"How Do We Achieve Systemic Institutional Change?"

Dr. Rita R. Colwell
Chairman, Canon US Life Sciences, Inc.
Distinguished Professor, University of Maryland College Park and
Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health

Association for Women in Science (AWIS)
Conference on Women Scientists and Engineers
Smith College
New Hampton, Massachusetts
June 24, 2005

Thank you for your kind introduction.

It is a pleasure to be part of the program.

My talk today is titled "How Do We Achieve Systemic Institutional Change?"

As you know, agencies across the government are facing severe constraints this year, and I will not spend time on the details here, except to say that fundamental science and engineering and science and math education are taking heavy cuts. Not a good prognosis.

Three years ago, I spoke at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, to proudly announce the NSF FY2002 budget request with an initial $200 million of $1 billion over five years for a new Math and Science Partnerships Initiative, part of President Bush's education plan.

The NSF initiative was focused on links between higher education and K-12 education, an area that needs a great deal of effort -- the integration of research and education. Sad to say, since the completion of my term as NSF Director, that budget line has been reduced to only a fraction of the amount.

I grew up in Massachusetts, in Beverly, a stone's throw from the ocean.

I lived in the family home just a block down the road from this lighthouse in Beverly Cove. I went to Purdue University and earned both my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees. You might say I returned to the water when my husband, Jack, whom I met and married at Purdue, and I moved West to attend the University of Washington in Seattle.

Being an undergraduate at Purdue University was an entirely new experience! I have come to love the Midwest and my many friends from Purdue.

But, not all memories of the past are as warm as my Purdue days, yet, some of them do bear upon our topic, which is my reflections on women in science and engineering.

For example, when I went to high school, girls simply were not allowed to take physics. More to the point, my high school chemistry teacher told me I would never make it in chemistry -- because women could not.

That angered me, but also galvanized me. I had begun to see science as a way to understand the world and as a way to make my way in the world.

At Purdue University, many of my counterparts were majoring in home economics, learning how to make soufflés while I was learning how to balance equations.

In my senior year at Purdue, I found the encouragement of a good mentor -- Professor Dorothy Powelson. It was rare in those days, back in the 50s, to have a woman professor.

She opened the door, and I became entranced by the microscopic world. That enthusiasm was an asset when encountering various roadblocks along the way.

For my master’s degree, for example, I counted 186,000 fruit flies, studying crossing-over in the linkage map of Drosophila, the fruit fly. Now, we have the entire genome of Drosophila sequenced!

Today, no one would ever say outright that they would not "waste" a fellowship on a woman -- like I was told in the 1950s -- at least not unless you are President of Harvard, I suspect. Yet, girls and women still have a long way to go to achieve equity in all phases of scientific and engineering education and careers.

The problems are highly complex and not all solutions are clear. That is why I prefer to discard the metaphor of the "glass ceiling" as too fragile to bear the weight of what we need to learn and change.

Instead, I will offer the crystal ball as a symbol of being able to see our way through and beyond established strictures that keep girls even today from taking flight though the discovery of science and engineering.

This new metaphor presents us with clearer vision and a multitude of futures.

Knowing the past often helps when we want to change our future. Women have a long and distinguished history in science although we still do not learn much about past pioneers.

It is eye-opening to bring to light even a few of these poorly known stories. Some of these women's lives actually border on the tragic. Then we'll look at where women stand today in mathematics, science and engineering, from elementary school up through the labor force.

Mathematics as a gateway to science and engineering deserves special mention.

Finally, I will explore some trends that are transforming science and engineering, and suggest how women may be shaping some of these changes, notably to achieve systematic institutional change.

Some of you have probably read or heard of the scientific bestseller, Galileo's Daughter, by Dava Sobel. Recently, I attended a play at the Arena Stage in Washington, DC, that was based on the book.

As we read Maria Celeste's letters to her father, the eminent Galileo, the dynamic personality of his daughter is revealed. She copies his manuscripts for him and takes avid interest in his scientific inquiries.

We can speculate how Maria Celeste -- with all her intelligence, energy, and perseverance -- might have succeeded in science herself in a later era that would not have consigned her to the life of a cloistered nun. Her story as portrayed on stage was riveting.

Jumping several centuries to our own, we find women who accomplished much in science, but whose stories are seldom told.

One is Alice Catherine Evans, who studied the bacterial contamination of milk, and identified the organism that causes undulant fever in humans.

At a time when bacteriology was in its infancy, she challenged the wisdom of her scientific peers, triggering enormous controversy in the medical and dairy communities.

Unfortunately, Evans' work extracted a heavy personal toll. She contracted undulant fever while doing her research and suffered its effects for two decades. She was elected the first woman president of the Society of American Bacteriologists (precursor society to ASM), but was too ill to attend the Annual Meeting over which she would have presided.

Her pioneering work led to the near-elimination of undulant fever through the mandatory pasteurization of milk in this country, starting in the 1930s.

Another example is Rosalind Franklin. History now inextricably links the names Watson and Crick with the revelation of the structure of DNA. Sadly, few have heard of Rosalind Franklin.

Her x-ray studies revealed critical evidence of DNA's helical structure, but she never received the full credit she deserved. Her early death prevented her work from ever being considered by the Nobel committee.

That work, which was "purloined" by Jim Watson -- to paraphrase his own words -- helped him to win his Nobel Prize.

Another woman who did receive the Nobel Prize -- Barbara McClintock -- nonetheless suffered from scientific isolation during her career. McClintock won the Nobel for her discovery of "mobile genetic elements."

Through her studies of corn, beginning in the late 1940s, she proposed the existence of transposons -- genes that can change position, carrying other genetic material along. McClintock's discoveries had huge significance for biology and medicine.

On a personal note, I can recall an agriculture genetics professor of mine at Purdue University (in the School of Agriculture), muttering that he felt compelled to teach us McClintock's findings on "jumping genes," but that he did not believe the theories of this "crazy woman."

Other forgotten females in science and engineering were the six women chosen to program the ENIAC -- the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer -- during World War II. ENIAC was the first large electronic computer.

The job title of the women was actually "computer." (The old usage of the term "computer" referred to the people -- usually women -- who did mathematical calculations.) However, they were considered sub-professionals because of their gender.

One of the women, Jean Bartik, worked on the ENIAC at the age of twenty. Looking back, she recalls,

"We lived and breathed computers. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I had never been around so many brilliant people in my life...We had no manuals for ENIAC. We learned how to program by studying the logical block diagrams. What a blessing. From the beginning, I knew how computers worked."

It helps to learn about those few who preceded us. Others with stories worth remembering include astronomers Jocelyn Bell and Henrietta Leavitt, and physicist Lise Meitner.

Even today, however, far too many girls and women fail to even cross the threshold into science and engineering. We know that obstacles and stereotyped cultural conditioning begin to appear very early in life.

In a study of young children reported in the recent book Athena Unbound, a four-year-old boy told researchers that "...only boys should make science."

Part of the problem today lies in what I call the "valley of death" in education: grades 4 through 8, when girls are discouraged -- in subtle and not so subtle ways -- from pursuing science and engineering.

Many assessments of educational programs show a gender gap in science proficiency as early as age 9. We can trace this through ages 13 and to age 17, when the gap has widened further.

There has been little change in this trend over two decades. No doubt many of you have heard the term "leaky pipeline." It's an apt phrase for the loss of women in science and engineering throughout higher education, and continuing in academia, through the route to full professor.

It is interesting that between ages 25 and 34, the typical American female is more educated than her male counterpart. Women now earn more than half of all college degrees, and over half of those in the life sciences. Well over 40% of math and chemistry bachelor's degrees also go to females. Michael Cox and Richard Alm at the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas have done research that shows a continual increase in women earning science degrees between 1970 and 2002. Doctorates in physics earned by women are up from 2.9% of the total to 15.5%. Engineering 0.6% to 17.3% (Jennifer Frey, Washington Post, March 17, 2005, Cl-C4).

But, some developments are deeply disturbing. For example, the percentage of women receiving bachelor's degrees in computer science has been dropping since the mid-1980s. We see a downward trend for both men and women -- but it's been more precipitous for women.

If we take a closer look at doctorates earned in the United States by women, we see a divergence among the disciplines. Women earn approximately around 40% of all doctorates. However, this differs greatly by field.

In the life sciences, women earn over 40% of doctorates. But in the physical sciences and mathematics, women earn fewer than 20%. In engineering, they now receive a little over 17% of PhDs (in 2002).

A couple of years ago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology took a close and courageous look at women on its science faculty, releasing its study in 1999.

Introducing the report, MIT President Charles M. Vest wrote, "I have always believed that contemporary gender discrimination within universities is part reality and part perception. True, but I now understand that reality is by far the greater part of the balance."

As the study began in 1994, the MIT School of Science had only 15 tenured women, versus 194 men. It will be interesting to see how this is changing with Chuck Vest’s sincere efforts to institute change and, now, with a woman at the helm at MIT.

The study, which took much determination and effort, found that women science faculty had been "marginalized" throughout their careers, facing discrimination in salary, awards, space, and other parameters.

Our problem is larger than the institutions of higher learning. In more than 400 job categories in our economy, women are found mainly in only 20 categories.

Women comprise less than a quarter of the total science and engineering labor force. The S&E workforce looks very exclusive. This is dangerous for the nation. We need the talent of every worker in order to compete and prosper.

At this point, I want to highlight the key role of mathematics. Mathematics is the single most important factor leading to a career in science and engineering.

The American Association of University Women has recommended that states should make algebra and geometry mandatory for all students. These are the "gatekeeper" classes for college admission and later study in math, science and engineering.

We know that we have been able to narrow the gender gap in mathematical performance for young women, which is a hopeful sign for the future and also evidence that the gender gap in performance is not a genetic gap.

Biologist E.O. Wilson writes that "...mathematics seems to point arrow-like toward the ultimate goal of objective truth." Given the accelerating cross-pollination of mathematics and science, it's not a mere coincidence that Wilson is a biologist.

Indeed, mathematics is the ultimate cross-cutting discipline, the springboard for advances across the board. Mathematics is both a powerful tool of insight and a common language for science.

As a biologist, I find the burgeoning two-way traffic between biology and mathematics especially exciting. Not only is mathematics revolutionizing biology, but biology begins to foster new paradigms in mathematics.

The information science of life edges ever closer to electronic information science. Advances in understanding life may lead to new algorithms and new modes of computing, notably biological computing.

However, our country's world leadership of mathematics is fragile. We have been relying on overseas talent and have not been attracting enough U.S. students. And, now, the doors are closing to foreign students.

One of the NSF programs, in Carson City School district in Nevada, focused on 10 Hispanic girls who barely knew English.

Within a year, they had learned English using a computerized tutor; learned to use computers; could make presentations about a Geographic Information System; and were being sought out by employers. Nevada's Department of Education picked up the funding of the program.

Computer games -- often the first exposure kids have to computers -- are one factor that can turn off girls. They dislike the violent, repetitive and sexist elements of the games that are widely available. Although even that is changing, with girls increasingly mesmerized by the more violent video games. Generally speaking though, girls ask for identity games in which they can create a character or build a world, with chances to communicate and collaborate.

The journey includes science, math and technology games.

Let me broaden our perspective, looking into the crystal ball as a wider lens to scan the entire spectrum of discovery in science and engineering, which we want to open to the participation of all.

We have entered the Age of Knowledge and we need to transform our educational system into one of lifelong learning so that everyone benefits.

New tools are broadening our vision in every discipline. In just one example, we are able to look at our sun, and a couple of years ago, we saw the largest group of sunspots in a decade.

The sun has an 11-year cycle; the phase of high activity is called the solar maximum. The sun's activity fosters geomagnetic disruption, and we have reached the point of being able to predict these effects, now called space weather.

When sunspot areas erupt, they disrupt radio communications and low-frequency navigation signals on Earth.

We are graced to be alive at a time when science and engineering are extending our vision to the farthest reaches of the cosmos, back to the time of the Big Bang.

At the same time, we can peer down into the minutest scales of life, decoding the blueprint of life for our species, the human genome, and learning the secrets of life for all our fellow travelers.

The scientific tool most familiar to me as a microbiologist is, of course, the microscope. It is the tool that represents an approach that much of modern science has followed up to now: to seek understanding by taking things apart into their components.

To be sure, this strategy has given us the lion's share of scientific knowledge to date, but it has been a reductionist approach.

As science and engineering grow ever more interwoven, we fashion new, more integrative tools. We watch our fields intersect increasingly with one other to forge new frontiers at every scale, from quarks to stars.

Only through mapping and nourishing these linkages can we truly reflect and probe the wholeness of the world that we study. The days are gone when a discipline could go it alone. Now, the entire enterprise must progress as a whole.

On another frontier, the border between astronomy and physics, researchers are listening for gravitational waves (The LIGO Project, short for Laser Interferometry Gravitational Wave Observatory).

LIGO is searching for the waves produced by colliding black holes or collapsing supernovae. If these ripples in the fabric of space time are recorded, they will open up a new window on the universe.

These explorations are not taking place in isolation. LIGO, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and CERN, the European accelerator laboratory, are linked together in the Grid Physics Network (GriPhyN).

This computational grid ties together resources from the United States and Europe. Many disciplines share a similar need for widely dispersed users to access and use a massive data set.

These include projects on the human brain and genome, to those who study astronomy, geophysics, crystallography, and satellite weather, to consumer spending and banking records. These latter uses require advances that preserve consumer privacy as well.

Another example of blending boundaries is the refinement and application of a technique called adaptive optics. Large ground-based telescopes, it turns out, have their views into space blurred by the earth's shimmering atmosphere.

Some are being fitted with adaptive optics to correct for the distortion.

Adaptive optics are being applied to human vision. So far tests have shown that adaptive optics doubles the sensitivity of the eye in low light.

Our new vistas also extend our concept of life. Even in the most extreme environments on our planet, in ocean vents, within the deepest mines, and in the seeming wastes of Antarctica, we are finding life, thriving and abundant, leading many scientists to believe there may have been (and still is) microbial life on Mars.

The oldest living organism found so far, a 250 million-year-old bacterium, was described recently and a report in Nature this month describes sub-seafloor microorganisms -- ancient and alive!

The halophile shown in the slide was found entombed in salt crystals 850 feet down in the Permian Salado Formation in New Mexico, by Russ Vreeland, a former student, and his colleagues. Needless to say, we never imagined life to survive in pure salt.

Our tools give us insight on the smallest of scales. Foremost among them are nanoscience and technology, whose applications are only limited by our imaginations.

At the Lilliputian level of the nanoscale, we see how nanotechnology is being used to understand the Earth’s biodiversity.

Researchers have developed microscopic nanosensors that are carried like ordinary pollen on the body of a bee. A bee collects the sensor, called smart dust, and carries it throughout its normal daily activities.

When it returns to the hive, a sensor plate downloads the data collected by the sensor. The result is a map of the bee’s itinerary: where it traveled and which flowers it visited.

Only integrating information from many scales will lead us to deeper discoveries. In my own research, I have spent more than 30 years studying cholera, a terrible waterborne scourge that still causes thousands to die every year in developing countries.

At the same time, our research continues at the scale of the village, where women in Bangladesh are testing a simple filtering system for their drinking water. They are using sari cloth to remove plankton and particulate matter to which the cholera bacteria are attached. My work on the environmental factors associated with cholera epidemics would be impossible without the power of computing.

Remote sensing and computing have helped us to delineate the patterns in the incidence of cholera. Its occurrence is related to environmental factors, whether in the Bay of Bengal or off the coast of South America.

Sea surface temperatures, chlorophyll concentrations, and sea surface height are all elevated when cholera appears. It is our ability to integrate insights from many levels that leads us to the threshold of predicting cholera epidemics.

There are many such examples. To unravel the complexity of life on our planet, we must chart the ribbons of interconnections between cells, organisms and ecosystems, past and present. The term for what we study is biocomplexity.

We are at the brink of being able to observe complexity at multiple scales across the hierarchy of life. To understand the interlocking systems of our planet is our only hope to sustain them.

A celebrated astronomer and featured in the Washington Post Style Section, March 17, 2005, Vera Rubin, speaks about the evolution of galaxies -- a term we might associate more with the study of life.

She returns often to her theme of connections. In an interesting cross-fertilization of vocabulary, she speaks of a galaxy as an ecosystem.

In her view, we should be looking for life on other planets by looking for planets that have a hot molten core. The core generates the Earth's magnetic field, which ultimately gives us the ionosphere that enables and protects life.

But, Vera also speaks to the barriers to women in science.

The frontiers of science and engineering today seem endless, yet we need the participation and perspectives of all to probe as far as we might in every direction.

When we consider how to attract women and minorities to science and technology, we begin to reexamine our assumptions about education across the board, from kindergarten to lifelong learning.

The process to achieving a doctorate today can take twice as long as it did when I worked on my PhD -- and the degree holder now emerges even more specialized than in the past.

We need to change our thinking about how we educate those who will carry out the research of the future, in a world of science and engineering that is moving toward international networking, collaboration with multiple disciplines, study of complexity, and integration of perspectives.

We live in a world that must welcome the perspectives of women more warmly than have the cultures of science and engineering of the past, and will all be the better for it.

Thank you.