Making Sense of My Life in Science: A Memoir

By Evelyn Fox Keller

Evelyn Fox Keller trained as a theoretical physicist at a time when women didn't "do physics." Unable to find a supportive advisor, she moved into the new field of molecular biology just getting off the ground. After receiving her doctorate, she returned to physics but then took another swerve, joining a small interdisciplinary effort to develop mathematical models of biological systems. This work led to her appointment to a special position as Professor of Mathematics and Humanities at Northeastern University.

When second-wave feminism arrived in the 1960s, it changed the lives of everyone in its path. It certainly changed Keller's, leading her beyond the borders of science altogether. Eventually she began to think of herself as a dual citizen of the proverbial two cultures—science and humanities. The trajectory was hardly straightforward, nor was it conducive to building a conventional career, or even getting a job. Now in hindsight, after an illustrious career and having published fourteen books, Keller reflects on her life, influences, successes and struggles along her trailblazing path as a scientist and feminist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781667891408

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MAKING SENSE OF MY LIFE IN SCIENCE:

A MEMOIR

Praise for Evelyn Fox Keller’s

Making Sense of My Life in Science: A Memoir

Evelyn Fox Keller has lived an extraordinarily creative, productive, and influential life. The compelling story she tells here is full of strength and courage, originality and insight, political sensitivity and determination. She shows both what it costs to forge your own path, and also the surprising possibilities of contributing to intellectual and social progress. A truly inspiring memoir.

—Philip Kitcher, John Dewey

Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus,

Columbia University

Evelyn Fox Keller’s memoir is a life of the mind—and what a mind, too. Her quest to find an academic home embraces physics, molecular and mathematical biology, gender studies, the history and philosophy of science, and much hard, clear thinking about essential topics that fit nowhere and everywhere. It is also a memoir about the life of the heart, about courage and candor, love and loneliness, and, above all, the sustaining power of friendship.

—Lorraine Daston, Director emerita,

Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin

Read this book if you want to be in intimate conversation with a brilliant thinker who, in her own words, has a feeling for the argument. As Evelyn Fox Keller makes sense of her life in science; as she challenges some of its assumptions about gender and the workings of power in the construction of knowledge; and as she details and questions her own ambitions and disappointments; you will be moved, inspired, and often awed by her clarity, her courage, and the hopes and commitments that suffuse this feminist life.

—Marianne Hirsch, Professor emerita of Comparative Literature and Gender Studies, Columbia University

A breathtaking journey across a long twentieth century, through the life of a daughter of immigrants who achieved excellence in the academic world. In her authentic voice, Evelyn Fox Keller highlights how her lifelong and uncompromising efforts to make sense of her personal experience—as a woman, a mother, a scientist, in short, as a human being—led her to offer contributions that have earned her fame and respect. A story of struggle, resilience, and solidarity.

—Karine Chemla, CNRS and SPHERE (Science, Philosophie, Histoire), Université Paris Cité

The unputdownable story of Evelyn Fox Keller’s transformations is inspiring to anyone trying to live a creative intellectual life. This memoir glows with insight and clarity won by a lifetime of revolutionary writing on science and gender.

—Uri Alon, Weizmann Institute of Science

title

MAKING SENSE OF MY LIFE IN SCIENCE: A MEMOIR © 2023 Evelyn Fox Keller

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without prior written consent of the copyright owner. The thoughts, reflections, and opinions expressed in this book are those of the author, based upon her personal recollections and research. The author takes full and sole responsibility for all of the contents, including text and images, and regrets any aspect of the content that might be construed as injurious to a party mentioned, implied, or referred to.

All photographs from the author’s collection.

Cover photograph from The Controversial Career of Evelyn Fox Keller, an essay by Beth Horning in Technology Review (January 1993), David Oxton, photographer. Photo courtesy of: Technology Review.

Cover design by Nicole Miller.

Printed and bound in the United States.

ISBN: 978-1-66789-140-8

For my grandchildren Chloe and Cale,

with all my love

CONTENTS

Preface: Who Am I?

PART I: Family Origins

Where Do I Begin?

Early Years

Politics as Another Way Out

PART II: My Accidental Journey Towards Becoming a Scientist

Under the Wings of Great Men

My Brother (and Molecular Biology) to the Rescue

Starting a New Family and a Professional Life

Gradually, Haltingly, Maybe, a Career

Photographs

PART III: Women, Gender, and Science

A Different Kind of Question

Feminism in Academia

Leaving Terra Firma: A Crucial Turning Point

From Women in Science to Gender and Science

Again, a New Start

From A Feeling for the Organism to Reflections on Gender and Science

Language and Science: Crossing Yet Another Line in the Sand

Where Do I Belong?

PART IV: Homecoming and the Underside of Academic Success

The MacArthur Award, MIT, and the Science Wars

The Other Side of the Coin (and the Other Side of the Campus)

Genetics and Me

Summing Up

Afterword: Looking Back

Bibliography

PREFACE: WHO AM I?

To write a memoir is to make a claim on a reader’s attention, but on what grounds do I make such a claim? A tricky question! I’ve lived in interesting times, and my life journey clearly bears the marks of that history—indeed, my life is the product of the many historical winds that crisscrossed, and sometimes propelled me along, my idiosyncratic and erratic path. But the question begs: Why might you, my reader, be interested in me? Who am I?

Well, I am a woman, a daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, the youngest of three siblings, a mother, a friend… I could go on. I could tell you, e.g., that I am also a university professor, even one with a claim to a bit of fame (i.e., you could find me in a Google search), but I still would not quite have answered the question of who I am.

Indeed, what would an answer look like? What, for that matter, is an identity? For sure, identities are never either pure or fixed—they shift, blend, and combine; they multiply in their core. Sometimes the main point of claiming an identity is simply to say what one is not, in order to distinguish oneself from others, to name a place where you, but not others, belong. A place to call home. As a professional academic, I’m not sure I ever knew such a place. Rather, my story is that of a wanderer who has managed a long and successful career without ever quite answering the question of who I am—insisting throughout on multiple identities and rejecting the very idea of a disciplinary home.

My focus in this memoir is neither on who I am nor on who I am not; rather, it is on the opportunities—and costs—of never settling into a clear and recognizable place in the world. A wandering Jewess.

Indeed, as I look back, I can see signs of this inclination toward forging my own path even in my early childhood. I remember, e.g., being introduced to the basic rules of behavior on my first day of kindergarten. Milk and cookies were served mid-morning, and one child at each table was assigned the task of counting the number of children at the table so that the requisite number of cookies could be provided. To avoid confusion, there was a rule: No counting with the counter!, meaning that nobody except the counter was to count aloud. I was mystified by this demand, and so, of course, I counted with the counter. In truth, I simply could not not count. But inevitably, there was a penalty—I was not to be given a cookie. So I did the obvious thing: I ate the counter’s cookie.

I never did understand just what was wrong in what I’d done. Indeed, maybe I should think of this as the story of my life, over and over again ignoring rules that didn’t make sense to me, and then being surprised at being punished.

*   *   *

Later, much later, en route to a career, I trained as a theoretical physicist. This was at a time when women didn’t do physics. But unable to find an advisor to take me on, I moved into the new field of molecular biology—a subject then just getting off the ground. After my doctorate, I returned to physics but then took another sideways lurch, joining a small interdisciplinary effort to develop mathematical models of biological processes. In short, my career was aberrant, unruly from the start. Not only was I a woman embarking on a subject that was manifestly a man’s field, a subject I was repeatedly told women can’t do, but even before getting started, I’d crossed at least two major disciplinary borders. Yet, still, even if it may not have been clear what department I might belong to, I was at least identifiable as a scientist. In other words, I still seemed to be on something like a career track.

Soon the women’s movement, sometimes referred to as second-wave feminism, arrived. This wave, not a gentle change of the tides, was as powerful as a tsunami, though it exerted its force in generative rather than destructive ways, changing the lives of everyone in its path. It certainly changed mine. Part of that change was that I found myself straying beyond the borders of science altogether. Eventually, I began to think of myself as a dual citizen of C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures, maintaining (or at least trying to maintain) membership in both science and the humanities. The trajectory was hardly straightforward, nor was it conducive to building a career, or even, for that matter, to getting a job.

But, truth be told, I never did care very much about building a career, certainly not at the start. I knew, of course, what a job was, but a career? Whatever was that? My parents had been poor, without education, and hemmed in by invisible barriers that neither I nor my siblings knew even existed. We recognized occupations (e.g., those of doctor or lawyer) but not careers, and certainly not ways of earning a living wage simply out of thinking. The idea of making one’s way in the world as a scientist—or, for that matter, as an academic—would have been totally mystifying. It was just not part of our world. Yet, even so, notwithstanding my parents’ almost total lack of schooling and despite their unworldliness, all three of their children became prominent academics playing on a world stage.

My brother, Maurice (Maury), was the first, wittingly or not, blazing a trail for his sisters. He was the proverbial big brother, astonishingly kind and attentive. From boyhood, he was also a wannabe scientist with a passion for homemade explosives. He was eight years older than my sister, Frances (Fran), and eleven and a half years older than me, and he did indeed become a scientist. Ultimately, he trained as a physical chemist, but while finishing his doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago, he met up with Leo Szilard (the Hungarian physicist known, above all, for his role in the building of the atomic bomb). Under Szilard’s influence, Maury became one of the early converts to molecular biology. He went on to become a renowned and widely respected contributor to the development of this new science.

My sister—probably both the best-known and the most influential of the three of us—came next. Frances Fox Piven is a sociologist and political scientist recognized worldwide for both her academic writings and her political activism—perhaps, above all, as a force for integrating political theory with effective social reform in the War on Poverty.

My sister’s life work unquestionably has roots in our upbringing. In school, all three of us found ways of standing out, pathways to success, ways of climbing out of immigrant poverty. Indeed, we were hardly alone. We belonged to a generation of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, thrown upon American shores by pogroms, persecution, and the promise of a better life elsewhere. Many succeeded, finding here safety and even a measure of prosperity; their success can’t help but fill us with awe. But even among this relatively fortunate cohort, the success of all three of the Fox children often takes people aback: How did we do it? How did we get from there to here? How, in just one short generation, did we manage the transition from shtetl life, mired in superstition and poverty, to the elite cosmopolitan world of American academia?

I don’t think I can fully answer that question, but this memoir is, in part, an attempt to do so. It begins with my family’s saga, soon turns into my own story—more specifically, into an account of the intellectual and professional trajectory of how I came to do the work I did. As I look back, this journey appears so bumpy and irregular, it is sometimes difficult even to detect a path, much less a coherent narrative of that path. Indeed, the only account I can envision is more like a sketch made up of anecdotal memories, a quirky reconstruction of the haphazard trajectory that led, somehow, to something one might call a career.

Perhaps this, above all, is where my family’s immigrant heritage matters most. There we were, in an alien world, without any sort of map to guide us. Indeed, without even being able to properly read the few road signs we could find—for that matter, without even knowing where we were aiming to go. For me, as for my siblings, these circumstances meant we had to make it up as we went along, stumbling from one opportunity to another, from one obstacle to another, inventing our lives as we lived them. The absence of guidelines meant we got to—meant we had to—make it up. Whatever claim I can make to originality stems from just that, from knowing so little about the world I had to navigate, from having no map, no guidelines, no parents to look towards for help. Survival meant self-invention. And, of course, I took help from wherever I could find it, perhaps most immediately from my siblings. In short, this is a story of immigrant experience. And it is with the twists and turns of that experience that I begin.

These days, we live in a world in which the traumas of migration dominate our attention. The stories we hear about migration and the vast upheavals of peoples currently taking place around the world are mainly horrendous. By comparison, the immigrant stories I recall from my youth are benign. They make up a familiar genre that tilted towards the upbeat and heartwarming, focusing on successes rather than on traumas of upheaval and struggle. Yet upheaval, struggle, and trauma are at the core of all immigrant experience, even those of my parents’ generation—though, of course, more so for some than for others. My family’s own experience (or so it seems to me) fell towards the bleaker end of that generation’s spectrum.

All of us bore the scars. Yet we survived. No, we did better than survive, we prospered. And it was not just us. As I’ve already said, many families from the Jewish ghettos of Eastern Europe fared well, both socially and economically—often astonishingly well. The question can hardly be avoided: How come? Certainly, other waves of migrants have not fared nearly as well.

One explanation sometimes offered is that a guiding light for upward mobility was provided by a cultural heritage—a Jewish cultural heritage—carrying a deep and abiding respect for education. But I’m not sure how much our own particular successes can be credited to a family faith in education, at least not in education per se. The need to earn a living was of course obvious, and like others, my parents clearly understood the relevance of education to that pursuit. But as to the value of education and an intellectual life as a goal in its own right—an ideal that ultimately drove all three of us—that ideal had to have come from elsewhere. My personal view is that it came, at least a good part, from a few remarkably dedicated and devoted teachers in the New York City school system. The difference they made in our lives was substantial and demands acknowledgement.

For my own particular survival, and my own ultimate success, there are others who also