Nancy Hopkins, an American molecular biologist, (born 16 June 1943) is the Amgen, Inc. Professor of Biology at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...
.
She is a member of the
National Academy of Sciences
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...
, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy, and the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and ...
. She is known for her research identifying genes required for
zebrafish
The zebrafish (''Danio rerio'') is a freshwater fish belonging to the minnow family ( Cyprinidae) of the order Cypriniformes. Native to South Asia, it is a popular aquarium fish, frequently sold under the trade name zebra danio (and thus often ...
development, and for her earlier research on gene expression in the bacterial virus, lambda, and on mouse RNA tumor viruses. She is also known for her work promoting equality of opportunity for women scientists in academia.
Early life and education
Nancy Hopkins was born in 1943 in New York City.
Hopkins received her BA from
Radcliffe College
Radcliffe College was a women's liberal arts college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and functioned as the female coordinate institution for the all-male Harvard College. Considered founded in 1879, it was one of the Seven Sisters colleges and he ...
in 1964,
and earned her PhD from the Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
in 1971,
where she worked with Professor
Mark Ptashne
Mark Ptashne (born June 5, 1940, in Chicago) is a molecular biologist. He is the Ludwig Chair of Molecular Biology at Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.
Ptashne grew up in Chicago. He earned his undergraduate degree at Re ...
. With Ptashne she identified the operator sites on DNA to which the lambda repressor binds to control early
gene expression
Gene expression is the process by which information from a gene is used in the synthesis of a functional gene product that enables it to produce end products, protein or non-coding RNA, and ultimately affect a phenotype, as the final effect. The ...
and hence the viral life cycle. As a postdoctoral fellow of Nobel Laureate
James D. Watson
James Dewey Watson (born April 6, 1928) is an American molecular biologist, geneticist, and zoologist. In 1953, he co-authored with Francis Crick the academic paper proposing the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. Watson, Crick and ...
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.
Career and research
She joined the MIT faculty in the Center for Cancer Research in 1973
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
A retrovirus is a type of virus that inserts a DNA copy of its RNA genome into the DNA of a host cell that it invades, thus changing the genome of that cell. Once inside the host cell's cytoplasm, the virus uses its own reverse transcriptase e ...
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
gene
In biology, the word gene (from , ; "...Wilhelm Johannsen coined the word gene to describe the Mendelian units of heredity..." meaning ''generation'' or ''birth'' or ''gender'') can have several different meanings. The Mendelian gene is a ba ...
s 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.
Retroviral insertional mutagenesis in zebrafish
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
Mark Fishman is an American cardiologist, a professor in the Harvard Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology and Chief of the Pathways Clinical Service service at the MGH for patients with complex medical disorders. A researcher and clini ...
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
''Drosophila melanogaster'' is a species of fly (the taxonomic order Diptera) in the family Drosophilidae. The species is often referred to as the fruit fly or lesser fruit fly, or less commonly the "vinegar fly" or "pomace fly". Starting with Ch ...
and
C. elegans
''Caenorhabditis elegans'' () is a free-living transparent nematode about 1 mm in length that lives in temperate soil environments. It is the type species of its genus. The name is a blend of the Greek ''caeno-'' (recent), ''rhabditis'' (r ...
), would provide a valuable alternative or adjunct to the chemical screens.
Hopkins and "A Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT"
During the mid-90s, Hopkins felt she and other women were systematically discriminated against at MIT. 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.
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.
The results were bold but contentious: A summary of the committee's findings, published in 1999 and endorsed by then-MIT president Charles Vest and then-Dean of Science (now Chancellor of Berkeley) 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,
MIT's efforts are considered by many to be a laudable example of self-monitoring by a world-renowned institution of higher education.
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
Donna J. Nelson is an American chemist and professor of chemistry at the University of Oklahoma. Nelson specializes in organic chemistry, which she both researches and teaches. Nelson served as a science advisor to the AMC television show ''Brea ...
presented the
Nelson Diversity Surveys
The Nelson Diversity Surveys (NDS) are a collection of data sets that quantify the representation of women and minorities among professors, by science and engineering discipline, at research universities. They consist of four data sets compiled b ...
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
The Tribeca Festival is an annual film festival organized by TriBeCa Productions, Tribeca Productions. It takes place each spring in New York City, showcasing a diverse selection of film, episodic, talks, music, games, art, and immersive progra ...
in the film "
Picture a Scientist
''Picture a Scientist'' is a 2020 documentary highlighting gender inequality in science. The movie tells the stories of several prominent female researchers, and brings to light the barriers they encountered, including cases of discrimination ...
", presenting the MIT study.
Incident with Francis Crick
Hopkins stated that when she was an undergraduate in the 1960s,
Francis Crick
Francis Harry Compton Crick (8 June 1916 – 28 July 2004) was an English molecular biologist, biophysicist, and neuroscientist. He, James Watson, Rosalind Franklin, and Maurice Wilkins played crucial roles in deciphering the helical struc ...
put his hands on her breasts during a lab visit. 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?'"
Incident associated with then Harvard President Lawrence Summers
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).
Her action became public when she replied to an e-mail from Boston Globe reporter Marcella Bombardieri inquiring about Summers’ speech. Bombardieri's report of Summers’ speech set off a national discussion of
gender discrimination
Sexism is prejudice or discrimination based on one's sex or gender. Sexism can affect anyone, but it primarily affects women and girls.There is a clear and broad consensus among academic scholars in multiple fields that sexism refers primaril ...
,
academic freedom
Academic freedom is a moral and legal concept expressing the conviction that the freedom of inquiry by faculty members is essential to the mission of the academy as well as the principles of academia, and that scholars should have freedom to teac ...
, and
human biodiversity, and contributed to Summers’ resignation as the President of Harvard.
Honors
* Fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and ...
* Member of the
Institute of Medicine
The National Academy of Medicine (NAM), formerly called the Institute of Medicine (IoM) until 2015, is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Medicine is a part of the National Academies of Sciences, E ...
of the National Academies
* Member of the
National Academy of Sciences
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...
* MD Anderson Cancer Center,
Margaret L. Kripke Legend Award (2012)
* Awarded an honorary doctorate by
Trinity College Dublin (2014)
*
Alice C. Evans Award
The ASM Alice C. Evans Award for Advancement of Women is an award given by the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) to an ASM member who has made outstanding contributions to the status of women in microbiology and related sciences. The award ai ...
,
American Society for Microbiology (2015)
* Helen Dean King Award (2017)
Personal life
Hopkins has been married to J. Dinsmore Adams Jr.(known as Dinny) since 2007.
References
External links
Inaugural article for Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)* [http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11741 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
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hopkins, Nancy
Living people
Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science faculty
21st-century American biologists
American geneticists
Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
American women biologists
Radcliffe College alumni
1943 births
American women academics
Members of the National Academy of Medicine
21st-century American women scientists