Nancy Hopkins

A Nobel Prize winner groped this college student during a lab visit. Thirty years later, she exposed the institutional sexism baked into MIT.

In 1973, Nancy Hopkins joined the MIT faculty as a molecular biologist.

She had trained under James Watson.

Helped decode viral gene regulation in phage lambda.

And later discovered how mouse retroviruses cause cancer.

She was a star on paper.

But despite her success, she noticed something off.

Her lab space was smaller than her male colleagues’.

She was excluded from meetings.

Grants went elsewhere.

For years, she pushed through, believing that great science would speak for itself.

But eventually, she started calculating the square footage of her lab compared to others.

The results confirmed her suspicion: this wasn’t about personality.

It was systemic.

In 1994, she co-authored a private letter with 15 other tenured women in MIT’s School of Science, outlining clear evidence of institutional bias.

Hopkins chaired the committee that investigated further.

They documented disparities in pay, space, recognition, and opportunity.

When the findings were published in 1999, MIT made history: it became the first elite university to admit publicly that it had discriminated against its female faculty.

That admission sparked a national wave.

Nine other top-tier universities (including Harvard, Stanford, and Yale) formed a working group to address gender inequity in science.

And Hopkins kept her lab running through it all.

In the 1980s, she had pivoted to zebrafish research, building tools for large-scale insertional mutagenesis.

Her lab identified 25% of the genes essential for a fertilized egg to develop into a swimming larva, discovering genes that cause cancer and kidney disease, in fish and in humans.

She proved time and again that she could reinvent herself scientifically.

But she also proved that change inside institutions takes more than data.

It takes persistence, collaboration, and a willingness to risk your reputation.

In 2005, she walked out of a talk by then-Harvard president Larry Summers, after he suggested women might have less “intrinsic aptitude” for science.

Her public protest fueled national debate and ultimately helped cost him his job.

Years earlier, as a college student, she had been sexually harassed by Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick, who approached her during a lab visit and placed his hands on her breasts as he asked what she was working on.

Like so many women of her generation, she didn’t speak out then.

But she never forgot.

She co-founded the Future Founders Initiative in 2020 with Sangeeta Bhatia and Susan Hockfield, to support women faculty launching biotech companies.

And in 2024, she received the National Academy of Sciences’ Public Welfare Medal, honoring her decades of leadership on gender equity in science.