To The Best Of Our Knowledge; Harassment In The Lab

It's to the best of our knowledge from PRX. Women in science have come a long way since the days they were told they couldn't do science. Today women run labs, they win grants, they make big discoveries. So why do they still have to deal with stuff like this? There was like a rumor network at the Astronomy Society. You could text or call a number if you wanted to be escorted from the big social banquet so that you wouldn't have a luxurious professor follow you to your hotel. You're kidding. I'm not kidding you. The things that really affected me were just being sworn at and told that I was effing down and that I would never have a career in science. Intimidation and harassment in the lab and in the field. I'm Ann Strange, and today stories of how women still have to fight to do science and also how they win. You

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You It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Ann Strange -Hamps, and it's time for a wake -up call. Hello, Jane. Hi, Jane. It's Ann. Hi, Ann. Thank you so much for joining us and for being willing to talk about this. Sure. Jane Willenbring is a geoscientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. But in 1999, she was a student doing field research in Antarctica, part of a four -person team led by the prominent Antarctic geologist David Martian. Boston University recently found him guilty of sexual harassment. After Jane filed a Title IX complaint, I should warn you this is not easy to hear. The majority of my Title IX complaint

stemmed from a field season that I spent with Dave Martian to other individuals in this very desolate, but beautiful, polar desert environment. There is a constant discussion of how many people I've slept with. His brother happened to be in the field with us too. You know, I overheard conversations about how he should try and sleep with me and how he'd probably be successful because I was so slutty. When we would be having dinner, there would be this crate of pornography that would come out. There would be comments about my breast size compared to the breast size of the model. I can remember more than one instance where he pushed me down, sat on top of me, and then spit on me. He would throw rocks at me every time

I'd keep for a period of time. I would try to hide, and then I'd try to like not have to go to the bathroom. I actually got a really bad bladder infection. I remember there was blood in my hair and there's a bunch of discussion about how we didn't want to waste helicopter hours. Wow. You were how old? I was 22. You don't really necessarily know how you're going to react when someone does something like that, in a situation where you have no power. I remember going over in my head like a chess game. If I do this, what are the next three things that are very likely to happen? What did you think would happen if you said, stop it. I did say stop it. You know, like what's wrong with you? I tried crying

because it seemed to want to make me cry. It was just incisive. The things that really affected me were just being sworn at and being told that I was effing down and that I would never have a career. I was at the University of Pennsylvania as an assistant professor. I operated a lab there and I had to take my daughter into work and I still had my lab code on and she said, Mommy, you really are a scientist. I want to be a scientist just like you, Mommy. That's the person that really got me. Jane, I'm so sorry. I know it's heavy, isn't it? I always wonder if I should add some levity at some point. Thank you for persevering and becoming a scientist and for doing the right thing. Well, it's

a joy to be a scientist. Yeah. Jane Willenbring. Today, she's a geoscientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Boston University recently found David Martian, guilty of sexual harassment. The case is also the subject of a current congressional investigation. You can see why field research would be especially dangerous for women. You're in the wild with a small team, maybe even just one other person. You're sleeping in tents. There's no phone service. It's kind of a setup for harassment. The National Science Foundation is now funding a new project looking into the problem. And the lead investigator is Erica Marin Spioda. She's a biogeographer and she says stories like these are coming out in a lot of science departments at a lot of universities. Yeah, so probably the first one that kind of caught a lot of people's

attention and there was kind of an impetus for the work that I'm doing was Jeff Marcy at UC Berkeley, who's an astrophysicist. And what happened there? Bus feed broke the news that this professor in Berkeley had been found to violate the codes of conduct at UC Berkeley. So there had been an internal secret investigation and basically nothing came out of it. He was still doing his job. There were no visible repercussions. Came out in the news. This was in the fall of 2015. And then people were just shocked. He had a 20 year plus record, a career of doing things at Berkeley. And then I believe he was at San Francisco State. He had been winning awards for his research. And he actually had been involved in this publicity for his professional society about mentoring women and diversity. And here he was like a serial harasser. So this is like the

science version of Harvey Weinstein, in which something went on for a really, really long time. And the industry, his university, covered up and was complicit. Often there will be an investigation, but it's secret. And so you don't even know the investigation is happening. And when there are, you know, if the person is found to be guilty, usually nothing happens. In the worst case scenario, you know, what happened to Marcy only because there was this public outcry, he retired early, right? Which basically means, you know, you have all your benefits. And what about the women? Yeah. Well, a lot of them are not even in science anymore, right? I mean, that's one of the reasons a lot of people decide to leave science, because they experience this when they're a student. And a lot of them toughen out. And a lot of them say, hey, I don't, I don't, I can't put up with this. Wow. And so they leave the field. You're the lead investigator on this NSF $1 .1 million project to look into sexual harassment in the earth sciences, in particular. Why the earth sciences? Yeah, that's a good question. So we are focusing on the earth sciences again, not because I think it's only place where

it's happening, but it's one of the least diverse from the STEM fields. But also another reason why we're focusing on the geosciences is that a lot of people in the geosciences do research in the field. This parks back to the Antarctica case, right, with Dave Martian, like 90 plus percent of geology undergraduate degree programs require a field course. So students have to go to the field, right? If something happens, you're not on campus, you don't have your support network, it's unclear. The supervisors in that case might be the people who are harassing you, right? And so it's hard to know what resources are. Or you might be doing field research in Antarctica with three other people. And one of those people is your harasser, right? They control your access to food, they control your access to communication, you control your access to a doctor or health care, right? And they also control your ability to advance in your career, right? Yeah, and we have a very hierarchical system. And especially when you're a grad student, almost everything professionally depends on one person, you know, your advisor. So you might depend on that person for your funding

access to field sites or access to data. Their reputation kind of guides your professional development in your career in the future, right? And so you're always going to be this person's student. And so there's a lot of power there, and there's a lot of potential for abuse of that power. Well, so the project that you're working on, this big NSF grant, is both about surveying the earth sciences to see just how big a problem this is. But you're also working on some protocols, some interventions for bystanders in particular. So what does that mean when and why bystanders? Yeah, so the training that you usually see and actually I had gone through sexual harassment training as a postdoctoral scientist at the University of California. And it's very kind of legalistic, right? Like this is the definition of sexual harassment. This is what you do at the university. These are some instances recognize them as sexual harassment. Don't do it. But it felt like most of the scenarios

where kind of the cubicle and the arm on the hand, right? Or somebody asks you on a date, it just seemed like very canned. And it seemed like the training was really just, oh, you know, the university needs to do this because otherwise they will be sued. And you need to take it because I just kind of protect you. Oh, but my employees have taken the sexual harassment training. Therefore, it's not going to be a problem, right? And so that seems not very effective. So with a bystander intervention training, you know, what we want to do is really empower the community and power scientists, professors, students to basically not put up with this with this environment. They're not to turn a blind eye. Exactly. Or, you know, explicitly condone problems. And that's the problem is that often, you know, you'll hear of these cases and they come on in the news, but people have known for years. You know, with Jeff Marcy, there was like a rumor network at the astronomy society. They even had like a you could text or call a number if you wanted to be escorted from one of the meeting events from like the big social banquet to your hotel so that you wouldn't have a luxurious

professor follow you to your hotel. I mean, people are kidding. I'm not kidding you. Yeah. So a lot of this people knew this behavior was happening. And the targets or the victims, I prefer to call them targets, they are in a powerless situation, you know, and basically they risk losing their professional career and their credibility if they come forward. So it's not on them, but it's on all the peers, right? All the professors who know and all the administrators, right, who have heard these things and done do anything. Why don't people come forward more? Why does one tenured professor look the other way when they're rumours about his colleague? I think a lot of it is just, well, that's not my business. I don't want to get involved. You know, and being a professor myself, you know, it's very easy to just kind of immerse yourself into your research and there's all this stuff going around. But if it doesn't directly affect you, you know, we're like, so overworked and so busy and it's easy to just say, oh, well, that's all social stuff. You know, I'm a scientist. I don't, you know, I deal with data. I don't deal with people, right? So I don't have to worry about this people stuff. It's not an excuse that people, it's easy to see how that happens. So

educating people about the problem and then telling them that it's hurting people. So for that reason, it's inappropriate. But it's also hurting the scientific enterprise, right? Because you're turning people away. Is there any way to estimate any kind of data about how many women may have left science or not gone into science because they experienced either outright harassment or the kind of hostile climate you're talking about? Yeah, that's a good question. And we've been wondering about that. And I think because nobody, people, people leave their programs and very often there's no exit interview. Students will just decide halfway through their PhD, get a master's in leave, right? And very often they're never asked, why are you leaving? Do you know women who've left because they were sexually harassed? Yeah. Yeah. And so you know it happens, but it's really hard to come up with data. What is science lose when it's done by predominantly white men? It loses more than half of the world's brains, right? And more than half of the world's minds and experiences. Erica Marin -Sbiota is a biogeographer at the University of Wisconsin -Madison. She's the lead investigator on a new NSF

-funded program to address sexual harassment in the Earth Sciences. So what kind of thinking would we lose if women didn't go into science? Did you ever see that movie for being planet? Explore all the wonders of a vanished civilization. That's one of my, you know, him most favorite movies. What is it, Randall? Sir radar just picked up something. There's this invisible monster and when he walks... This way sir, slowly. The Earth trembles, we can't really see him or her. Well that's the way it is when an adult male orangutan appears in the trees. You know what it is. You know it's an adult male orangutan. And you know that he's relatively benign. You can't really see him clearly, but you can see the tree shaking and the Earth kind of moving and... You tremble. I mean, it's involuntary in spite of yourself, even though you know it's just an adult male orangutan.

Trees crashing, branches falling, and then he gives forth the long call. The long call is really an awesome sound. Almost like a locomotive when a locomotive goes by, it's so powerful that you can feel the vibrations just go through your body. Oh, it's stopped now. Check over the whole system first thing in the morning. Nice, sir. Coming up the story of how women forever change what we know about our cousins, the big apes. I'm Ann Strange -Hamps. It's to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX. One of

the most famous scientific experiments of the 20th century was a series of pioneering field studies of the great apes. And these studies were all done by women. There was Jane Goodall studying chimpanzees, Diane Fosse was mountain gorillas, and Barutek Aldekas with orangutans. And these three women, the so -called trimates, were personally chosen by the legendary paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey. And Leakey had a theory. He thought that if we could get really detailed field studies of the animals most closely related to us, we might discover how our own ancestors evolved. He also had another theory. It should be women, not men, who did the research. Steve Balson has our story. Today Jane Goodall is one of the world's most famous scientists. She showed us that chimpanzees like humans have very different personalities, and she made several revolutionary discoveries. She found that chimps are toolmakers.

She observed them hunting other animals, and she also said them wage war on rival groups of chimps. But what may be the most surprising piece of the story is that when Goodall started her field study in 1960, she had no scientific training. I didn't have any. None, I was at school, I left school at 18. I got a course of training as a secretary, got a job in London with documentary films, and then decided I had to get to Africa when I was invited by a school friend. So left my job in London, which didn't pay very well. Went home, worked as a waitress, saved up my wages and my tips. Got a return fair to Africa, and there I met Louis Leaky. Well, I have to say that is remarkable. When you think about it, I mean, back in 1960, you seemed to be the most unlikely candidate to revolutionize our understanding of chimpanzees. Why do you think Louis Leaky picked you to do this field study?

He told me later afterwards that he deliberately picked somebody with no scientific university training because he wanted to send somebody into the field with an unbiased mind. And of course, back then in the early 60s, the ethylogists of Europe were very reductionist. Humans were the only animals with personalities, minds, and above all feelings. And of course, I hadn't learned any of that, so I went merrily ahead and gave the chimpanzees names, which wasn't too appropriate. They should have had numbers and described those vivid personalities and described many examples of clearly intelligent behaviour and emotions that were obviously similar to or sometimes the same as ours. About five years after Jane Goodall went to Africa, Barutte Galdacos got the idea that she wanted to study a different grade ape, the orangutan, which eventually led to her own meeting with Louis Leaky. When I was 19, I was sitting in a very large psychology class,

and the prof just sort of mentioned the woman living with chimpanzees, and I just knew that this is what I wanted to do. The orangutans had not really been studied in the wild very well, and there was this history of people going out and looking for wild orangutans and not being very successful at finding them. Because of this over the years, there was this sort of mythology that had arisen in academia, and this mythology basically was that it couldn't be done. How did you first meet Louis Leaky? I met him again at a lecture in CLI, and I just went up to him after the end of the lecture and started talking to him. And you told him that you were the person that he should send to to study orangutans? Well, I didn't quite say it that forcefully, but I said, I told him that I wanted to study orangutans and asked him for his help. Well, he had a whole theory

of why women would be better field biologists, didn't he? Oh, he was absolutely convinced of it. He felt that women were much more patient than men. He felt that women would not excite the aggressive tendencies of the grade apes as much as men. And he really believed that women were more perceptive than men. He deliberately chose women. He felt that women made better observers, and he liked working better with women. Was he right, do you think? Well, if you look at women in an evolutionary perspective, you find that, and I compare them with chimps, chimps, mothers, human mothers, that a mother would need to have been patient. Otherwise, children wouldn't do very well, and they don't with chimps. A woman needed to be able to understand the needs of a non -verbal creature. That's our children before they can speak. And also, women, traditionally, even if they've been subjugated, have been very

quick to recognize the little communication signals in a household so that they can prevent arguments happening before they blow up, keep children out of the way of irritable men. You know, I think he may be right, at least, of women in our society, in that tests repeatedly show that women do see details that men don't see. So I'll give you an example. An experience I had, I was once at the home of an internationally known primatologist, to happen to be a man. And I was looking at a picture on his wall, and I said, oh, so these particular primates engage in male -male competition fight a lot. And he said, what do you mean? I said, well, look, you know, the finger of one of the males is missing. And he looked, and he'd been studying these primates for a year. I mean, there was a picture of them on his wall. And he looked at me. He said, funny. He said, I never noticed that before. That's amazing. Yeah, he had never noticed that part of the finger of one of his study animals was missing.

And these were revolutionary discoveries. I mean, for instance, when you saw a chimpanzee using a tool, can you describe that first day that you saw this? Oh, I easily, I can close my eyes. And as I am now, and just see it, I was a bit cold. It's been raining. I was pushing through some tool grass. And suddenly I saw this dark shape hunched over the golden soil of a termite mound. And I peered through the bushes with my binoculars. And the chimpanzee is back to me. But I saw a hand reach out and pick a piece of grass. And I could see him pushing it down into the termite mound. And the next time, a couple of days later, not only did I see him using the tools, but actually stripping leaves from a twig, therefore making a tool. And that was the exciting thing, because up till then, it was thought

that humans and only humans used and made tools, and we were defined as man, the tool maker. One reason Goodall and Galdekas made so many groundbreaking discoveries was simply the amount of time they spent with the primates they studied. Goodall lived at Gombe in Tanzania for 15 years. Galdekas stated her campsite in Borneo for more than 30 years. This was not the way male biologists had typically done their field work. Basically, it's get in there, get the data and get out. And I think women have a different attitude. The data is not necessarily everything to them. I mean, I don't want to give the wrong impression that all male scientists are like this and all female scientists are like that. But basically, I think we were speaking about different acculturation processes. I've noticed that the male scientists frequently will get the data and it will almost be like a trophy. It will almost be like a scalp. And Lewis Leakey

really zeroed in on that difference. Well, you tell some remarkable stories about one orangutan whose name was, I'm not sure if I'm saying this right, Sugito. Yes, Sugito is my first well -born, ex -captive. Who just clung to you all the time, no matter what you were doing, whether you were taking a bath, whether you were trying to change your clothes in bed when you were sleeping at night? That's right. That was exactly what he did. A orangutan infants, like all primate infants, are very needy and they have to be on the body of their mother. And he would urinate on you throughout the night? Yeah, throughout the day as well. Effocate. I was covered by tropical ulcers. My body was covered with tropical ulcers. I wasn't until years later that I figured out the reason I had all these tropical ulcers was because I was always wet with urine. You write that your relationship with Sugito became so intense that it really was the most important relationship in your life with the possible exception of your

relationship with your husband. Well, that's very true. He was very intense. And in fact, I think this intensity is what caused problems in the relationship with my husband, my then -husband. And I would think it would be hard. I mean, here you have this baby clinging to you at night, you know, and your husband is sleeping beside you and... Yeah, he couldn't touch me. Sugito didn't especially like your former husband. No, he was just insanely jealous. And I mean, the relationship was that intense. There was something else that set both galdacas and goudal apart from their male counterparts. Both became mothers during the years they spent in the field and they raised their children alongside the apes they were studying. Do you think your experience as a mother helped you as a scientist? Definitely, yeah. I understood, like for example, when a chimpanzee mother is approached by another one and she gets all angry if the child is asleep or

something, I felt exactly the same. That the surges of irrational anger if something happens that you think is going to harm or disturb your own child. And so I could much better understand the mother chimpanzees when they behaved in what seemed to be the same way. And then you had a child of your own. And you were raising him out there at Gombe, as you were doing these field studies. I guess it raises the question of whether you learned anything about raising your own son from the chimpanzees you were studying. Well, I'm quite sure I did. I mean, I really looked on flow as a role model. She was patient and supportive. She was protective but not overprotective. She could impose discipline when she wanted. She provided a nice secure base for her kids. And she supported them if they got into difficulties. That's the hallmark of a good human mother. Well, there was another convention as well in science. I mean, to some degree, it's still there. But I'm sure it was even more prominent back in the early 60s when you were just starting out.

And that's that scientists were not supposed to get emotionally involved with the subjects they studied. And it seemed that you kind of violated that role in your study of chimpanzees. Well, of course, I didn't know that when I began, I hadn't got any degree of any sort. I had just done biology in high school. That's why Lewis chose me, he says. You know, I've watched animals all my life long before I watch chimpanzees. And I think that having empathy with the creature you're watching isn't immensely powerful tool. It gives you a platform from which you can start asking questions. I think when you do field work, you basically not only experience the science and the animal that you study, but you also get to experience yourself. If you don't understand yourself, you can't understand the animal that you're studying and how to study that particular species.

I was sitting in the forest with David Greybeard and I picked up a fruit and held it out to him. He turned his head away and I put my hand closer. He turned, looking directly into my eyes, he reached out, took the fruit, dropped it, he really didn't want it. And then he very gently squeezed my hand, which is how chimpanzees reassure each other. And so, in that moment, we communicated with a language or communicated in a way that seems to predate words. Perhaps in a way that was used by our own common ancestor, millions of years ago. And it was an extraordinary feeling, it was bridging these two worlds. It felt like interacting with equals. Because they were so smart, but yet at the same time,

the world of the orangutans rests on such different assumptions about what is important and what isn't. And it's so slow -paced. It's hard to explain, but it was like going into another universe. When I think back about those early days, I tend to forget how sick I was, and how thin I was, and how weak I was, and how hungry I was. But I remember how happy I was. That audio is from interview Steve Falson did with Jane Goodall and Brew to Galdacas about a decade ago. Coming up, restoring the history of women in science, won Wikipedia article at a time. I'm Anne Strange -Hamps. It's to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio, and PRX. . .

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You know, we got to share the stories of these women with each other, find inspiration, share our moments of rage, and frustration, and our successes. And it's time I made some of my best friends. There's really a great community that builds up around that. Oh, that's incredible. And I can imagine I was looking through a bunch of the women that you've written about in Wikipedia. You weren't finding them on other sites online and moving and over, you're going to the library, right? I mean, there's some of these written, yeah. Tell me about one of them. Um, sure. So one of my favorites, her name was Tilly Edinger. And she since popped up in a couple of other places on the internet, which makes me extraordinarily happy because more people need to know about this lady. Okay. She invented a field called neuropaleontology. So in the 1800s in Germany, she discovered that when you looked at fossils of skulls, you could inject like plaster or other material into them and make a cast of what the animal's brain looked like. And you could get so much information out of this. Kind of a crazy genius. So then what do you do? Do the entry, you work with some other women, you make sure it's right,

accurate. Get the entry in there. And then the guy that like basically talks about your breasts or says you had sex with this other dude, do you then like send them a response and say, you know, A -hole, here's Tilly's bio. No, um, I usually try not to respond to them because that's usually a waste of my time. I do occasionally do, I've done that a couple times and it's been extraordinarily satisfying. I bet. Wait, wait, wait, tell me because that sounds extremely satisfying. I try not to because it's not about that. Also, they're, they're a waste of space and I don't want to give them anymore things they deserve. But being able to come back and be like, look what you did. You made the world better. No thanks to your, your actions. You know, it's, it's beautiful. So every time you get some, some troll online being a jerk, you directly keep track of that somewhere in your house or apartment and say, okay, I now owe the world a bio of a scientist on Wikipedia. Yeah, I currently owe the world about 150

pounds of space. Oh, oh no, there's a backlog. There's a backlog. Well, there's a backlog because, you know, medical school. Sure. You're busy. I wrote one this morning, so I'm taking it down one by one. I will say this is probably the most creative and empowering response. I have ever heard to violence like this on the internet. Is that the response you get for most people or some people like, oh god, you're wasting your time. I would say 99 % of it is positive. Just like what you said that people think it's creative and it's funny and it's empowering. I do get the occasional, you know, hate mail that says something to the effect of like, your stupid bitch and, you know, you are wasting your time writing about these dumb bitches who didn't do anything important. Women scientists aren't real. I literally got an email that just said, women scientists aren't real. Wow. And I'm literally sitting in a lab that is staffed by all women except for, you know, our two token guys run

by a woman. And I'm just like, come on. Come on. I want to talk about you, but I do want to take a step because you have some insight into these guys. Like, what the hell? I think it's part of why they do this is that they're threatened. You know, they feel like I'm public property because I'm a woman existing in a public space. And there's the anonymity of the internet. You know, I'm a target because my name is known. There's pictures of me, God forbid. You know, and there's a lot of easy things for guys to pick up on. I don't read comments anymore for obvious reasons, but I did it first and it was. Horr, it was all about my appearance. You know, my boobs are too big. They're too small. My hair's the wrong color. It's greasy. My face is the wrong shape. But I get all this stuff and they just feel the need to lash out and that's the only way they know how. We'll be hard for them to critique Tilly, the paleontologist. I can't even know what that is. Right. No, and I'm sure there's a lot of insecurity and they feel the need to take others down to make themselves feel better. But Emily, you and I know that this can be, it can be

dangerous. It isn't just a hurt feeling. I mean, oh, no, I get death threats all the time. I've been getting death threats since I was 13 years old. And I just part of me just doesn't care anymore. But you know, the first time I got a threat that was like, I'm going to murder your family and rape their dead bodies while I make you watch. I was 13. That freaked me out. I didn't know what to do. And I let it get to me. It was hard. Yeah. I mean, I can see it would get you because it's messed up. It's so messed up. But the other thing is that, you know, empowerment is a muscle. I was told that once. And it sounds like you've been flexing and flexing and flexing that muscle. You're quite the empowered woman. But it always seems like it's at a price. Is this whole thing worth it? 100%. Every day, you know, I have made some of my best friends through this work all over the world. I've connected with women. I've heard their stories. And I've gotten to know these women

from history in such a deep, substantial way. I've gotten to dig into their papers and their writings. And the details of their stories, their struggles, and their triumphs. And every day that inspires me more and more. You know, reading about the first women to go to medical school makes me really grateful for the place that I'm in right now. It makes me want to study that much harder. And it's a joy for me to share these stories with the world. You know, every time someone reads it, that makes my heart grow. That was Emily Temple Wood. She's a medical student at Midwestern University in near Chicago. And she was talking to Charles Monroe Kane between classes from her car. So most people can name at least one famous woman scientist, someone like Marie Curie. But how about the other Einstein? Albert's first wife, Maleva. In next week's

podcast Extra, we'll talk with Marie Benedict about her best -selling novel about Maleva Einstein. And in the meantime, here's a preview. October 20 of 1896, Zurich, Switzerland. Squaring my shoulders and willing myself to be just a little taller than my regrettably tiny frame. I placed my hand on the heavy brass handles of the classroom. Turn the knob and push the door open. I told myself, you can do this. You can do this. Professor Heinrich Martin Weber, and I looked at each other. You are? Yes. Mrs. Maleva, may I ask your answer? I prayed my voice didn't quaver. Very slowly, Weber consulted his class list. Of course, he knew precisely who I was. The consultation of the class list was a blatant and calculating move.

Telegraphing his opinion of me to the rest of the class. It gave them license to follow suit. You may take your seat. He finally said and gestured towards the empty chair. Find out more about the other Einstein in next week's podcast Extra, which means, of course, you have to subscribe to the podcast. Visit ttbook .org and we'll show you how. Forgotten women scientists are showing up everywhere these days. In movies, books, on Wikipedia, and also on the stage, thanks especially to one woman, Lauren Gunderson. She is currently the most produced playwright in America and she's the author of at least half a dozen plays about real women who changed science. And she thinks we're living in a golden age for stories like these. I absolutely do. And then why? Several reasons. So as a dramatist, you look for the best stories and the best stories are the ones with the highest stakes for the main characters, the greatest

struggle for them to get what they want. And those two things are usually women. For anything a woman does, especially if you're setting it anywhere beyond three decades ago, a woman has to work harder to justify the fact that she's even doing what she's doing, much less that she's good at and much less that she could change the world with her ideas. Excuse me, is this the observatory office? Yes. Miss Levit. You are Miss Levit. I am. I've come a long way and I'm quite anxious to get started. May I? Hmm? Get started. Or just point me in the direction of the telescope and I'll be fine. The telescope. Is that it? The great refractor? Yes, but... One of the largest in the world. I'm very aware quite a point of pride for us, but this is the work room for you girls to work in here. Well, this is the story you tell in your play about Henrietta Levit. Yeah. Tell us about her. She's such a great story. She is an amazing story. Here she was showing up at Harvard who were looking for mathematicians for, again, this drudgery kind of clerical work

almost for male astronomers. And they was a new technology at the time taking pictures of the stars. And they did them on these big window -pane -sized glass plates. And so Henrietta was one of these women and was doing a minute work of measuring the stars where they were, how bright they were, a lot of just making long lists and long books. This was at the time when there was a huge raging debate among astronomers, right? Yes. About the size of the universe. So there was something big at stake. Yeah. A lot of the people at Harvard actually thought that the universe was very small. That basically the Milky Way was our universe, that our galaxy was it. And all of the other things we see in the sky, the nebula, the other galaxies were in our galaxy. And Henrietta's work proved how big the universe was, how much space, how many stars. I'm going on 2 ,000 of them. I'm starting to think it's like counting grass. You can count it. But why? Oh, I've wasted

so much time on this. I really thought that I could sense something in the numbers. Really feel something important that we weren't connecting, but no. Miss Levit. 12 notebooks packed staring at me. Lucens all loose with nothing to show and no meaning and nothing, nothing makes any damn sense. Henrietta, excuse my language. You're close. Keep working. Think about how you're thinking. It's in there. Should I ask Dr. Pickering? No. Mr. Shaw? No. This one's yours. She realized that there's a pattern between the length that takes for the stars to blink and how bright they actually get. Well, once you know brightness, the actual brightness, you can compare it to how bright a star appears in the sky. So if it's supposed to be really, really bright, but it appears really dim, it must mean that the star is far away. And the reverse. So here suddenly we had what Edwin Hubble called a ladder, a measuring stick, which we'd never had before. So her work, Henrietta's work, was the backbone of Hubble's work, which was the math that allowed him to make his incredible discovery about the expanding universe, et cetera, et cetera. So

I'm so curious about how you take a story like this and really bring this woman to life as a whole person. Because I imagine that when you started, she's like a little tiny entry in an encyclopedia that says very little about her. And you have to flesh her out and discover the real drama in her life, which certainly wouldn't have all been scientific. For a story like Henrietta, it's important for me to show the complexity of a woman's full life and full emotional range. So she's allowed to be in love and she's allowed to be heartbroken, as well as being brilliant. Which again often female characters are put where you can either be an in love story or a story of how smart you are, you can't do both. Well, one of the things I love about your plays is that people fall in love with each other's minds. Oh, yeah, exactly what you said. For my characters, the height of their intellectual passion is the exact same as

their heart's passion. And so then when intellectual disagreements pop up, that's when you feel the real heartbreak of that. You know, if you fall in love with somebody and you're sharing this intellectual passion, you think the same things and then suddenly they diverge. Exactly. Or they don't credit you or recognize your brilliance. Yeah, or you realize that somebody may not be as smart as you thought they were. That's kind of what happens in Silence Guy. She realizes, oh, I thought that we were equal, but I don't actually think we are. How can you say that the universe isn't that vast? How can you say that? Because the majority of astronomers agree. No, they don't. The ones that matter do. The ones who gave you your job do. If you look at the literature. Which I have. Then you would see Miss Levitt that there is simply no other way to think. Well, it's a good thing that the universe doesn't care what you think. Or Newton or Kepler. It just marches on and waits for the blind to catch up. That would be you. That would be you. I usually put a scientific discovery earlier in the play at about an act break

point. Why? This first moment. Because for me, it's about having a great change in the middle of the play. And what happens in the wake of that change is the actual work of seeing how the world is different. But then at the end of those plays, there's a more metaphysical revelation discovery that happens. And that is usually to do with the future. The thing that this character can't know. They're not going to be alive to see it. And that's the kind of tingly cathartic release of really knowing that you're a part of this large human story of discovery as opposed to a singular one. Well, play that out in terms of your play about at a loveless because that's a perfect example. She's considering what the mother of computers indeed. Mr. Babich, hello, your machine. May I ask what order of polynomial it can manage? Oh, certainly, my dear. This model can process to the third. The third? No. Well, this is just a model, a fragment. The final engine can evaluate to the seventh. A seventh order? Well, that's

more impressive, isn't it? I certainly think so. And if you're here to know, the final engine would have 31 digit accuracy. 31. What a prime. I do so love primes. Don't you? She was the daughter of Lord Byron. Right. The famous romantic poet. Indeed. Oh, my gosh. Mad bad and dangerous. Dangerous to know. Of course. Yes. Which not a great father figure. When I found so compelling about her story and how it would make a really interesting play is, she could use her mathematical sense and her sense of engineering to program a computer that didn't exist just through logic. Oh. It would be programmable. And reprogramable. Change the card. Change the operation. Any computation. Any combination of computations. Any time you like, it would be completely... Universal, Charles. It would be universal. If I could figure out how to make it work, yes, it would. Yes, it was. Oh, my God. I feel like I'm witnessing the beginning of something absolutely grand. Part of the disappointment of her life was the computer that she

programmed never actually was built. She figures out, essentially, ones and zeros, binary code and programmable computer. In my play, she does. But that is after a bit of this metaphysical kind of theater magic moment at the end of the play, she gets just a peek at what the future would be. And that really sprang out of a very true moment in Ada's writings where she's writing to Babbage. And she says, I think one day, this engine, which is what they call the computer, this engine will write music. One, one, zero. One, one, zero. One, one, zero. One, one, zero. One, one, zero. So I know audiences leave your plays with a sense of the wonder of science and a sense of

wanting to celebrate the life and the vision. Oh, I hope so. Of a particular day's work. But not only were these women often prevented from living out their dreams, then history forgot about them. So we're in this mix of wonder and everything else. Where's the anger for you? I don't spend too much time on anger. I'm a fixer and that's what the plays are in some way, is a way to fix history's ignorance. Reminding people not just of the credit that is deserved and the history of the loss of these stories that we're trying to recover. But the fact that what I want to celebrate is people finding the thrill, the joy, the meaning, the overwhelming happiness of doing the work of science. You can walk away, especially as a young girl, perhaps thinking, this is fun. That sounds fun. Not just important and valuable, but yeah, that sounds like a good time. Now the room is spinning

white. The numbers fading into light. And now the room is spinning white. Numbers fading. Lauren Gunderson. She's the most produced playwright in America. And we heard excerpts from two of her plays. Silent Sky and Ada and the Engine. That's it for this hour. To the best of our knowledge is produced at Wisconsin Public Radio in Madison, Wisconsin by Doug Gordon, Mark Rickers, and Charles Monroe Kane. Our sound designer and technical director is Joe Hartke. Steve Paulson is our executive producer and I'm Ann Strangehamps. See you next time. PRX.