Another entry for the “queer parents can do anything” files: Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi, a professor at Stanford University, has won this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the 59th woman to win the prize (versus more than 800 men). She’s also a lesbian mom.
Bertozzi won the Nobel along with Morten Meldal, Professor at University of Copenhagen, and Barry Sharpless, Professor at Scripps Research. The trio won for their work on “click chemistry,” ways that molecules can snap together to create quick reactions and avoid by-products. The field was pioneered by Meldal and Sharpless, but Bertozzi “took click chemistry to a new level,” according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awarded the prize. “She developed click reactions that work inside living organisms. Her bioorthogonal reactions take place without disrupting the normal chemistry of the cell.”
Stanford University further explained in a press release:
Bertozzi’s lab first developed the methods in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Since then, her lab and others have used them to answer fundamental questions about the role of sugars in biology, to solve practical problems, such as developing better tests for infectious diseases, and to create a new biological pharmaceutical that can better target tumors, which is now being tested in clinical trials.
Bertozzi is the daughter of an MIT physics professor and “a secretary turned stay-at-home mom who had been denied the chance to go to college by her parents and who was determined that her own daughters would receive a far different message,” according to a profile of her in Stanford Magazine last March. Bertozzi attended Harvard, where despite excelling in her classes, she struggled as a woman to get a research position. Additionally, during her sophomore year, the Supreme Court ruled to uphold an anti-sodomy law in Bowers v. Hardwick, “creating an unsettled feeling in Bertozzi that she, as a lesbian, had been criminalized.” She thus decided on the University of California, Berkeley, for graduate school, which had “a small but significant female presence” in the organic chemistry department, and was near “the most gay-friendly city in the country.”
Bertozzi told Chemical and Engineering News (C&EN) in April that despite legal progress for gay people since then, “casual homophobia still exists. I’ve been relatively privileged and shielded from it, but step outside of the United States, step outside of Canada, there are places where you’re still punished for being gay, even sometimes by death. We should never lose sight of the fact that science is international.”
Now, she said, “I definitely have trolls on Twitter; any woman on social media does. But nothing compared to the blatant outward homophobia of my college years. Surprisingly, though, being a woman was and still is worse than being a lesbian,” in terms of facing bias and hostility in science.
Despite the obstacles, Bertozzi went on to join the UC Berkeley faculty in 1996 and then Stanford University in June 2015, and is now the Baker Family Director of the interdisciplinary institute Stanford ChEM-H (Chemistry, Engineering & Medicine for Human Health). She won a MacArthur Fellowship “genius grant” in 1999, at age 32, and has been elected to the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences; and received the Lemelson-MIT Prize (the first woman to do so), the Heinrich Wieland Prize, the ACS Award in Pure Chemistry, and the Chemistry of the Future Solvay Prize, among others, according to her Stanford bio.
Today, “she still feels a duty and a desire to be a role model as a lesbian scientist,” the Stanford Magazine profile added, explaining:
Bertozzi has three sons with her wife, the first born just before California voters approved Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in the state. She remembers feeding him when he was 2 months old, with anti-gay marriage ads blaring on the TV and the anxiety of not knowing whether her parental rights would survive the election. “I think it’s important for me to bear witness,” she says. “I never want to be like, ‘Well, all that is behind me; now I’m just like everybody else legally.’ No, I don’t think that does anyone a service.”
Via her Twitter account, she’s also offered her perspectives on parenting, noting the unrealistic expectations of being a working parent in Silicon Valley, as well as the gender inequities. Parenting has impacted her scientific work in other ways, too. Among the several startup companies based on her research, one was motivated by a girl named Grace, the daughter of a Stanford alumnus, who had a rare and potentially deadly disease. “As a mother of children around Grace’s age, she could feel the terror of such a mysterious, possibly fatal diagnosis,” related Stanford Magazine. Grace Science, the company she launched with the alumnus, now has a drug ready to enter Phase I clinical trials early next year, according to biotech publication The Timmerman Report. When a Grace Science co-worker brought her infant to a scientific poster session, Bertozzi tweeted a photo, saying that such colleagues “show everyday that great science and great parenting are highly compatible, indeed mutually reinforcing.”
In other interests, she’s also an avid weightlifter and “was the keyboardist in a hair metal band at Harvard called Bored of Education, alongside guitar wizard Tom Morello, who later founded Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave,” said Stanford Magazine. Morello tweeted his congratulations to her today, noting that their band won the Ivy League Battle of the Bands in 1986.
May she continue to rock on!
[Updated to add: She’s not the only queer parent to win a Nobel this week. Geneticist Svante Pääbo, a bi dad, has won one, too! I should have posted first about Pääbo, who won his prize Monday, but I’m just getting back from a trip to a family wedding and catching up on a lot of things, so I happened to write about Bertozzi first.]