An internship with MIT Biology can get you on your way.
Raleigh McElvery
April 7, 2020
For the past several years, MIT Biology has been training undergraduates, graduate students, and research associates in the craft of science communication. In an effort to foster professional development and share the exciting research that transpires on campus, our communications team offers science writing and multimedia internships. We develop these positions to align with the interests of our interns, who often help out on a volunteer basis. Assignments range from assisting with videos and podcasts to writing news stories and profiles, aiding with social media, and chronicling the history of the department. After honing their own skills, many of our interns have successfully competed for prestigious communications fellowships, graduate programs in science writing, and communications jobs. Take a look at what they’ve done, and contact us if you’re a member of the department interested in joining our team.
Justin Chen PhD ’18 (Spring 2017 – Spring 2018)
Justin Chen earned his PhD in Hazel Sive’s lab, using frog embryos to model human craniofacial development. As a science writing intern, he composed student profiles for the department website and articles on research papers for MIT News. After graduating from MIT, he earned an AAAS Mass Media and Science and Engineering Fellowship, which he spent at STAT News publishing breaking news and profiles of scientists. He is currently an external affairs associate at OpenBiome, where he drafts press releases, annual reports, academic publications, and patient education materials, while helping to manage the website and social media. In addition to his work at Openbiome, he authors personal essays as a writer-in-residence at Porter Square Books.
Nafisa Syed SB ’19 (Spring 2019)
Nafisa Syed earned her bachelor’s degree in Biology (Course 7), with minors in Science Writing (Course 21W) and Brain and Cognitive Sciences (Course 9). She was an editor at The Tech, MIT Undergraduate Research Journal (MURJ), and Rune Literary Magazine, while completing a UROP in Evelina Fedorenko’s lab studying the brain’s language regions. As an intern at MIT Biology, Nafisa generated content for the internal newsletter, spearheaded social media campaigns, and analyzed data displaying the distribution of life science funding across the Institute. She is currently earning her master’s degree at MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing.
Saima Sidik (Spring 2019 – Spring 2020)
Saima Sidik is a research associate in Sebastian Lourido’s lab, where she studies how the parasite Toxoplasma gondii causes disease. In addition to authoring articles on scientific research for her blog, 10X Objective, Saima composes student profiles for the department website and MIT News, news briefs, and archival pieces about the history of biology at MIT. Starting this fall, she will begin her master’s degree at MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing.
Lucy Jakub (Fall 2019- Spring 2020)
Lucy Jakub served as the editorial assistant at The New York Review of Books for two years before entering MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing in the fall of 2019. As an intern for MIT Biology, she writes news briefs for the department website, student profiles for MIT News, and articles on recent events, in addition to generating the internal newsletter and social media campaigns. Her work has also appeared in Harper’s Magazine and National Geographic.
Sebastian Swanson (Fall 2018 – present)
Sebastian Swanson is a fourth-year graduate student in Amy Keating’s lab, studying the principles of protein-protein interactions in order to develop algorithms for peptide design. As an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota, he served as an officer and co-chair of MinneCinema Studios, which produces a variety of multimedia projects ranging from mock TV episodes to short films. He is currently the department’s primary cinematographer, filming faculty profiles and short videos on research projects.
Are you a member of the MIT Biology community interested in honing your scientific communication skills? Contact biowebmaster@mit.edu to discuss potential internship opportunities.
Neurons that store abstract representations of past experiences are activated when a new, similar event takes place.
Anne Trafton | MIT News Office
April 6, 2020
Imagine you are meeting a friend for dinner at a new restaurant. You may try dishes you haven’t had before, and your surroundings will be completely new to you. However, your brain knows that you have had similar experiences — perusing a menu, ordering appetizers, and splurging on dessert are all things that you have probably done when dining out.
MIT neuroscientists have now identified populations of cells that encode each of these distinctive segments of an overall experience. These chunks of memory, stored in the hippocampus, are activated whenever a similar type of experience takes place, and are distinct from the neural code that stores detailed memories of a specific location.
The researchers believe that this kind of “event code,” which they discovered in a study of mice, may help the brain interpret novel situations and learn new information by using the same cells to represent similar experiences.
“When you encounter something new, there are some really new and notable stimuli, but you already know quite a bit about that particular experience, because it’s a similar kind of experience to what you have already had before,” says Susumu Tonegawa, a professor of biology and neuroscience at the RIKEN-MIT Laboratory of Neural Circuit Genetics at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory.
Tonegawa is the senior author of the study, which appears today in Nature Neuroscience. Chen Sun, an MIT graduate student, is the lead author of the paper. New York University graduate student Wannan Yang and Picower Institute technical associate Jared Martin are also authors of the paper.
Encoding abstraction
It is well-established that certain cells in the brain’s hippocampus are specialized to store memories of specific locations. Research in mice has shown that within the hippocampus, neurons called place cells fire when the animals are in a specific location, or even if they are dreaming about that location.
In the new study, the MIT team wanted to investigate whether the hippocampus also stores representations of more abstract elements of a memory. That is, instead of firing whenever you enter a particular restaurant, such cells might encode “dessert,” no matter where you’re eating it.
To test this hypothesis, the researchers measured activity in neurons of the CA1 region of the mouse hippocampus as the mice repeatedly ran a four-lap maze. At the end of every fourth lap, the mice were given a reward. As expected, the researchers found place cells that lit up when the mice reached certain points along the track. However, the researchers also found sets of cells that were active during one of the four laps, but not the others. About 30 percent of the neurons in CA1 appeared to be involved in creating this “event code.”
“This gave us the initial inkling that besides a code for space, cells in the hippocampus also care about this discrete chunk of experience called lap 1, or this discrete chunk of experience called lap 2, or lap 3, or lap 4,” Sun says.
To further explore this idea, the researchers trained mice to run a square maze on day 1 and then a circular maze on day 2, in which they also received a reward after every fourth lap. They found that the place cells changed their activity, reflecting the new environment. However, the same sets of lap-specific cells were activated during each of the four laps, regardless of the shape of the track. The lap-encoding cells’ activity also remained consistent when laps were randomly shortened or lengthened.
“Even in the new spatial locations, cells still maintain their coding for the lap number, suggesting that cells that were coding for a square lap 1 have now been transferred to code for a circular lap 1,” Sun says.
The researchers also showed that if they used optogenetics to inhibit sensory input from a part of the brain called the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC), lap-encoding did not occur. They are now investigating what kind of input the MEC region provides to help the hippocampus create memories consisting of chunks of an experience.
Two distinct codes
These findings suggest that, indeed, every time you eat dinner, similar memory cells are activated, no matter where or what you’re eating. The researchers theorize that the hippocampus contains “two mutually and independently manipulatable codes,” Sun says. One encodes continuous changes in location, time, and sensory input, while the other organizes an overall experience into smaller chunks that fit into known categories such as appetizer and dessert.
“We believe that both types of hippocampal codes are useful, and both are important,” Tonegawa says. “If we want to remember all the details of what happened in a specific experience, moment-to-moment changes that occurred, then the continuous monitoring is effective. But on the other hand, when we have a longer experience, if you put it into chunks, and remember the abstract order of the abstract chunks, that’s more effective than monitoring this long process of continuous changes.”
The new MIT results “significantly advance our knowledge about the function of the hippocampus,” says Gyorgy Buzsaki, a professor of neuroscience at New York University School of Medicine, who was not part of the research team.
“These findings are significant because they are telling us that the hippocampus does a lot more than just ‘representing’ space or integrating paths into a continuous long journey,” Buzsaki says. “From these remarkable results Tonegawa and colleagues conclude that they discovered an ‘event code,’ dedicated to organizing experience by events, and that this code is independent of spatial and time representations, that is, jobs also attributed to the hippocampus.”
Tonegawa and Sun believe that networks of cells that encode chunks of experiences may also be useful for a type of learning called transfer learning, which allows you to apply knowledge you already have to help you interpret new experiences or learn new things. Tonegawa’s lab is now working on trying to find cell populations that might encode these specific pieces of knowledge.
The research was funded by the RIKEN Center for Brain Science, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the JPB Foundation.
April 1, 2020
April 2, 2020
March 30, 2020
Junior Emily O’Rourke traveled to South Africa to investigate epidemics and returned with a broader outlook on her fundamental disease research.
Raleigh McElvery
March 31, 2020
Growing up in El Paso, Texas near the border of the U.S. and Mexico, Emily O’Rourke could venture across cultures in less time than it takes most people to commute to work. In fact, her dad would make this short trip each day for his job as a mechanical engineer. Watching him cross over so frequently reminded O’Rourke that “ideas and skills don’t stop at the border.” O’Rourke herself would visit Mexico to see relatives, and these experiences seeded aspirations to spearhead international scientific collaborations. Now a junior in Course 7 (Biology), O’Rourke is continuing to add stamps to her passport while exploring the global implications of disease research.
O’Rourke chose MIT because it offered a particularly wide array of study abroad programs, in addition to having top-tier research opportunities. One such study abroad program, MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI), operates 25 regional programs, matching undergraduate and graduate students with fully-funded internship, research, and teaching opportunities in over 40 countries. The summer after her first year, O’Rourke participated in MISTI’s MIT-Italy Program in order to gain some research experience in the realm of urban planning. For six weeks, she investigated the urban effects of sea level rise while living in Venice.
When she returned to campus for her sophomore year, O’Rourke was intending to double major in physics and biology. But she ultimately opted to drop physics and pursue the life sciences once she started working in Becky Lamason’s lab in the Department of Biology.
“I started to see how biology worked on a practical level,” she says. “I get to experience a hands-on connection by running DNA on a gel and doing other experiments. During our weekly lab meetings, I witness scientific stories as they unfold.”
More recently, the duo has begun to examine how Sca4 may coopt another protein in the host cell, known as clathrin, for its own malicious means. “Sca4 is a really big protein and we still don’t know its entire structure,” O’Rourke says, “and we’re hoping to uncover some new functions.”The Lamason lab investigates how parasites hijack host cells processes in order to spread infection. O’Rourke is working with graduate student Cassandra Vondrak to probe the proteins that allow the tick-borne Rickettsia parkeri to migrate from one cell to the next. Their protein of interest, surface cell antigen 4 (Sca4), is secreted by the bacterium and binds to the host’s cell membrane, reducing the tension across the membrane and allowing Rickettsia to punch through to the neighboring cell. O’Rourke and Vondrak aim to determine how Rickettsia releases Sca4, in the hopes of piecing together a general mechanism by which pathogens propagate.
While O’Rourke was studying infectious disease on a cellular level, she heard about an opportunity to explore epidemics on a global scale. Each January, the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology sponsors a two-week class in South Africa called Evolution of an Epidemic. The class, taught by Professor of the Practice Bruce Walker, covers the medical, scientific, and political responses to new diseases, focusing on the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Walker, who is also the director of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard, is a world leader in the study of immune control and evasion in HIV infection. Since then, he’s developed strong connections and research partnerships in South Africa where the disease is most prevalent.
O’Rourke enrolled in Evolution of an Epidemic, and MISTI helped her to plan her trip. On January 16, she landed in Johannesburg, the first of three destinations. The cohort of students from MIT, Harvard, and the African Leadership Academy attended lectures, spoke with patients, and met medical professionals.
After Johannesburg, the class traveled to Durban where they visited traditional healers who were learning to administer HIV/AIDS tests as part of the iTeach program.
“We had the chance to ask these healers how they felt about interacting with Western medicine, and whether it clashed with their traditional values,” O’Rourke says. “They said HIV was so new that they couldn’t draw upon ancient wisdom from their ancestors to treat it. They were directing patients towards Western treatments because they’d seen the devastation the disease could cause.”
The iTEACH Program located in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.
At their third and final destination, the province of KwaZulu-Natal, O’Rourke toured the FRESH Program. Twice a week, as part of a clinical trial, healthy African women around O’Rourke’s age attend classes that address topics like self-esteem, gender-based violence, HIV prevention, career development, and computer training. Before each session, the women are tested for HIV/AIDS, so if they contract it the researchers can treat it early and learn more about the disease’s initial stages.
“I really liked going there because it helped me see a direct connection between science and social good,” O’Rourke says. “It showed the value of talking to patients and asking about their experiences, rather than just looking at study outcomes.”
After two weeks, O’Rourke returned to MIT Biology and the Lamason lab with a broader outlook on her parasite research. “I’m able to see how my works fits into a larger context,” she says, “and how it may eventually have far-reaching impacts on disease evolution and spread.”
O’Rourke still plans to pursue fundamental biological research, but intends to seek out international collaborations focused on global health as well. It’s hard to leave the MIT bubble, she says, but it’s worth it. “Traveling can really broaden your perspective as a scientist, and inform your research in unexpected ways.”
Photos courtesy of Emily O’Rourke
Posted 4.1.20
Repurposing a drug used for blood clots may help Covid-19 patients in danger of respiratory failure, researchers suggest.
Anne Trafton | MIT News Office
March 26, 2020
Researchers at MIT and the University of Colorado at Denver have proposed a stopgap measure that they believe could help Covid-19 patients who are in acute respiratory distress. By repurposing a drug that is now used to treat blood clots, they believe they could help people in cases where a ventilator is not helping, or if a ventilator is not available.
Three hospitals in Massachusetts and Colorado are developing plans to test this approach in severely ill Covid-19 patients. The drug, a protein called tissue plasminogen activator (tPA), is commonly given to heart attack and stroke victims. The approach is based on emerging data from China and Italy that Covid-19 patients have a profound disorder of blood clotting that is contributing to their respiratory failure.
“If this were to work, which I hope it will, it could potentially be scaled up very quickly, because every hospital already has it in their pharmacy,” says Michael Yaffe, a David H. Koch Professor of Science at MIT. “We don’t have to make a new drug, and we don’t have to do the same kind of testing that you would have to do with a new agent. This is a drug that we already use. We’re just trying to repurpose it.”
Yaffe, who is also a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and an intensive care physician at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center/Harvard Medical School, is the senior author of a paper describing the new approach.
The paper, which appears in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery, was co-authored by Christopher Barrett, a surgeon at Beth Israel Deaconess and a visiting scientist at MIT; Hunter Moore, Ernest Moore, Peter Moore, and Robert McIntyre of the University of Colorado at Denver; Daniel Talmor of Beth Israel Deaconess; and Frederick Moore of the University of Florida.
Breaking up clots
In one large-scale study of the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China, it was found that 5 percent of patients required intensive care and 2.3 percent required a ventilator. Many doctors and public health officials in the United States worry that there may not be enough ventilators for all Covid-19 patients who will need them. In China and Italy, a significant number of the patients who required a ventilator went on to die of respiratory failure, despite maximal support, indicating that there is a need for additional treatment approaches.
The treatment that the MIT and University of Colorado team now proposes is based on many years of research into what happens in the lungs during respiratory failure. In such patients, blood clots often form in the lungs. Very small clots called microthrombi can also form in the blood vessels of the lungs. These tiny clots prevent blood from reaching the airspaces of the lungs, where blood normally becomes oxygenated.
The researchers believe that tPA, which helps to dissolve blood clots, may help patients in acute respiratory distress. A natural protein found in our bodies, tPA converts plasminogen to an enzyme called plasmin, which breaks down clots. Larger amounts are often given to heart attack patients or stroke victims to dissolve the clot causing the heart attack or stroke.
Animal experiments, and one human trial, have shown potential benefits of this approach in treating respiratory distress. In the human trial, performed in 2001, 20 patients who were in respiratory failure following trauma or sepsis were given drugs that activate plasminogen (urokinase or streptokinase, but not tPA). All of the patients in the trial had respiratory distress so severe that they were not expected to survive, but 30 percent of them survived following treatment.
That is the only study using plasminogen activators to treat respiratory failure in humans to date, largely because improved ventilator strategies have been working well. This appears not to be the case for many patients with Covid-19, Yaffe says.
The idea to try this treatment in Covid-19 patients arose, in part, because the Colorado and MIT research team has spent the last several years studying the inflammation and abnormal bleeding that can occur in the lungs following traumatic injuries. It turns out that Covid-19 patients also suffer from inflammation-linked tissue damage, which has been seen in autopsy results from those patients and may contribute to clot formation.
“What we are hearing from our intensive care colleagues in Europe and in New York is that many of the critically ill patients with Covid-19 are hypercoagulable, meaning that they are clotting off their IVs, and having kidney and heart failure from blood clots, in addition to lung failure. There’s plenty of basic science to support the idea that this concept should be beneficial,” Yaffe says. “The tricky part, of course, is figuring out the right dose and route of administration. But the target we are going after is well-validated.”
Potential benefits
The researchers will test tPA in patients under the FDA’s “compassionate use” program, which allows experimental drugs to be used in cases where there are no other treatment options. If the drug appears to help in an initial set of patients, its use could be expanded further, Yaffe says.
“We learned that the clinical trial will be funded by BARDA [the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority], and that Francis Collins, the NIH director, was briefed on the approach yesterday afternoon,” he says. “Genentech, the manufacturer of tPA, has already donated the drug for the initial trial, and indicated that they will rapidly expand access if the initial patient response is encouraging.”
Based on the latest data from their colleagues in Colorado, these groups plan to deliver the drug both intravenously and/or instill it directly into the airways. The intravenous route is currently used for stroke and heart attack patients. Their idea is to give one dose rapidly, over a two-hour period, followed by an equivalent dose given more slowly over 22 hours. Applied BioMath, a company spun out by former MIT researchers, is now working on computational models that may help to refine the dosing schedule.
“If it were to work, and we don’t yet know if it will, it has a lot of potential for rapid expansion,” Yaffe says. “The public health benefits are obvious. We might get people off ventilators quicker, and we could potentially prevent people from needing to go on a ventilator.”
The hospitals planning to test this approach are Beth Israel Deaconess, the University of Colorado Anschultz Medical Campus, and Denver Health. The research that led to this proposal was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense Peer Reviewed Medical Research Program.
An unusual synergy between cancer researchers, clinical centers, and industry leads to promising clinical trials for a new combination therapy for prostate cancer.
Bendta Schroeder | Koch Institute
March 21, 2020
As Jesse Patterson, an MIT research scientist, and Frank Lovell, a finance industry retiree with a penchant for travel, chatted in the Koch Institute auditorium after a public lecture, they realized the anomaly of the experience: Cancer patients rarely get to meet researchers working on their treatments, and cancer researchers rarely get to put a name and a face to the people they aim to help through their work.
Lovell was participating in a clinical trial for a prostate cancer therapy that combines the widely-used targeted therapy abiraterone with the Plk1 inhibitor onvansertib. Patterson, working in the laboratory of Professor Michael Yaffe, the David H. Koch Professor of Science and director of the MIT Center for Precision Cancer Medicine, played a significant role in identifying the new drug combination and its powerful potential.
While their encounter was indeed fortunate, it was not random. They never would have met if not for the human synergy showcased at that evening’s SOLUTIONS with/in/sight event, the result of collaborative relationships built between research labs, clinical centers, and industry. Patterson and Yaffe were on hand to tell the story of the science behind their new drug combination, and were joined by some of the partners who helped translate their results into a clinical trial: David Einstein, clinical oncologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Mark Erlander, chief scientific officer of Trovagene Oncology, the biotech company that developed onvansertib.
Network synergy
The need for new prostate cancer therapies is acute. Prostate cancer is the leading diagnosis among men for non-skin cancer and the second-leading cancer killer among men in the United States. Abiraterone works by shutting off androgen synthesis and interfering with the androgen receptor pathway, which plays a crucial role in prostate cancer cells’ ability to survive and divide. However, cancer cells eventually evolve resistance to abiraterone. New, more powerful drug combinations are needed to circumvent or delay the development of resistance.
Patterson and his colleagues in the Yaffe lab hypothesized that by targeting both the androgen receptor and other pathways critical to cancer cell proliferation, they could produce a synergistic effect — that is, a combination effect that is much greater than the sum of each drug’s effect by itself. Plk1, a pathway critical to each stage of cell division, was of longstanding interest to the Yaffe group, and was among those Patterson strategically selected for investigation as a potential partner target for androgen receptor. In screens of prostate cancer cell lines and in xenograft tumors, the researchers found that abiraterone and Plk1 inhibitors both interfere with cell division when delivered singly, but that together, those effects are amplified and far more often lethal to cancer cells.
An unexpected phone call from Mark Erlander at Trovagene, a San Diego-based clinical-stage biotech company, was instrumental in translating the Yaffe Lab’s research results into clinical trials.
Erlander had learned that MIT held a patent for the combination of Plk1 inhibitors and anti-androgens for any cancer — the result of Yaffe Lab studies. Although he did not know Yaffe personally and lived a continent away, Erlander picked up the phone and invited Yaffe for coffee. “This was worth flying across the country,” Erlander said.
Still in scrubs, Yaffe, who is an attending surgeon at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in addition to his academic roles, chatted with Erlander during his shift break at the hospital. The new collaboration was on its way.
Speaking Frankly
While Erlander had the Plk1 inhibitor and the Yaffe Lab had the science behind it, they were still missing an important component of any clinical trial: patients. Yaffe enlisted doctors David Einstein and Steven Balk, both at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Dana Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, with whom he had worked on related research supported by the Bridge Project, to bring clinical translation expertise and patient access.
By the time clinical trials began in 2019, Frank Lovell was ready for a new treatment. When his prostate cancer was first diagnosed about a decade ago, he was treated with surgery and radiation. When the cancer came back five years later, he received a hormonal treatment that stopped working within three years. He started to see Einstein, an oncologist who specialized in novel therapies, and tried yet another treatment, this one losing effectiveness after a year. Then he joined Einstein’s trial.
For Lovell, the new combination of drugs was “effective in a wonderful way.” Many of the patients in the trial — 72 percent of those who completed phase 2 — showed declining or stabilized levels of prostate-specific androgen (PSA), indicating a positive response to the treatment. Lovell’s PSA levels stabilized, too, and he reports that he experienced very few side effects.
But most importantly, noted Lovell, “I say thank you to Dr. Einstein, Dr. Patterson, and Dr. Yaffe. They brought me hope and time.”
The gratitude is mutual.
“I especially want to thank Frank and all the patients like him who have volunteered to be on these clinical trials,” says Yaffe. “Without patients like Frank, we would never know how to better treat these types of cancers.”
Lovell is no longer in the trial for now, but enjoying making his rounds from Cape Cod in the summer; to Paris and Cannes, France, and then Hawaii in the autumn; and to Naples, Florida, in the winter, on top of visiting with family and a wide circle of friends. “Illness has not stopped me from living a normal life,” Lovell said. “You wouldn’t think I was sick.”
Meanwhile, Yaffe, Patterson, and their research collaborators are still at work. They are optimizing drug delivery regimens to maximize the time on treatment and minimize toxicity, as well as finding biomarkers that help identify which patients will best respond to the combination. They are also looking to understand the mechanism behind the synergy better, which in turn may help them find more effective partners for onvansertib, and to identify other cancer types, such as ovarian cancer, for which the combination may be effective.
March 17, 2020
In honor of Women’s History Month, meet two of the first female students to earn biology degrees at MIT.
Saima Sidik
March 19, 2020
In MIT’s 1887 annual report, former Institute President Francis A. Walker included a section titled, “Women as students in the Institute.” He predicted: “The number of young women attending the Institute of Technology is never likely to be large, considering the nature of the professions to which our courses lead, and the severity of our requirements for admission and for graduation.” More than 100 years later, it’s clear Walker was sorely mistaken; today, women comprise around 40% of the student body and 58% of the students in the Department of Biology. But, for decades, only about 5% of MIT’s students were female.
In 1958, decades after Walker’s report, Marilynn Bever was one of 28 women in her first-year class of 652 students. “I was aware that MIT women are often regarded with suspicion, as being somehow ‘different’ from normal coeds,” Bever later wrote. She was so fascinated by this attitude that she wrote a thesis for her bachelor’s degree in anthropology in which she catalogued early female MIT students and documented their experiences. Bever reported that Caroline Augusta Woodman was the first woman to obtain a Course 7 bachelor’s degree in 1889, and that Helen Louise Breed became the first woman to earn a PhD from MIT’s Department of Biology in 1937. In honor of Women’s History Month, meet these two women who helped set MIT on a path toward gender equality.
Caroline Augusta Woodman
Woodman (pictured above, second from the left) was born in 1844 in Minot, Maine near a textile manufacturing center. After graduating from high school in nearby Portland, Maine in 1866, Woodman taught at Portland’s Center Grammar School for Girls. By 1874, she’d moved from the coast of Maine to the banks of the Hudson River and earned a bachelor’s degree from Vassar College, which had recently opened as an all-women’s institution.
According to the Vassar Registrar’s Office, early Vassar students took a prescribed set of courses rather than declaring a major, so Woodman studied art, science, languages, and religion, among other topics. Her transcript indicates that she supplemented these classes with “special courses,” which the 1870-71 course catalogue described as “intended only for ladies of maturity,” as the college’s faculty felt that students should complete the usual curriculum before venturing on to these more complex topics. Vassar’s faculty must have seen Woodman as an accomplished scholar, as she was allowed to take extra classes in German, chemistry, math, astronomy, and geography.
The foreign language skills that Woodman learned in these special courses must have served her well after completing her degree, as she traveled around Europe before moving to the Finger Lakes in upstate New York, where she taught at a high school for girls for about twelve years. But in 1889 she found herself back in college and earning a second bachelor’s degree, this time at MIT.
Just as Woodman joined Vassar during its incipient years, she came to MIT when the Institute consisted of only a handful of buildings near Copley Square in Boston’s Back Bay. Graduate degrees had only been established a few years earlier, and the first dormitory wouldn’t be built for another decade. Today’s MIT undergraduates can choose interdisciplinary programs in Chemistry and Biology (Course 5-7) or Computer Science and Molecular Biology (Course 6-7). But in Woodman’s time, even the name “Biology” was new to the department, which had been previously called “Natural History” and re-named to encompass modern aspects of the expanding discipline such as techniques for preserving food safely.
An MIT Biology lab photographed the year Woodman earned her degree. Credit: Photogravure Views of the Mass. Institute of Technology, Boston, 1889, by Henry Lewis Johnson
Course 7 was a small program when Woodman arrived. MIT’s yearbook, MIT Technique, shows that there were only about 10 biology undergraduate students. Although few women attended the Institute as a whole, MIT Biology had a strong female presence by comparison; there were at least five women in the program. However, many of these women were classified as “special” students — a category intended for students taking select classes rather than pursuing full degrees — and few of them were able to complete the classes necessary to earn a bachelor’s degree.
Woodman did earn her second bachelor’s degree, later becoming a physiology instructor in the Zoology Department at Wellesley College, where the student newspaper described her as “a teacher of experience.” A picture from the Wellesley Archives (above) depicts her overseeing a group of young women as they examine a model human body, concoct mixtures of chemicals, and take notes on their experiments.
In 1895, Woodman moved back to her home state and accepted a position as a librarian at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. Five years later, a student publication reported that she had added substantially to the library’s collections, instituted the Dewey decimal system, and was constructing a card catalogue.
By the time Woodman died in 1912, she had experienced much more of the world than most people from the rural mill town where she was born. From studying at Vassar during the school’s first decade, to traveling through Europe and paving the way for women in MIT Biology, she strayed far from home, then returned to tell the tale.
Helen Louise Breed
A picture of Helen Louise Breed when she earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1931. Credit: Wellesley College Archives, Library & Technology Services.
It would be 30 more years before Helen Louise Breed joined MIT in the fall of 1933 and became the first woman to earn a PhD from MIT Biology. The Great Depression was in full swing; although enrollment, staff, and funding had decreased, life went on relatively normally for those lucky enough to remain at the Institute. On September 25, 1933, the student newspaper The Tech reported that the first-year class had successfully captured the sophomore class president and dunked him in Lake Massapoag during their orientation. Several alumni were also returning to the Institute to offer career advice to current students, and the Architecture Department had added a course in city planning to its curriculum. “People didn’t talk much about the Depression,” said one MIT alumna whom Bever interviewed. “We were all busy studying.”
Breed had a strong interest in medicine before attending MIT. Her PhD thesis contains a short biography in which she wrote that after completing a bachelor’s of arts at Wellesley college, she took premedical courses at Harvard and at Radcliffe. But research caught her attention, and she ended up devoting the next few decades to studying the microbes that cause disease rather than treating patients in the clinic.
Breed’s interests were well in line with MIT’s research priorities, as Course 7 had a strong focus on microbiology, infectious disease, and food safety when she attended. In fact, MIT Biology was called Biology and Public Health in Breed’s time, having been re-named from simply Biology in 1911. Many graduate students took classes in bacteriology, planktonology, and fermentation, whereas today’s students might be more likely to study nucleic acid structure or the mutations that lead to cancer. The department’s student population had increased dramatically since Woodman’s time, and there were around 90 biology students when Breed attended, a quarter of which were in graduate programs. Female students were relatively rare, and Breed was one of around 10 female biology students.
Breed performed her PhD research in Murray Horwood’s lab in the Biology Department, where she assessed how efficiently bacteria use various organic molecules to generate the cellular energy that they use to live and reproduce.
Breed’s automatic pipette. Credit: “The Comparative Availability of Monohydric Alcohols As Sole Sources of Carbon for Certain Bacteria,” 1937, by Helen Louise Breed, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Distinctive Collections, Cambridge Massachusetts.
Today, these types of experiments might be performed by high school students, but the techniques Breed employed were novel at the time. To quantify bacterial growth, she needed a device that could measure the amount of light absorbed by a liquid culture of bacteria. Such instruments are common in today’s labs, but Breed’s was custom-built by Marshall Jennison, a professor in the Department of Biology.
Breed used her own engineering skills to advance her studies as well. The long hours of pipetting required to grow many species of bacteria in many kinds of media motivated her to construct an automatic pipette (left) using a series of tubes and flasks. While today’s graduate students often use a much smaller version of this device, called a repeater pipette, Breed’s creation warranted an appendix in her thesis.
Job prospects were limited for all MIT graduates during the Depression, but Breed found work in her field after graduating. In 1940, census records showed that in addition to having married and changed her last name to Arnold, she was working as a bacteriologist. Similarly, her death certificate from 1999 shows that Breed had a career in scientific research at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital.
For her thesis, Bever also interviewed several women who were Breed’s contemporaries at MIT during the 1930s. Attitudes towards the few women who studied at the Institute varied, and one student recalled a faculty member telling her, “We tolerate females around here, but we don’t encourage them.” In contrast, another student suspected the dean of the Architecture Department may have paid for her scholarship out of his own pocket because he was so determined to keep her at MIT.
Despite the hardships, Bever and her interviewees said they obtained a thorough education at MIT, and it’s likely that Breed and Woodman left the Institute with the same impression. “I had some marvelous teachers,” one woman said. “We were pushed, we were pushed, we were pushed.”
Top image: “Physiology Class: Woodman oversees a group of Wellesley’s physiology students as they perform lab experiments.” Credit: Wellesley College Archives, Library & Technology Services.
Special thanks to the MIT Libraries and Institute Archives, the Registrar’s Office at Vassar College, and Deb Smith.
