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On her first day of work, the young bioengineering major climbed down the basement steps of a cancer laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., and caught sight of someone summarily beheading a mouse.
The student, Elizabeth Vargis, felt faint. She grasped for a chair. A child of Indian immigrants whose dipping grades had just cost her a scholarship, she reckoned her difficulty staying upright spelled the end of her research career, too.
Her new boss, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, took a different view. A slight woman of 5 feet with a siren of a laugh, Dr. Gopalan Harris listened a few days later as her student reproached herself for being an inadequate scientist, and then cut in with a question: “Did you eat that day?”
The younger biologist had not.
“You have to eat!”
The reply was not exactly warm — more “are you stupid?” than “I’m so sorry you fainted,” Ms. Vargis said. Nor was it as ready-made for a meme as Dr. Gopalan Harris’s aphorisms, like the one about the coconut tree, that caught the imagination of voters online during her daughter Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.
But in the professor’s admonition, Ms. Vargis heard an echo of her own Indian aunties, and an affirmation that she belonged in a scientific world where neither she nor her professor had ever felt entirely at home.
“She wanted me to be in that room,” said Ms. Vargis, who earned her doctorate and now runs a lab at Utah State University, a career that she credits in part to Dr. Gopalan Harris. “She wanted to give everybody a chance, an equal chance.”
Dr. Gopalan Harris died of cancer in 2009, around six years after that encounter. This fall, she has become perhaps the most recognizable character in her daughter’s campaign biography. In speeches, Ms. Harris has often leaned on the memory of the person she calls her greatest influence: the “brown woman with an accent” who left India at 19 and spurned convention to marry a Jamaican man and settle in the United States.
But the vice president’s telling of the story has tended to elide her mother’s more defiant attitudes toward racism and misogyny in her chosen country, according to interviews with more than 20 people Dr. Gopalan Harris worked with, mentored or befriended. That part of her character was evident not only in the fights she joined for Black rights and ending the Vietnam War, but also in the breast cancer laboratory she led, a small corner of a scientific establishment that was white, male and, in her eyes, often inhospitable to people like her.
The vice president has woven her mother’s past into an only-in-America success story. But Dr. Gopalan Harris in fact told colleagues that she had needed to leave the United States for Canada to make a career in science. After a job she had been promised at the University of California, Berkeley, went to a white man, she told friends, she came to feel that American schools were not yet ready to hire a brown woman who dressed for interviews in a sari.
In an era when most scientists spoke in whispers about discrimination, Dr. Gopalan Harris readily complained to her bosses about the mistreatment of nonwhite workers, her supervisor at a Berkeley-area lab in the early 2000s said. And with female colleagues, she plotted ways to protect their positions from stingy administrators while they took maternity leave.
Dr. Gopalan Harris even playfully jabbed at Western culture in scientific talks, showing ancient European statues of women with misplaced breasts next to Indian ones that were anatomically correct.
“My ancestors were way ahead of you,” Dr. Robert Cardiff, a pathologist at the University of California, Davis, remembered her joking.
In her daughter’s telling, Dr. Gopalan Harris had rebelled against Indian social conventions in marrying for love and settling abroad. But Dr. Gopalan Harris’s rebellion was as much against American norms, among them the expectation that she quiet her laugh, swallow her opinions and keep her students at arm’s length.
“Some investigators consider their graduate students indentured servants,” Dr. Cardiff said. “But to Shyamala, they were part of the family.”
Upper-Caste Egalitarian
Shyamala Gopalan’s rebellion started early.
At her high school in India, in the mid-1950s, girls sat on one side of the classroom and boys on the other. Crossing the line was not exactly forbidden, but it could be treacherous: Best to approach the opposite sex in groups of three or four.
“That protected you from rumors starting about you romancing someone,” said R. Rajaraman, a classmate.
Ms. Gopalan took no such precautions. The oldest daughter of a diplomat from a privileged Tamil Brahmin family, she spoke to boys without shame. “If she wanted something, she would ask,” Mr. Rajaraman said. “It was very rare.”
By the time Ms. Gopalan decided to leave India, she no longer risked asking: At 19, she told her father that she had been accepted to Berkeley’s graduate program in nutritional science. It was an escape from the education she had found at Lady Irwin College in New Delhi, founded by British colonial rulers to educate Indian women. There, she had resigned herself to a degree in home science, a discipline that covered cooking, child care and nutrition.
A $1,600 scholarship in hand, she traveled to Berkeley in 1958, still needing nine units of undergraduate coursework to catch up, according to records from her immigration file.
Ms. Gopalan was on her own. Her family had no contacts in Berkeley. The United States had not yet ended a discriminatory quota system that was restricting the number of immigrants from outside Western Europe.
“She was lonely, and she said it was hard,” said Judith Turgeon, a longtime friend and collaborator. “But she pushed on.”
In a crucible of radical politics at Berkeley, Ms. Gopalan found close friends, many of them Black. They often hung out at The Terrace, a cafe that became a seedbed of ideas about Black organizing on campus.
She joined a Black intellectual study group, one whose members would eventually help found the Black Panther Party. Always studious, she sometimes had a science book open on her lap during lulls in debates, as members explored parallels between anticolonial movements and the fight against American racism. Despite her upper-caste origins, she was at ease wherever the group gathered, even in Black areas of west Oakland that classmates said tended to rattle other outsiders.
That collision of sensibilities — her privilege and her egalitarianism — sometimes left friends puzzling over Ms. Gopalan. She marched for equality. She also had her own jeweler.
But friends said her upbringing had endowed her with an assuredness that helped her hop between worlds. In India, she once told a colleague, she was a goddess; at ceremonies, villagers would put her family on elephants.
“There were two people in Shyamala,” Dr. Turgeon said. “She was all about democracy, disparity and equality and all that. But she also grew up in that caste system.”
‘I’m Going Into Labor’
Ms. Gopalan had been expected to return to India for an arranged marriage. But in the fall of 1962, she met Donald Harris, a Jamaican seeking a doctorate in economics who had also fallen in with the Black study group at Berkeley. They married the following year.
He was climbing the academic hierarchy; she was moving sideways. But Shyamala Gopalan Harris clung to her research, earning her doctorate and working in a physiology lab that was studying how the body processed cholesterol. She was at the lab in 1964 when, pregnant with Kamala, she began having contractions. Before departing, she paused to leave a note on her supervisor’s desk.
“I’m going into labor,” it said, Dr. Gopalan Harris later told Yu-Chien Chou, a postdoctoral researcher. At the hospital, she begged in vain to be allowed to return to her experiments while she waited to deliver.
With their toddler, Kamala, in tow, Dr. Gopalan Harris followed her husband first to Illinois and then Wisconsin, where he had won a tenure-track position and she a lower-level research job. But they were young, the vice president wrote in her 2019 memoir. The romance was Dr. Gopalan Harris’s first. The pair, having “become like oil and water,” her daughter wrote, soon separated.
For Dr. Gopalan Harris, ending a marriage that she had defied her parents to undertake in the first place was grueling. “I doubt they ever said to her, ‘I told you so,’ but I think those words echoed in her mind regardless,” her daughter wrote.
The split embittered Dr. Gopalan Harris. For years, she barely spoke to her ex-husband. According to divorce records, she sought legal assurances that he would return 20 phonograph records he had kept after the split.
Now a single mother with a second young daughter, working in a profession dominated by men, Dr. Gopalan Harris became ever more attuned to what she would describe to friends as blatant sexism.
Years later, when she came down with an autoimmune disease, she personified her illness. Consciously or not, she gave it a gender.
“She called it ‘him,’” Dr. Turgeon said. “She talked about it as, ‘He’s getting me, and I’m not going to let him do it.’”
Raising Black Girls
After her marital split, Dr. Gopalan Harris returned in 1969 to the Bay Area. She chose to settle with her girls not in one of the region’s pockets of Asian immigrants, but rather in the Black neighborhood of West Berkeley. The area had become a haven for Black families a generation removed from the segregated South who, for reasons of financial hardship or anti-Black housing practices, could not live elsewhere.
An assistant research biochemist at Berkeley, Dr. Gopalan Harris could only afford to rent the top floor of a duplex. Financial stresses piled up: Short on money for the impound fee after her car had been towed, she tearfully pleaded with a judge for forbearance, she later recounted to Dr. Chou, her postdoctoral researcher.
“No matter how wealthy your family, you come to the United States, you start the same as anyone,” Dr. Chou said.
Once again, Black friends from Berkeley came to her aid. One introduced her to an aunt, Regina Shelton, a Black woman from Louisiana who ran a day care center two doors down from Dr. Gopalan Harris.
While their mother worked, Kamala and her little sister, Maya, stayed with Mrs. Shelton. When experiments ran late, they spent the night. On Sunday mornings, Mrs. Shelton took the girls to the 23rd Avenue Church of God, a Black Baptist church.
This, Dr. Gopalan Harris told a reporter in 2007, was why she had moved her girls to West Berkeley. “It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference if your color comes from India or African Americans, because this country is racist based on color,” she said. The best training for how to “maneuver” in such a country, she reasoned, was raising the girls among Black neighbors.
Dr. Gopalan Harris had tended to her daughters’ Indian identity: She took them to India and invited her parents for visits in West Berkeley, said Carole Porter, a childhood friend of the vice president’s. But Dr. Gopalan Harris wanted to root her daughters in their Black identity, too — and prepare them for attacks on their race that she could see coming.
“She knew that’s what America would see us as,” said Ms. Porter, who, like the vice president, is biracial. “You can’t be anything other than what you are, and what we are is Black women.”
A Lab of Her Own
Dr. Gopalan Harris was intent, too, on showing her girls why she was so often away from home. So she took them to the lab and put them to work labeling test tubes. Those visits, she hoped, might help her daughters imagine lives for themselves that centered as much on the work they did as the homes they made.
“She didn’t tell her daughters, ‘Oh, I wish I could be here for you,’” Dr. Turgeon said. “She explained to them how important it was, what she was doing, and how someday they would have something in their lives that was really important.”
However itinerant her career, Dr. Gopalan Harris was advancing, inch by inch, toward her goal of deciphering what made breast cancer so deadly. She was preoccupied by estrogen and progesterone, hormones made by the ovaries that seemed to drive the disease.
She and collaborators had identified receptors that bound to estrogen, triggering changes to the reproductive system. Later, she helped untangle how those receptors functioned.
“That was groundbreaking work,” said Milan Bagchi, an endocrinologist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
But her papers failed to win her the more secure academic positions she craved. At Berkeley in the early 1970s, she was still often running experiments for her bosses, said Mina Bissell, a noted breast cancer biologist who later became a mentor and close friend.
No rejection stung as hard as when her supervisor at Berkeley reneged on a promise to give her a faculty position, Dr. Gopalan Harris told colleagues. Instead, the university hired a white man from Britain. She later told Dr. Bissell and others interviewed by The New York Times that she had gone so far as to prepare legal action against the university in response. (A request by The Times at the county courthouse for any such lawsuits turned up none.)
Angered, she left Berkeley for a hospital affiliated with McGill University in Montreal, where she was given her own lab space. She wanted to use what she was learning about hormone receptors to build a picture of what went awry when breast cells turned cancerous.
Surrounded by mostly male-run labs, Dr. Gopalan Harris rejected the stilted jacket-and-tie ethic of the era. Instead, she dressed in saris or jeans, said Dr. Michael Pollak, a collaborator at McGill, and chose to forgo being called “professor.”
It was not simply a matter of style; she seemed to think that formalities stood in the way of making gains for women’s health, putting up barriers between experimentalists and doctors or professors and students. She would crash through them.
“Her lab was much more egalitarian, like the big professor would talk to the youngest students,” Dr. Pollak said. “For her, this was no academic, ivory tower exercise.”
Lab ‘Kids’
Eager for ever more autonomy and a return to the Bay Area, Dr. Gopalan Harris leaned on one of the few nonwhite women with power in her field: Dr. Bissell, the breast cancer researcher, who had immigrated from Iran and was overseeing a division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Seeking overlooked female scientists, Dr. Bissell hired Dr. Gopalan Harris, who was turning her focus to lesser-studied progesterone receptors.
Dr. Gopalan Harris was a demanding and, at times, abrasive boss, foreshadowing reports about her older daughter’s management difficulties. She yelled at postdoctoral researchers. Undergraduates blanched when they heard her upbraiding colleagues or slamming things out of frustration.
In an industry that often valued the number of papers someone published over their reliability, Dr. Gopalan Harris worked slowly and obsessively to make her studies more solid. The delays exasperated colleagues.
But she could not help herself, students said; she loved the science. Dr. Chou was long gone from her mentor’s lab when Dr. Gopalan Harris, who was ill, called one day about a study. “I’m going into surgery tomorrow,” she told her old student, “and just in case I don’t wake up, would you mind to finish the paper and publish it?”
Her toughness came with an equal dose of affection. She referred to the students as her “kids.” Struggling to juggle motherhood and a paper deadline, Dr. Chou once took her young son to her professor’s apartment, where Dr. Chou wrote her manuscript while the professor played with the boy.
And when a young researcher from India arrived at her lab in 2001, Dr. Gopalan Harris found him an apartment, drove him to the grocery store and invited him to her granddaughter’s dance recitals.
“I was new to this country,” the researcher, Asaithamby Aroumougame, now an oncology researcher at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, said. “She took care of me like her own son.”
Female mice, the lab’s key experimental subjects, received respectful treatment, too. Dr. Gopalan Harris referred to them as “the ladies.” In her mouse colony, the traditional gender hierarchy was reversed: Male mice were used mainly for breeding. Students sometimes used the extra males to practice surgeries that they would eventually need to perform on their female counterparts for experiments.
Over time, Dr. Gopalan Harris struggled to secure funding, jeopardizing her research. But she badgered her bosses anyway, protesting about issues like people using offensive language toward nonwhite scientists.
In her tendency to needle those in power, some saw a difference between the professor and her older daughter, who was by then moving to take the reins of the institutions where she worked, starting with the district attorney’s office in San Francisco.
“She was not at all shy about calling out things she thought needed to be corrected,” said Joe Gray, who fielded Dr. Gopalan Harris’s complaints as an administrator at Lawrence Berkeley. “She was probably more attuned to inequities in the workplace than was common in those days.”
Gradually, Dr. Gopalan Harris herself grew sicker, first with an autoimmune disease and later colon cancer. Past the point when pain from a pinched nerve should have kept her from walking, colleagues said, she came to work, even formally retiring so as to free up salary money to spend on research needs instead.
“Let us hope that you and I have a less tumultuous New Year,” she wrote in an email to Dr. Turgeon in January 2004. “I am too old and wise to talk about happiness!!”
Her death, at age 70, left her older daughter bereft. Even two years afterward, when Dr. Bissell’s daughter happened to meet Ms. Harris backstage at a public event, Ms. Harris teared up at the mention of her mother before gathering herself and delivering a speech.
“It emotionally touched her in a way that was clearly very deep,” Dr. Bissell’s daughter, Yalda Uhls, said.
As Ms. Harris’s political career took off, her mother kept looking after her other “kids” — the lab students languishing in the lower rungs of academia. Shortly before Thanksgiving in 2006, Dr. Vargis wrote her old professor to thank Dr. Gopalan Harris for unexpectedly including her as an author on a newly published paper.
“You have really helped me out!” Dr. Vargis wrote.
Once again, Dr. Gopalan Harris took a different view.
“You deserved an authorship since without your calculations, counting, etc., Fig. 6 would not have materialized,” she replied. “So, how did I help you out?”
The post The Rebellious Scientist Who Made Kamala Harris appeared first on New York Times.
