If any one figure can rival University President Lawrence H. Summers for inspiring the widest range of public opinion and heated press coverage in the last five months, it is MIT biologist Nancy Hopkins ’64.

Since she walked out of Summers’ January speech at a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) conference in a statement of disagreement with the president’s comments about women’s “intrinsic aptitude” for science, Hopkins has been both exalted as a crusader and assailed as a hysterical feminist who stifles free academic discourse.

But Hopkins, while she continues to defend her decision to walk out, says she never expected to touch off a controversy.

“Having seen the enormous pain of women who every day had to face the question of ‘are you really smart enough to be here?’ to hear a person in a position of power say, ‘can women really do science?’ I knew was about as painful a thing as can happen to a human person,” Hopkins says.

Hopkins has drawn fire not only in blogs and editorial pages, but also from fellow professors.

At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on March 15—at which the Faculty voted in support of a motion of lack of confidence in Summers—Winthrop Professor of History Stephan A. Thernstrom said that Hopkins was “ill-suited for work in the academic profession” because she had left the speech instead of offering evidence against Summers’ arguments.

Hopkins says the e-mails and media coverage she has received since Summers’ speech have been overwhelming.

“Could it have been done in a way where I didn’t end up in the situation I ended up in? I don’t know. I wish there could have been a different way,” Hopkins says, referring to the release of the transcript of Summers’ remarks.

RADCLIFFE ROOTS

Champagne bottles in Hopkins’ lab celebrate the major scientific accomplishments she has made in four decades since an undergraduate class sparked her interest in biology.

Two weeks ago, Hopkins—who has spent 10 years advocating for women in science—added another champagne bottle. Sent to her by two people from the National Organization for Women, this bottle celebrates Harvard’s allocation of $50 million to address the issues faced by women in higher education, particularly in the sciences.

As the champagne bottle suggests, Hopkins says she now sees a brighter future for Harvard’s women in science.

Hopkins began her career at Radcliffe planning to major in math, but it was an introductory biology lecture by James Watson that “pretty much determined the course of my life,” she says.

“It was 1963,” Hopkins recalls. “The genetic code was just being cracked at that time. We were still trying to figure out what genes are and how gene expression is controlled.”

Frightened early in her life by her mother’s battle with a mild form of cancer, Hopkins wanted to work on cancer research, and after earning her Ph.D., she went on to study tumors in animals and their relevance to human diseases.