Nancy Hopkins (scientist)

Nancy Doe Hopkins[3] was born in 1943 in New York City.

Hopkins received her BA from Radcliffe College in 1964,[1] and earned her PhD from the Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at Harvard University in 1971,[4] where she worked with Professor Mark Ptashne. With Ptashne she identified the operator sites on DNA to which the lambda repressor binds to control early gene expression and hence the viral life cycle. As a postdoctoral fellow of Nobel Laureate James D. Watson and Robert Pollack at the Cold Spring Harbor Lab she worked on DNA tumor viruses and cell biology, discovering that cells whose nucleus had been removed were able to re-establish normal morphology.

She joined the MIT faculty in the Center for Cancer Research in 1973[4] as an assistant professor and switched to work on RNA tumor viruses. She identified viral genes that determine host range and the type and severity of cancers mouse retroviruses cause, including importantly the capsid protein p30 and transcriptional elements that came to be known as enhancers. After a sabbatical in the lab of Nobel laureate Christiane Nusslein-Volhard in 1989, Hopkins switched fields to develop molecular technologies for working with zebrafish. With her postdoctoral fellow Shuo Lin, graduate students Adam Amsterdam and Nick Gaiano, and others in her lab she developed an efficient method for large-scale insertional mutagenesis in the fish. Using this technique her lab carried out a large genetic screen that identified and cloned 25% of the genes that are essential for a fertilized egg to develop into a free-swimming zebrafish larva. Among the genes identified was an unexpected class of genes which when mutated predispose fish to get cancer, and a set of genes that cause fish to develop cystic kidney and which overlap with genes that cause cystic kidney disease in humans.

In an effort to help maximize the utility of the zebrafish as a model organism, Hopkins and colleagues set out to develop a large-scale insertional mutagenesis method. Although large-scale chemical mutagenesis screens were getting underway in several zebrafish labs at the time (those of Mark Fishman in Boston, and Christiane Nusslein-Volhard in Tübingen, Germany), there were concerns in the community at the time that identifying the molecular lesions using positional cloning methods would be inefficient. Hopkins believed that insertional mutagenesis, which had been very successfully employed in invertebrate model organisms (D. melanogaster and C. elegans), would provide a valuable alternative or adjunct to the chemical screens.

During the mid-90s, Hopkins felt she and other women were systematically discriminated against at MIT. In July 1994, together with 15 other women faculty in the School of Science at MIT, Hopkins drafted and co-signed a letter to the then-Dean of Science (now Chancellor of Berkeley) Robert Birgeneau, stating their evidence regarding gender discrimination.[3] Due to her complaints to the administration, a committee was formed (with Hopkins as the initial chair) to investigate the issue of inequalities experienced by women faculty as a result of unconscious gender bias.[4] The committee existed in two forms over the course of a four-year period and included both men and women faculty members, including men who were current or previous chairs of the departments of mathematics, chemistry, and physics.[5]

The results were bold but contentious: A summary of the committee's findings, published in 1999[6] and endorsed by then-MIT president Charles Vest and then-Dean Robert Birgeneau, is credited with launching a national re-examination of equity for women scientists. While some have questioned the rigor of the analysis performed by the MIT committee,[7][8] MIT's efforts are considered by many to be a laudable example of self-monitoring by a world-renowned institution of higher education.[9][8][10][11]

It also led 9 research universities, including MIT, to form an ongoing collaboration to study and address issues of gender equity. The group, which came to be known as “The MIT-9”, includes Harvard, Stanford, Caltech, Princeton, U. Penn, U Michigan, Yale, and Berkeley, in addition to MIT. Hopkins involved many experts, who were researching the status of women and minorities among faculty, in these collaborations. At the MIT-9 meetings, Donna Nelson presented the Nelson Diversity Surveys to compare the representation of women among faculty at these individual universities versus the national data.

In 2020, Hopkins appeared in the Tribeca Film Festival in the film "Picture a Scientist", presenting the MIT study.[12][13][14]

Hopkins stated that when she was an undergraduate in the 1960s, Francis Crick put his hands on her breasts during a lab visit.[15] She described the incident: "Before I could rise and shake hands, he had zoomed across the room, stood behind me, put his hands on my breasts and said, 'What are you working on?'"[16]

In January 2005, at an NBER meeting in Cambridge, MA on the topic of how to address the under-representation of women and minorities in science and engineering fields, Hopkins caused controversy by walking out in protest during a talk by then President of Harvard Lawrence Summers when he speculated that one reason for the very small number of high-achieving women in science and engineering fields might be “intrinsic aptitude” (specifically that the bell-curve of aptitude is flatter for men than women).[17] Her action became public when she replied to an e-mail from Boston Globe reporter Marcella Bombardieri inquiring about Summers’ speech.[18] Bombardieri's report of Summers’ speech set off a national discussion of gender discrimination, and academic freedom, and contributed to Summers’ resignation as the President of Harvard.[18]

• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies
• Member of the National Academy of Sciences
• MD Anderson Cancer Center, Margaret L. Kripke Legend Award (2012)[19]
• Awarded an honorary doctorate by Trinity College Dublin (2014)[20]
• Alice C. Evans Award, American Society for Microbiology (2015)
• Helen Dean King Award (2017)[21]

Hopkins has been married to J. Dinsmore Adams Jr. (known as Dinny) since 2007.[22]

• Zernike, Kate (27 April 2023). The Exceptions: Sixteen Women, MIT, and the Fight for Equality in Science. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-1-3985-2000-4.
• First and Second Committees on Women Faculty in the School of Science (March 1999). "A Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT". The MIT Faculty Newsletter. MIT. 11 (4). Archived from the original on 8 May 1999.

• Inaugural article for Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)
• FNL article known as "The MIT Report on Women in Science"
• FNL article on Lawrenc Summers speech and the hiring of women faculty at MIT
• National Academy of Sciences report reviewing research on cognitive abilities of women vs men and on gender bias; Hyde and Mertz’ article on women and mathematical ability
• "The Reluctant Feminist," The New York Times
• Cold Spring Harbor oral history