Two Generations Of NAS Couples Reflect Changing Role Of Women

When scientists are wed to their labs as well as to each other, they can encounter extraordinary personal and professional challenges In 1939, on the eve of war in Europe, Gertrude Scharff felt that marriage to a fellow scientist working in the United States offered her the best chance to survive as a physicist. Her husband, she hoped, represented her ticket to greater opportunities to carry out research. 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 1979, are in their prime. Separated by more than a generation, these couples offer insights on the opportunities to do good science for scientists married to each other. Both couples emphasize the need for each partner to respect the other's professional efforts and to be flexible enough to accommodate changes in each other's careers. "Love and respect," says Rakic about what's required today to maintain a world-class, two-career marriage in science. "One is not enough to avoid professional jealousy. And if you have love but no respect, that's no good. You must have respect for the field and the intelligence [of your partner]." Each says his or her spouse has been a source of great support and, sometimes, of great ideas. Although the marriage has been less of a career constraint for the husbands than for the wives, both partners have had to make tough choices as they struggled to keep their personal and professional lives in balance. As members of different generations, the Goldhabers and the Rakics have lived in eras that placed different emphases on questions of equality in professional opportunities and in the relationship between husband and wife. The second half of the 20th century has seen science become much less of a man's world; at the same time, the home has become less of a woman's world. "Now women are given quite a good chance to make use of their potential [in science]," says Maurice Goldhaber, who for 12 years headed the Brookhaven lab. "It was certainly much different when we started." Their lives and their thoughts illustrate how these changes have affected them as individuals as well as couples. When the husbands reflect on the past, they remember the wonder of exploration and the rewards of progress. They emphasize how much their careers have been labors of love, and they have warm feelings toward the research community that has nurtured them. The wives are a little less sanguine about the scientific enterprise. Their labors of love have been struggles against prejudice, they say. Both say they had to fight harder than a man would have to fight to get promotions or, in Scharff-Goldhaber's case, any research position at all. Notwithstanding those difficulties, these women say the situation for women--and therefore for couples--is improving. "Modern couples come into it with much more open eyes," says Scharff-Goldhaber. Adds Goldman-Rakic, "The younger people start at a more equal level; it's much more common that the woman and the man have equal jobs." And as awareness and acceptance improve, they say, so does the prospect for a happy marriage to a fellow scientist.

Two Generations Of NAS Couples Reflect Changing Role Of Women

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