Boston Globe: Mary-Lou Pardue, MIT professor whose anti-bias efforts lifted women in science, dies at 90

Her research formed the foundation for understanding the structure of chromosomes.

Bryan Marquard | Boston Globe
July 7, 2024

Amid the clatter of lunchtime dishes, Mary-Lou Pardue sat across from Nancy Hopkins one day in 1994 in a café not far from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reading a letter Hopkins had drafted.

Both were MIT professors and scientists, and Hopkins, the younger of the two, had gathered data showing women on the faculty were routinely discriminated against in numerous ways. Hopkins wanted to send her findings to the school’s president, but sought a blessing of sorts from Dr. Pardue, the first woman in MIT’s School of Science to be inducted into the National Academy of Sciences.

“I chose Mary-Lou as the person whose judgment would mean the most to me. I had this huge respect for her as a scientist before I even met her,” Hopkins recalled in an interview.

Dr. Pardue read the letter “very slowly and put it down on the table and said, ‘I agree with this letter, every word. I want to sign it and think you should send it to the president,’ ” Hopkins said. “And that changed my life, and ultimately it changed MIT. That was, to me, the defining moment for women at MIT.”

A highly regarded cellular and molecular biologist whose work formed the foundation for key advancements and discoveries in understanding the structure of chromosomes, Dr. Pardue died June 1 in Youville Assisted Living in Cambridge.

She was 90, had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, and her health had been failing.

The first Boris Magasanik professor of biology at MIT, Dr. Pardue had also been an American Academy of Arts and Sciences fellow, and was a past president of the Genetics Society of America and the American Society for Cell Biology.

Her efforts at MIT 30 years ago with Hopkins and other female professors, however, are still having a ripple effect through academia across the country and around the world.

When Dr. Pardue told Hopkins she wanted to sign the letter about bias against women and send it to MIT’s president, “I knew the world had shifted,” said Hopkins, whose efforts with Dr. Pardue and others were documented in “The Exceptions,” a 2023 book by New York Times reporter Kate Zernike, who initially broke the story as a Boston Globe reporter.

“I could sense the power of it: Two women, saying the same thing, one of them a member of the National Academy of Sciences,” Hopkins said. “She looked at me and felt the same thing, that two women together had power.”

They reached out to other tenured female professors at MIT, and almost all co-signed the letter, which they presented to the president. In 1995, MIT created the Committee on the Status of Women Faculty, whose 1999 report documented the systematic bias that women in the School of Science were facing.

That report, and MIT’s subsequent efforts to address its failings, led to similar efforts at universities across the country.

“It was life-changing, but that it could change the world? This is not something that occurred to me then,” Hopkins said, laughing at the memory.

As a young scientist, Dr. Pardue and Joseph Gall, who had been her doctoral adviser at Yale University, developed an “in situ hybridization” technique that “led to many discoveries, including critical advancements in developmental biology, our understanding of embryonic development, and the structure of chromosomes,” MIT said in its tribute to Dr. Pardue.

“In situ hybridization was a crucial step toward genomics. In some ways you could call it the first genomic technique,” said Allan Spradling, an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institution.

“Her research is underappreciated,” said Spradling, who also is a former director of the embryology department at the Carnegie Institution for Science. “It’s all tied into so many momentous events in the history of genomics.”

Kerry Kelley, who formerly managed Dr. Pardue’s lab, and is now manager of the Yilmaz Lab at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, said that “Mary-Lou was a giant of her time.”

Continuing to work in her lab after the onset of Parkinson’s, Dr. Pardue was “gracious, kind, smart as a whip, and just full of great stories,” Kelley said.

The techniques that Dr. Pardue and Gall developed are now used in thousands of labs around the world, said Thomas Cech, a former post-doctoral student of Dr. Pardue’s who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

“It was one of those discoveries which seemed important at the time and certainly attracted many of us to her laboratory,” he said, “but in retrospect, we had no idea how powerful this would become.”

Born on Sept. 15, 1933, Mary-Lou Pardue grew up in and around Lexington, Ky.

Her father, Louis Pardue, was a dean at Virginia Tech. Her mother, Mary Allie Marshall Pardue, had been a teacher before marrying. Her younger brother, William, who died in 2016, was a scientist in the nuclear industry.

Dr. Pardue graduated in 1955 from the College of William and Mary with a bachelor’s degree in biology.

After working in research, she received a master’s in radiation biology in 1959 from the University of Tennessee and a doctorate in biology in 1970 from Yale University.

She also did postdoctoral work at the University of Edinburgh before seeking a faculty position in the United States. MIT turned her down with a letter at first, and then recruited her for an associate professor position in 1972 after hearing about her work and lectures, “which I thought was as sincere an apology as you can get,” she said with a laugh in a video forum that MIT posted online.

Dr. Pardue, whose marriage in her graduate student years ended in divorce, was an avid hiker in New Hampshire’s White Mountains who also took on distant challenging terrain. She agreed to the Genetics Society presidency because on the way home from an international meeting in India she could go trekking in Nepal’s Annapurna range.

“She was a fun person to be around,” said Susan A. Gerbi, the George Eggleston professor of biochemistry emerita at Brown University, and a graduate school contemporary of Dr. Pardue’s at Yale.

“She had a twinkle in her eye, which you can see even if you look at the seminar she gave on YouTube,” Gerbi said. “And she was very smart and had good insights.”

Over the years, Dr. Pardue was close to her brother’s family, spending time with them during the winter holidays and going along on skiing and camping trips.

“A lot of times you run into scientists who are quite intelligent and can’t relate to people on a personal level,” said her nephew, Todd Pardue of Fairfax Station, Va. “She would take the time to talk to you. She was a very special person.”

He and his sister, Sara Pardue Gibson of Columbus, Ohio, are their aunt’s closest survivors. Plans for a celebration of Dr. Pardue’s life and work are pending.

While fielding questions during her MIT talk that was recorded for a video, Dr. Pardue smiled and said in a voice still rich with the Kentucky accent of her youth that as a researcher, “the greatest joy is when an experiment you didn’t think would work, works.”

Such clear, concise lessons were among those she imparted to generations of young scientists who worked in her labs, including at MIT, where she was a professor for more than 30 years.

“She was a great mentor who was as proud of her scientific children and grandchildren as she was of her own accomplishments. That’s not the way all scientists look at things,” said Ky Lowenhaupt, manager of the Biophysical Instrumentation Facility at MIT.

Lowenhaupt said Dr. Pardue “was a role model of what women in science can be at a time when there weren’t a lot of those, and a trailblazer as a woman — but also a trailblazer as a scientist who didn’t do things along the path that other people took.”

In Memoriam: Mary-Lou Pardue, 1933-2024

Mary-Lou Pardue, Professor Emeritus of Biology, dies at 90

Lillian Eden | Department of Biology
June 17, 2024

Known for her rigorous approach to science and pioneering research, Pardue paved the way for women scientists at MIT and beyond

Mary-Lou Pardue, professor emerita in the Department of Biology, died on June 1, 2024. She was 90.

Early in her career, Pardue developed a technique called in situ hybridization with her PhD advisor Joseph Gall, which allows researchers to localize genes on chromosomes. This led to many discoveries, including critical advancements in developmental biology, our understanding of embryonic development, and the structure of chromosomes. She also studied the remarkably complex way organisms respond to stress, such as heat shock, and discovered how telomeres, the ends of chromosomes, in fruit flies differ from those of other eukaryotic organisms during cell division.

“The reason she was a professor at MIT and why she was doing research was first and foremost because she wanted to answer questions and make discoveries,” says longtime colleague and Professor Emerita Terry Orr-Weaver. “She had her feet cemented in a love of biology.”

In 1983, Pardue was the first woman in the School of Science at MIT to be inducted into the National Academy of Sciences. She served as Chairman for the Section of Genetics from 1991 to 1994 and as a Council Member from 1995 to 1998. Among other honors, she was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, where she served as a Council Member, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  She also served on numerous editorial boards and review panels, and as the vice president, president, and chair of the Genetics Society of America and president of the American Society for Cell Biology.

Her graduate students and postdoctoral scholars included Alan Spradling, Matthew Scott, Tom Cech, Paul Lasko, and Joan Ruderman.

In the minority

Pardue was born on Sept. 15, 1933, in Lexington, Kentucky. She received a BS in Biology from the College of William and Mary in 1955, and she was awarded an MS in Radiation Biology from the University of Tennessee in 1959. In 1970, she was awarded a PhD in Biology for her work with Gall at Yale University.

As one of the senior women faculty who co-signed a letter to the Dean of Science at MIT about the bias against women scientists at the institute, Pardue’s career was inextricably linked to the slowly rising number of women with advanced degrees in science. During her early years as a graduate student at Yale, there were a few women with PhDs — but none held faculty positions. Indeed, Pardue assumed she would spend her career as a senior scientist working in someone else’s lab, rather than running her own.

Pardue was an avid hiker and loved to travel and spend time outdoors. She scaled peaks from the White Mountains to the Himalayas and pursued postdoctoral work in Europe at the University of Edinburgh. She was delighted to receive invitations to give faculty search seminars for the opportunity to travel to institutions across the U.S.—including an invitation to visit MIT.

MIT had initially rejected her job application, although the department quickly realized it had erred in missing the opportunity to recruit Pardue. In the end, she spent more than 30 years as a professor in Cambridge.

When Pardue joined, the department had two women faculty members, Lisa Steiner and Annamaria Torriani-Gorini — more women than at any other academic institution Pardue had interviewed. Pardue became an associate professor of Biology in 1972, a professor in 1980, and the Boris Magasanik Professor of Biology in 1995.

The person who made a difference

Pardue was known for her rigorous approach to science as well as her bright smile and support of others.

When Graham Walker, American Cancer Society and HHMI Professor, joined the department in 1976, he recalled an event for meeting graduate students at which he was repeatedly mistaken for a graduate student himself. Pardue parked herself by his side to bear the task of introducing the newest faculty member.

“Mary-Lou had an art for taking care of people,” Walker says. “She was a wonderful colleague and a close friend.”

Troy Littleton, Professor of Biology, Menicon Professor of Neuroscience, and Investigator at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory — then a young faculty member — had his first experience teaching with Pardue for an undergraduate project lab course.

“Observing how Mary-Lou was able to get the students excited about basic research was instrumental in shaping my teaching skills,” Littleton says. “Her passion for discovery was infectious, and the students loved working on basic research questions under her guidance.”

She was also a mentor for fellow women joining the department, including E.C. Whitehead Professor of Biology and HHMI investigator Tania A. Baker, who joined the department in 1992, and Orr-Weaver, the first female faculty member to join the Whitehead Institute in 1987.

“She was seriously respected as a woman scientist—as a scientist,” recalls Nancy Hopkins, Amgen Professor of Biology Emerita. “For women of our generation, there were no role models ahead of us, and so to see that somebody could do it, and have that kind of respect, was really inspiring.”

Hopkins first encountered Pardue’s work on in situ hybridization as a graduate student. Although it wasn’t Hopkins’ field, she remembers being struck by the implications — a leap in science that today could be compared to the discoveries that are possible because of the applications of gene-editing CRISPR technology.

“The questions were very big, but the technology was small,” Hopkins says. “That you could actually do these kinds of things was kind of a miracle.”

Pardue was the person who called to give Hopkins the news that she had been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. They hadn’t worked together, yet, but Hopkins felt like Pardue had been looking out for her, and was so excited on her behalf.

Later, though, Hopkins was initially hesitant to reach out to Pardue to discuss the discrimination Hopkins had experienced as a faculty member at MIT — Pardue seemed so successful that surely her gender had not held her back. Hopkins found that women, in general, didn’t discuss the ways they had been undervalued; it was humiliating to admit to being treated unfairly.

Hopkins drafted a letter about the systemic and invisible discrimination she had experienced — but Hopkins, ever the scientist, needed a reviewer.

At a table in the corner of Rebecca’s Café, a now-defunct eatery, Pardue read the letter — and declared she’d like to sign it and take it to the Dean of the School of Science.

“I knew the world had changed in that instant,” Hopkins says. “She’s the person who made the difference. She changed my life, and changed, in the end, MIT.”

MIT and the status of women

It was only when some of the tenured women faculty of the School of Science all came together that they discovered their experiences were similar. Hopkins, Pardue, Orr-Weaver, Steiner, Susan Carey, Sylvia Ceyer, Sallie “Penny” Chisholm, Suzanne Corkin, Mildred Dresselhaus, Ann Graybiel, Ruth Lehmann, Marcia McNutt, Molly Potter, Paula Malanotte-Rizzoli, Leigh Royden, and Joanne Stubbe ultimately signed a letter to Robert Birgeneau, then the Dean of Science.

Their efforts led to a Committee on the Status of Women Faculty in 1995, the report for which was made public in 1999. The report captured pervasive bias against women across the School of Science. In response, MIT ultimately worked to improve the working conditions of women scientists across the institute. These efforts reverberated at academic institutions across the country.

Walker notes that creating real change requires a monumental effort of political and societal pressure — but it also requires outstanding individuals whose work surpasses the barriers holding them back.

“When Mary-Lou came to MIT, there weren’t many cracks in the glass ceiling,” he says. “I think she, in many ways, was a leader in helping to change the status of women in science by just being who she was.”

Later years

Kerry Kelley, now a research laboratory operations manager in the Yilmaz Lab at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, joined Pardue as a technical lab assistant in 2008, Kelley’s first job at MIT. Pardue, throughout her career, was committed to hands-on work, preparing her own slides whenever possible.

“One of the biggest things I learned from her was mistakes aren’t always mistakes. If you do an experiment, and it doesn’t turn out the way you had hoped, there’s something there that you can learn from,” Kelley says. She recalls a frequent refrain with a smile: “‘It’s research. What do you do? Re-search.’”

Their birthdays were on consecutive days in September; Pardue would mark the occasion for both at Legal Seafoods in Kendall Square with Bluefish, white wine, and lab members and collaborators including Kelley, Karen Traverse, and the late Paul Gregory DeBaryshe.

In the years before her death, Pardue resided at Youville House Assisted Living in Cambridge, where Kelley would often visit.

“I was sad to hear of the passing of Mary-Lou, whose seminal work expanded our understanding of chromosome structure and cellular responses to environmental stresses over more than three decades at MIT. Mary-Lou was an exceptional person who was known as a gracious mentor and a valued teacher and colleague,” says Biology Department Head and Jay A. Stein (1968) Professor of Biology and Professor of Biological Engineering Amy Keating. “She was kind to everyone, and she is missed by our faculty and staff. Women at MIT and beyond, including me, owe a huge debt to Mary-Lou, Nancy Hopkins, and their colleagues who so profoundly advanced opportunities for women in science.”

She is survived by a niece and nephew, Todd Pardue and Sarah Gibson.