Summer of 1972 By Susan Light

  

 

Growing up in a middle-class Jewish family in Pittsburgh in the 1960’s doesn’t set a girl up for a scientific career. The family tree was laden with immigrant businessmen and housewives. The only woman physician I had ever met was a radiologist at the Children’s Hospital when I had whacked my foot against the bathtub in our narrow bathroom in a futile attempt to exercise. Devoted to watching “Dr. Kildare” and “Ben Casey”(adoring the former and just tolerating the latter), I don’t recall any women in medicine who weren’t nurses.

 

The science classrooms at my high school were double the size of the regular classrooms to accommodate the labs. There were doors at both sides of the podium where Mr. Herman, the freshman biology teacher, stood passing out completed test papers as we shuffled out of the door of the first floor classroom closest to the main entrance. As one of the younger teachers with a lawn mower haircut and a wide gap between his two front teeth, he had won the affection of his students with his sense of humor and direct style. He told us that he made as much money over the summer doing landscaping as he did teaching the remainder of the year. The message about what was important to him was clear, but his degree of honesty was unprecedented for that time and place. As he handed me my test paper, he looked me in the eye an said, “Good job.”

 

At the top of the page, next to the 100% I had scored on the test, was a handwritten note:   

Q: What does this mean? 

A:  That the test was too easy

 

Shocked into silence more by the comment more than by the grade: was Mr. Herman saying that I was smarter than him? My comfortable position as a B student was now challenged. A rush of self-confidence passed through my body and that became the foundation for my future.

 

Caught between my inner drive, curiosity about the world outside my microcosm, and harboring society’s expectations, my inner drive was taking the lead. By my junior year my parents had heard enough of my scientific interest and causal comments about medical school that they sent me to the B’nai B’rith vocational counselor. Their real concern was a protective one:  was I setting up unrealistic expectations for myself?

On a chilly and quiet Sunday morning in the winter of 1969, I went to his office above the Squirrel Hill News Stand and filled out all the multiple-choice questions.  The following week my parents attended the session where the results were presented. His conclusion: “She’s smart. She can do whatever she wants.”

 

More importantly, he told me about the National Science Foundation sponsored summer programs for high school students. My first serious rejection came when I wasn’t accepted to the program at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, ME, but did get into the Program in Biochemistry at the Loomis School in Windsor, CT. Not only did he reassure my parents about my ability to set my own goals, he showed me a path and a door that would lead me out of Pittsburgh.

 

Putting aside the Janis Joplin concert in New Haven, the weekend trips to New York City, going to Zabar’s for the first time, staying with my roommate’s family in Stuyvesant Town (and being amazed that you could have a supermarket on the block where you live) on the east side of Manhattan, that summer was about the science and culture. They gave this group of 48 rising high school seniors (32 boys and 16 girls, the proper ratio someone told the administration) the Lehninger’s college biochemistry textbook.  We went to lectures each morning and to our small research groups in the afternoon. My group was evaluating the effect of a choline deficient diet on lipoprotein accumulation in the brains of chicks. We sacrificed the chicks by beheading them and yes, chickens actually do run around with their heads cut off.

 

The life-changing component of the program was that although we had weekly tests each Saturday morning, they were corrected, but not graded. The program taught me that what was important was learning, not bringing home a grade to please one’s parents.

 

The other important message that I took home that summer was that, in marked contrast to my life at home, it was okay to be a girl and like science. In high school, the boys were not interested in me, but rather in how I could help them with their homework. That summer was an almost level playing field and of greater influence than the 32 high school boys in the program were the male advanced students and instructors. Young men who were entering and attending college, who would interact with us as both girls and smart. Complementing that was the instructor of our research project was a smart energetic woman who was a student at Mt. Holyoke College. She was a valuable role model and always able to come up with a creative solution to the next problem as she hobbled around on crutches that summer.

 

We gathered in the lecture hall on July 20, 1969, to watch the moon landing. While the world saw our planet from a new vantage point, I now saw the world differently as well. There was a planet where my intellectual aspirations as well as my social agenda could co-exist. 

 

My interest in medical school waned after my summer at Loomis as I focused on basic science and contemplated graduate school. I returned the summer after my second year of college to be an instructor hoping to help a group of high school students experience what I had experienced a few years earlier. 

 

A new director had been appointed for the program and he lacked the warmth that the Ed Ledbetter brought to the program three years earlier.  His wife had a Ph.D., but she had chosen to not work and focus on the care of their young child.  Having spent the previous summer doing organic chemistry research didn’t prepare me for working on a project related to peptidoglycan in the cell membrane of E. Coli.  

 

My group had a great rapport and the work was fun, but several weeks into the six-week program I didn’t think that we were making the progress I had expected. We couldn’t even get standard growth curves for the E. Coil and I shared my concern, frustration, and disappointment with the director in his office early one evening.

 

His reply was very direct and unforgettable: “That’s why women shouldn’t be in science.” I froze and was speechless: I was asking for technical help, not career advice. All I was interested in was being a better instructor and teaching my students how to generate data to test a hypothesis. This wasn’t the time or place to discuss his personal views. Since I was speechless, it was not difficult to gather my papers and quietly leave his office.

 

The punch line of the story is that at the end of the program my group did have some respectable data. I then learned that the four groups with male instructors who were working on parallel projects had also struggled, but didn’t acknowledge it.  

 

What I took away from that that summer was not that women shouldn’t be in science, but that I needed to be very careful about when and where I would admit weakness and think carefully before asking for help. The director’sremarks didn’t deter me from my scientific goals, but opened my eyes to what I might expect to see as I continued on my journey.

 

The choice of medical school over a graduate program in biochemistry was guided by several parameters including my father’s offer to pay for medical school (but not graduate school) and the landscape of the 1970’s where having a PhD did not promise a job offer. There was also the simple logic that going to graduate school meant I could do research while going to medical school would offer a choice between clinical medicine and research. In the end, I have done both.  

 

Yes, I have asked for help along the way since asking for help, especially in a clinical setting is the right thing to do.  

 

I shared my story of “why women shouldn’t be in science” at a talk to the winners of the science awards my daughter’s high school a few years ago. There was an audible gasp from the audience, and for me it was a wonderful reminder of how things have changed. I was proof of that.

Susan E. Light, MD: After practicing pediatric hematology/oncology for several years, Susan
moved to a career in clinical drug development, working to get innovative new drugs approved.
Her writing reflects a blending of her personal and professional lives.