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The birth of an award
A Nobel laureate pays tribute to the mother he never knew — and the first ever Pearl Meister Greengard Prize is awarded to a highly regarded French embryologist
BY BETSY HANSON
Within hours of learning that he had won the
2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Paul Greengard decided
to dedicate his portion of the cash award to the memory of a
stranger.
The stranger was his mother.
“To this day we have not been able to
rake together too many facts about Pearl Meister Greengard,”
says Ursula von Rydingsvard, Greengard’s wife. “We have
a few descriptions — she was beautiful, she read a lot, she
enjoyed taking baths, she had thick dark hair. She was intelligent
and curious. We know very little else.”
After she died giving birth to Greengard, his
father and stepmother raised him as their own. Greengard
wasn’t told of his biological mother’s existence until
he was 21, and even then, his parents kept him from trying to make
contact with her family. Pearl Meister’s tombstone is
Greengard’s and von Rydingsvard’s only tangible
connection to her.
Greengard had been thinking about an
appropriate way to honor his mother for several years, so the Nobel
windfall simply gave him a fitting moment. Knowing that she lived
at a time when most women had few opportunities for advanced
education or intellectual endeavors, and also that women have
historically faced obstacles to scientific careers, Greengard and
von Rydingsvard decided to use the money to found an annual award
dedicated to raising the visibility of women scientists whose
achievements in biomedical research merit international
recognition. The Pearl Meister Greengard Prize was born.
Greengard actually began the fund for the
award in 1998 when he received a $50,000 prize from the
Metropolitan Life Foundation. He matched it with $50,000 of his own
money, and others contributed to the fund through
Rockefeller’s Development office. Greengard’s share of
the Nobel Prize, however, helped boost the endowment to a level
that would support an annual prize. And his new prominence as a
Nobel laureate helped bring attention to the prize.
Last month the prize was awarded for the first
time, to French embryologist Nicole Le Douarin. Le Douarin, who
pioneered methods for following the fates of individual cells as
they migrate to take their proper places in a developing bird
embryo, is permanent secretary of the French Academy of Sciences
and professor of the Collège de France.
The prize was presented at a ceremony in
Caspary Auditorium by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day
O’Connor, who became the first female member of the U.S.
Supreme Court in 1981. “In my own time, and my own life,
I’ve witnessed a revolution in opportunities for women in
this country,” said O’Connor. “The talents of
women in science are going to be encouraged by this prize.”
Greengard stipulated that each year the Pearl Meister Greengard
Prize will be presented by a woman who has distinguished herself in
law, politics, the arts or the sciences.
“Dr. Le Douarin is a true pioneer in the
field of developmental biology,” said Rockefeller President
Paul Nurse at the October 27 ceremony in Caspary Auditorium.
“Her revolutionary discoveries are helping to solve one of
life’s great mysteries — how a single fertilized egg cell
can give rise to a very complex living organism.”
“Women have made enormous strides in
science, but they are not yet receiving awards and honors at a
level commensurate with their achievements,” says Greengard.
“It is my hope that by focusing attention on the
accomplishments of women scientists, the Pearl Meister Greengard
Prize will increase the likelihood that they will receive further
recognition, including the Nobel Prize.”
A committee chaired by Rockefeller President
Emeritus Torsten Wiesel unanimously chose Le Douarin to receive the
first Pearl Meister Prize. Early in her career Le Douarin
discovered that a peculiarity of the nucleus of quail cells could
become the basis of a marking technique for following the migration
and fate of cells in a developing embryo that contains cells from
both quail and chick. Cells transplanted from a quail embryo into a
chick embryo, and vice versa, could be followed through the
organism’s development.
Among other experiments, Le Douarin
transplanted cells from the neural crest — a ridge-shaped
cluster of embryonic cells — from quail into chick. These
cells migrate throughout the developing bird to give rise to the
peripheral nervous system, the nerve tissue that transmits
sensation and motor information back and forth from the body to the
brain and spinal cord. In addition, Le Douarin showed that
precursor cells within the neural crest were multipotent, and that
the pathway of migration determined the type of cell into which the
precursor cells developed. Le Douarin also made groundbreaking
contributions using this technique to investigate the development
of the blood and immune systems.
Le Douarin, who has also been elected to the
U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society in Britain,
said, “This prize is exceptional because of its human
content.” She is the recipient of many prestigious honors,
including the Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology, the Louis Jeantet
Prize for Medicine, and the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from
Columbia University.
In 1988 she became the third woman admitted to
the Collège de France in its nearly 500-year history. The
French Academy of Sciences today includes only nine women among its
200 members. “Both of these institutions were and still are
imposing temples of pure machismo,” Le Douarin says.
Le Douarin attributes her success to early
encouragement from her mother, a school teacher who instilled in
her a passion for learning and arranged for her to attend the
Sorbonne rather than the university closer to the family’s
home in Brittany. After obtaining an undergraduate degree in
natural sciences in 1954, however, Le Douarin did not continue on
to graduate school. Rather, like many well-educated women of her
generation, she got a job teaching high school, and she and her
husband began raising a family.
After a few years of teaching she realized
that she wanted to continue her education and do research. At age
29, while still teaching, she began working part-time in the
laboratory of renowned embryologist Etienne Wolf. This led to
research for which she was awarded a doctorate. In 1966 she and her
husband, also a scientist, moved to the University
of Nantes where they were both appointed professors. But when they
arrived, the dean refused to follow through with Le Douarin’s
appointment because he disapproved of a married couple as professors.
Wolf — a powerful person in the scientific and academic community
— intervened, and Le Douarin retained her appointment.
“It was done, but it was not without
consequences,” Le Douarin says. She was given a heavy
teaching load, no lab space and no budget for research.
Working at a bench in her husband’s
laboratory, Le Douarin was nevertheless able to pursue research
that was eventually recognized and funded. In 1972 she began to
gain an international reputation when she gave a series of lectures
in Canadian universities. When Wolf retired in 1975 as director of
the CNRS Institute of Embryology, Le Douarin was appointed to
replace him, largely on the recommendation of the influential
American embryologist James Ebert.
Today’s generation faces new challenges,
according to Le Douarin. “I have had the pleasure of
initiating a number of young people into scientific research,” she says.
“Several were women and many are brilliant. They have not been
exposed, at least overtly, to the difficulties encountered by my
generation. But difficulties still exist for them, especially if they
nurture the highly legitimate desire to raise a family. Nevertheless
the number of women in science has increased because they do both, work
and family, since research is a passion which makes its lovers able to
move mountains.”
When Greengard announced that he was putting
his Nobel funds toward a prize for women scientists, he received
many letters of congratulation. “Forty percent of the letters
came from women,” he says, “and every one of them
emphasized their gratitude for the prize — for the public
acknowledgment of the difficulties faced by women in
science.”
“At the time Ursula and I made the
decision to found the prize, I had greatly underestimated the
extent to which women still feel this discrimination. I was aware
intellectually of discrimination, but I wasn’t aware of the
emotional impact the prize would have.”
December 17, 2004
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