First Winner Of New Award For Women Scientists Sets High Standard

High Standard Author:BARBARA SPECTOR, pp.3 Date: June 13,1994 Members of the committee that selected Joan Argetsinger Steitz, a biochemist at Yale University's School of Medicine, as the first recipient of an award honoring women in science say their choice has established a standard of excellence for the prize. Steitz, the Henry Ford II Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator at Yale, received the prize--the Weizmann Women and Science Award--at a ceremony at the New York Academy of Sciences on June 7. The $25,000 award is sponsored by the American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science, a promotion and fund-raising arm of the research center located in Rehovot, Israel. It honors an outstanding woman researcher in the United States who has made a significant contribution in either basic or applied science. "There was the sense [among the nominating committee members] that it was important to find someone whose work was absolutely of unimpeachable quality," says committee member Harriet Zuckerman, vice president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and a professor, emerita, of sociology at Columbia University, both in New York City. "Joan Steitz fits that very well." Steitz, 53, is best known for defining the function of small nuclear ribonucleo-proteins, or snRNPs--which she pronounces "snurps"--cellular complexes that play a role in the splicing of messenger RNA. She and her student Michael Lerner first described snRNPs in 1979; she has been studying them ever since. Being the initial recipient of the Weizmann award is only the latest in a series of "firsts" in Steitz's career. In 1989, she became the first woman to win the Warren Triennial Prize, shared with Thomas R. Cech of the University of Colorado, Boulder. The prize, considered a "predictor" of the Nobel Prize (Cech won the 1989 Nobel in chemistry), is given by Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston (The Scientist, Jan. 22, 1990, page 21). Steitz was also the first woman to win the National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology in 1982 and the first female recipient of the American Chemical Society's Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry in 1976. But her latest honor is one she particularly treasures, she says: "This one is very special because there aren't any [other] significant prizes targeted to women in science." According to the Washington, D.C.-based Association for Women in Science, the new Weizmann award is the only national, pandisciplinary prize (in contrast to a research grant) in the U.S. that is given to women exclusively; other women's awards have been discipline-specific or limited to women from a specific region. Sara Lee Schupf, national chairwoman of the American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science--whose main office is located in New York City, with 15 regional offices around the U.S.--says she devised the award as a way of calling attention both to the accomplishments of women scientists in the United States and to the Weizmann Institute. "We want to give recognition to a woman in science and, hopefully, to promote women scientist role models," Schupf says. "I've been doing a lot of reading about how important role models are," says Schupf, who is studying the contributions of women in science for a bachelor of arts degree in women's studies from Sarah Lawrence College and is a member of the board of the New York Women's Foundation. "I feel quite strongly about this." When it comes to role models, the first Weizmann award winner unquestionably fills the bill, according to one Nobel Prize-winning biomedical researcher. "I am so admiring of Joan Steitz," says Joshua Lederberg, University Professor at Rockefeller University in New York. "She is one of the country's outstanding scientists, male or female." Steitz's long list of professional accomplishments includes receipt of the National Medal of Science in 1986 and membership in the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. In 1990, she was named by The Scientist as one of the 10 most-cited women researchers of the 1980s (A. Grissom, The Scientist, Oct. 15, 1990, page 18). Her most cited paper of the period 1980-93, which has been referenced in nearly 400 subsequent articles, is S.M. Mount, I. Pettersson, M. Hinterberger, A. Karmas, J.A. Steitz, "The U1 small nuclear RNA-protein complex selectively binds a 5' splice site in vitro," Cell, 33:509-18, 1983. Another paper- -D.L. Black, B. Chabot, J.A. Steitz, "U2 as well as U1 small nuclear ribonucleoproteins are involved in pre-messenger RNA splicing," Cell, 42:737-50, 1985--accumulated almost 390 citations through 1993. These totals put both papers in the 99.9th percentile of all cited publications from 1945 to the present, according to data from the Philadelphia-based Institute for Scientific Information. Steitz earned her B.S. in chemistry from Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1963. She did graduate work at Harvard University, where she studied with DNA double helix codiscoverer James D. Watson, earning her M.A. in 1967 and her Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology in 1968. She then worked as a postdoc at Cambridge University, England, with Watson's colleague Francis Crick. In 1970 she joined the Yale faculty, becoming a full professor in 1978 and an HHMI investigator in 1986. Steitz says she has visited the Weizmann Institute in Israel once--in 1980, as part of a conference at which she gave a lecture on protein-nucleic acid interactions. An interesting aspect of her research on snRNPs and "one of the points I make in my talks," Steitz says, is that while usually basic scientific discoveries lead to advances in clinical medicine, in this case clinical studies provided materials that proved to be "absolutely essential" for basic research. The immune system of patients with systemic lupus erythematosus makes antibodies against their bodies' own molecules and thus often makes autoantibodies against snRNPs. Steitz and colleagues have used these antibodies to study the roles of different kinds of snRNPs in gene expression. In addition to Schupf and Zuckerman, the award nominating committee consisted of Ruth Arnon, a professor in the chemical immunology department at the Weizmann Institute in Israel; Florence Haseltine, director of the Center for Population Research at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md.; psychologist Frances Degen Horowitz, president of the graduate school and university center of the City University of New York; Daniel E. Koshland, Jr., a professor of biochemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, and editor of Science; Ellen Levine, editor-in- chief of Redbook and a member of the board of directors of the National Alliance of Breast Cancer Organizations; Suzanne Braun Levine, editor-in-chief of the Columbia Journalism Review; Rodney W. Nichols, chief executive officer of the New York Academy of Sciences; Mary Reuchlin Rifkin, associate director of cell biology at the Brookdale Center for Molecular Biology of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York; David Z. Robinson, executive director of the Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology, and Government in New York; and Maxine F. Singer, president of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C. Despite their numerous other commitments, nominating committee members say, they were willing to devote the time to read up on the various candidates and select a winner because of their respect for the award's sponsor. "The Weizmann Institute is one of the world's outstanding institutes," says Koshland. It is especially appropriate that a science award for women be given under the auspices of an Israeli research center, Koshland says, because in that young country "women have always been part of the work force." Candidates for the award were culled from names submitted for consideration by various academies of science, from lists of nominees for other prizes, and from suggestions contributed by nominating committee members The pool of nominees "was not in the hundreds, but it was not just three or four, either," says Nichols, noting that the field was "rather wide open and extremely competitive." The scientific contribution of each candidate was judged according to "where it fit into the whole field and how pioneering the discovery was," says Koshland. Nichols adds that the committee was looking for individuals who demonstrated "the highest standards of professional accomplishment, particularly over a long period of time--not just one paper or one patent." Because they were selecting the first winner of the award, committee members say, they found it necessary to establish certain criteria. Among the questions they addressed, says Schupf, was "What sciences do we [honor] with this award?" After some discussion, she says, the committee decided to consider researchers in "the kinds of sciences that Weizmann supports," namely the "hard" sciences--mathematics, physics, chemistry (including environmental science and energy research), biophysics-biochemistry, and biology. Another matter that needed to be settled, committee members say, was whether the award should be given to a young scientist or an older, more established researcher. "There was some sense that it was a good idea to pick someone in mid-career, rather than someone who had gotten a ton of awards and was at the end of her career," says Nichols. Schupf adds that the panel opted not to select a younger recipient because "young scientists could get the award later on." After some discussion, it was decided not to take personal issues--such as whether a nominee had had to balance research and childrearing--into account, says Nichols, because the committee decided that "we'd never know enough" about each candidate. Steitz says she understands how important role models can be for young women wanting to pursue careers in science because she herself did not know any such women. "At the time I was a graduate student, there were no women professors in the biological sciences at any major university," she says. "There were [women] who worked in research positions for many years who were later appointed to professorships but didn't follow the traditional career path of assistant to associate to full professor--the university [where they had worked for many years] finally woke up and made them professors." Consequently, "I never envisioned myself as being what I am today," she says. "I thought I would be a research associate in someone s lab. I never thought that I would teach; I never thought that I would mentor graduate students; I never thought that I would be an active and prominent faculty member at a prominent institution." Steitz recalls that, when she and her husband, Thomas A. Steitz (now also a professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale), were preparing to return to the United States from England in 1970, it came as a great shock to her that "various institutions offered us both jobs. It was such a scary prospect because there were no role models out there." But, she says, as the result of "my husband being very supportive, and friends and previous mentors being very supportive," she came to the realization that "it was my responsibility to do it [accept a faculty position]." In an ideal society, some nominating committee members acknowledge, there would be no need for a separate science prize for women, because they would be receiving a sizable proportion of the major science awards open to everyone. "I would like to get to the point where [a women's science award] was not necessary," says Zuckerman. "But I think there's continuing evidence that women who do very important scientific work get rewarded later and less often than male scientists." Committee member Haseltine agrees, citing as one of many examples Salome Waelsch, Distinguished University Professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University in New York, who received the National Medal of Science last year, at the age of 86 (P. Beck, The Scientist, Nov. 15, 1993, page 7). Waelsch, who helped lay the foundation for modern genetics, "hardly got any awards before that one," Haseltine says. "The men know how to get attention--women aren't as good at it." Haseltine adds that her desire to see excellent women researchers get the accolades they deserve was one of the reasons she accepted the invitation to serve on the committee. "I'm in a position now to help other women get [awards]," she says. "I feel it's a responsibility once you identify it [lack of recognition for women] as a problem."

First Winner Of New Award For Women Scientists Sets High Standard

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