Forty years later, the tables were turned for neurobiologist Patricia Goldman. Goldman worried that tying the knot with another established neurobiologist might have a negative effect on her career. To be with him, she would have to abandon a senior position at the National Institute of Mental Health and, in mid-career, join the academic rat race.
Both women did marry professional colleagues. They stand out among the thousands of women scientists in the United States not because they are married to scientists but because they and their spouses are part of the scientific elite--members of the 1,600-person National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Only nine other couples share that distinction.
Gertrude Scharff-Goldhaber and Maurice Goldhaber, physicists who have spent the past 40 years affiliated with Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., are in the twilight of their careers, while Patricia Goldman-Rakic and her husband, Pasko Rakic, neurobiologists at Yale University since ...
