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.

Now, Hopkins investigates the genetics of zebrafish, isolating genes that are necessary to the development of the fish.

“We isolated a very big fraction of genes necessary to make these fish, and it turns out that many of them have human counterparts, and many of them turn out to be involved in human diseases,” she says.

By focusing on her research, Hopkins says, she did not fully recognize the extent of the discrimination she and female colleagues faced in everything from lab space to salaries.

Eventually, though, Hopkins could not ignore the situation any longer.

“I had to address it,” she says. “It didn’t occur to me I would be addressing it for anyone other than myself.”

She surveyed other women in MIT’s School of Science—and found that there were only 15 female senior faculty members, compared to 197 men. The survey led to the creation in 1995 of a Committee on Women Faculty, chaired by Hopkins and tasked with studying gender discrimination at MIT.

After five years, the committee released its ground-breaking report, finding discrimination in resources ranging from salary to office size.

“As women moved up through the ranks, they hit this higher-level glass ceiling, which was invisible, even to the women themselves,” Hopkins says.

After the MIT committee released its report, Hopkins says she was surprised to hear from women outside of academia who had faced gender discrimination.

“It was a real revelation to people,” Hopkins says.

Since the release of the MIT report, Hopkins has continued to advocate for women in science, even raising the issue with Summers last fall.

WALKING OUT

After a decade of attempting to address the problems faced by women in science, Hopkins says she left Summers’ Jan. 14 speech because she felt that his remarks were “just not right.”

Hopkins says that as Summers was speaking on the social and biological divides between the sexes, she looked around the conference room to gauge the reactions of her colleagues, and wondered aloud to her neighbors if they should leave.

“I didn’t want to make a visible statement, really,” Hopkins says. “I just quietly got up and left.”

Hopkins says she was corresponding with a Boston Globe reporter about another matter later when the reporter asked about the NBER conference.

“It never crossed my mind that it was a story,” Hopkins says. Having left in the middle of the speech, she says she thought it possible that Summers “was being provocative but that he might go on to say that these were thoughts people had a hundred years ago before they knew better.”

The day after Summers’ speech, Hopkins says she was in a taxi in New York City thinking about her reaction to the remarks when she got a call from the Globe reporter and decided to describe how she felt while listening to the speech.

Hopkins was quoted in the Boston Globe as saying she “would’ve either blacked out or thrown up” had she stayed at the conference.

“You have one moment to help educate people...I have to say the truth, so people can learn why this unfounded belief in women’s intellectual inferiority is so devastating,” Hopkins says. “The possibility that it was more than one moment of education did not cross my mind.”

In the fallout from Summers’ remarks—and Hopkins’ now-notorious exit—the University created two task forces to investigate ways to further women’s pursuits in the sciences.

Hopkins, who is acknowledged in the recently released committee report on Women in Science and Engineering, lauds the recommendations of the two task forces, which include new advising opportunities for women in science and a vice-provost position for faculty diversity, in addition to the administration’s $50 million allocation.

“I expect that there will be very significant progress. I hope that President Summers...will come to be a champion of this cause, and will become known for advancing it,” Hopkins says.

“Maybe Summers got into it in a bit of an odd way,” she continues. “Maybe he’ll be responsible for turning it around at Harvard.”

—Staff writer Sara E. Polsky can be reached at polsky@fas.harvard.edu.