by Sharon Elder

When Bill Moyers was looking for
someone to discuss science as part of his
“World of Ideas” television series just
over a year ago, it was no surprise that
he called on Maxine Singer. A renowned
molecular biologist and president of the
Carnegie Institution of Washington,
Singer, who earned a PhD from Yale in
1957 and has been a member of the Yale
Corporation since 1975, is among the
nation’s leading authorities on genetics.

One of the first questions Moyers put
to Singer during their interview was why
scientists are so often suspected by the
public at large of being “mad,” if not
downright diabolical. Having suffered
from that scientific stigma on any
number of social occasions when the
mere mention of her profession seemed
to “drive people to the far end of the
room,” Singer could answer from ex-
perience. “I suppose they’ re frightened,”
she said. “They think that I live ina
world apart, without the same kind of
human concerns they have.”

In Singer’s case, nothing could be
further from the truth. Besides heading
the Carnegie Institution, which is one of
the most respected private scientific

Science with
a passion

As the longest-serving female member of the Cor-
poration, biochemist Maxine Singer looks back
on Solid gains for Yale science and Yale women

   

Life in the lab: Times have changed.

research organizations in America, and
pursuing her own research in genetics at
the National Institutes of Health, Singer,
58, is a wife and the mother of four
grown children. She successfully com-
bined career and family long before the
media latched onto the professional
woman’s lament about the burdens of
“having it all.”

But the casual encounters Singer de-
scribed to Moyers continue to bother
her, if only because they highlight how
pervasive scientific illiteracy is, and
how prejudiced some Americans still

are against science. If Singer had her
way, science would be an integral part
of everybody’s education, and people
might begin to see it as she does, as “one
of the grand human activities.” Science,
she insists, “uses the same kind of talent
and creativity as painting pictures and
making sculptures. It’s not very different
except that you do it from a base of tech-
nical knowledge.”

Singer’s conviction about the impor-
tance of scientific literacy has had a
considerable impact at Yale. Appointed
by Kingman Brewster in 1974 to head
the University Council’s Committee on
the Biological Sciences, Singer joined
the Corporation as a successor trustee
the following year. She has since been a
strong advocate of the University’s ef-
forts to strengthen science requirements
for undergraduates, all of whom are now
required to complete two natural science
courses in order to graduate. “In a world
that is largely driven by technological
change, and where social and ethical
decisions hinge on science,” she says,
“it’s extremely important that everybody
learn something about it. Yale is doing
better than most places in this regard.”

Singer has also been a staunch sup-
porter of Yale’s campaign to improve

Yale /February 1990 29
the standing of its science faculty.
Singer’s service on the Corporation coin-
cided with the late President A. Bartlett
Giamatti’s initiative to bring the science
departments to the same high level as
those in the humanities. That effort,
according to Singer, has been continued
with “great verve” by President Schmidt.
Now in her final year as a corporation
member (she is the longest-serving
woman trustee in Yale history), Singer is
pleased with the University’s progress.
“Yale has become great in the sciences,”
she says, and insists that she is not over-
stating the case. “Across the board, from
Science Hill to the Medical School,
Yale’s science efforts are first-rank. I’m
not saying that this is coming; I’m saying
it’s here. It takes images a while to catch
up with reality.”

But as she prepares to leave the Cor-
poration, Singer is not about to declare
the battle won. She remains deeply con-
cerned about the shrinking number of
Yale students who are actually preparing
for careers in science and about the high
percentage of science majors who switch
to other majors before graduation. And
as a scientist who happens to be a
woman, Singer is also concerned about
the slow progress female faculty mem-
bers are making in obtaining tenure at
the University and, in general, the in-
creasingly heavy demands being made
on the community of professional
women Yale’s current female under-
graduates will eventually join.

S inger’s perspective on such issues,
at Yale and elsewhere, is informed
by her own professional and personal
experience. Growing up in the Flatbush
section of Brooklyn, the young Maxine
Frank attended Midwood High School,
where a gifted (female) chemistry
teacher introduced her to the excitement
of science. “She was a marvelous
teacher,” Singer recalls, “and she was
demanding.” As an undergraduate at
Swarthmore, Singer majored in chemis-
try, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and
Sigma Xi, and graduated in 1952 with
high honors.

Married just one week later to Daniel
M. Singer, a Yale law student whom she
had been dating since she was 17 (and
with whom she recently celebrated her
thirty-seventh wedding anniversary),
Singer came to New Haven that fall in
the dual role of bride and graduate stu-
dent in biochemistry. By 1957, she had
completed her doctorate and begun a
thirty-three year association with the

30 Yale /February 1990

National Institutes of Health in
Bethesda, Maryland. By 1980, Singer
had risen to chief of the Laboratory of
Biochemistry of the National Cancer
Institute, one of NIH’s largest
laboratories.

Endowed with abundant energy (until
recently, she rarely slept more than five
hours a night), Singer has managed,
without compromising her career, to
raise four children, all of whom have
taken diverse professional paths.
Stephanie Singer, ’85, majored in math-
ematics and is now a graduate student at
New York University. David Singer,

 

“Yale has become
great in the sci-
ences—across the
board. Its image
hasn’t caught up with
the reality.”

 

°84, went on to Stanford Business
School, where he earned an MBA. Two
of her daughters attended their mother’s
alma mater, Swarthmore College: Ellen
Singer went on to earn a master’s at
Tufts and is now a veterinarian; Amy
Singer holds a doctorate in Near Eastern
history from Princeton and is an assistant
professor at the University of Tel Aviv.
Over the years, their mother’s consid-
erable professional accomplishments
have brought her numerous awards and
honorary degrees, including member-
ship in the National Academy of Sci-
ences and the Pontifical Academy of the
Sciences. In 1988, she received a Distin-
guished Presidential Rank Award, the
nation’s highest civil-service prize. A
member of the governing board of the
Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel
and the Whitehead Institute, she is also
known for her work on behalf of civil
rights, human rights, and scientific
causes. In the 1980s, Singer assisted in
the development of Yale College’s
Judaic Studies program and established
the Henrietta and Hyman Frank Book
Fund at the University Library in honor
of her parents. She also served on the
School of Medicine’s National Volun-
teer Committee during its recent, and

highly successful, capital campaign.

One of the causes about which Singer
has cared the longest is science educa-
tion. Without some drastic improve-
ments in the teaching of science, it has
been predicted by the National Science
Foundation that by the year 2010, the
U.S. will face a shortfall of between
500,000 and 750,000 scientists. Accord-
ing to Singer, increasing numbers of
American students are disqualified from
careers in science by the time they finish
high school, having given up on mathe-
matics long before. A recent article in
Time magazine reported that one of the
earliest decisions school children make,
often by the fourth grade, is that science
is not for them. Singer feels one impor-
tant reason is the teaching. “Children
probably haven’t changed,” she says.
“They’re curious about the world around
them and always have been. But the
teaching of science in elementary and
high schools fails to capture that curios-
ity and sustain it.”

Although it has long been true that
relatively few high school students went
on to careers in science, what was once,
in Singer’s view, a “reasonable pool” of
potential science majors is steadily
evaporating. And of the few who do
become science majors in college, a
significant number switch to other disci-
plines before graduation.

he phenomenon is readily apparent
Ta Yale. Continuing a trend of recent
years, biology is the most popular pro-
spective major listed by this year’s Yale
freshman class, and, according to Dean
of Admissions Worth David, growing
numbers of applicants indicate that they
plan to major in molecular biophysics
and biochemistry, engineering, or
physics. Some soon discover, however,
that getting an “A” in a humanities
course is a safer bet than in a science
course, and if their sights are set on
grades that will get them into graduate
school, the incentive to drop science is
high. Undergraduates also argue that the
science faculty’s top-flight research
skills don’t always guarantee comparable
teaching ability. Singer concedes that
there is room for some improvement on
that score. “I suppose it’s nice to say that
it would be good if excellence in teach-
ing counts more in getting tenure,” she
says, “but in a way, that’s almost un-
realistic because of the whole grants
picture.” As things now stand, profes-
sors are forced to spend a disproportion-
ate amount of their time applying for
As good as Yale's research teams are, holding onto more science majors may call for some revamping of teaching methods.

grants critical to continuing their re-
search. Without a national effort to
change the current two- or three-year
funding cycle to five or more years, she
contends, those requirements make it
unlikely that professors can devote any
additional time to designing and teaching
undergraduate courses.

Even so, Singer would like to see the
University do more to nurture science
majors. “Special programs are needed,”
she says. “People get lost because they
discover that it’s a lot of hard work, and
there are social pressures to do other
kinds of things. At Yale, even the geog-
raphy is a problem, because students
have to do much of their work way up on
Science Hill, which makes it harder to
be part of the community during the
day.”

inger remains heartened by Yale’s
S continuing efforts at encouraging
the study of science. But she is alarmed
by the situation in the nation as a whole.
Turning American students on to sci-
ence, as Singer sees it, is going to require
taking into account a complicated set of
social and economic issues outside the
classroom, including the fact that so
many teenagers work after school. The

United States leads the nations of the
world in the percentage of 16- to 18-
year-olds who both go to school and
work. Singer shares the concerns ex-
pressed last summer in a report by the
Connecticut Academy of Science and
Engineering warning that the state faces
a scarcity of scientists and engineers,
and that the entire U.S. risks turning into
a nation of “hamburger flippers.” The
evidence is close to home. “In most
middle-class suburbs, the staffing of
shopping malls depends on having
young people work,” Singer says. “They
work to buy cars, to buy clothes, and in
the worst case, to buy drugs. They’re in
school until they can leave and go to
work. They don’t see their lives as de-
fined by the fact that they’re getting an
education the way many of us did when
I was a student.”

Singer’s education has led her to a
point where she has had to do considera-
ble juggling of her own just to stay up to
date in her chosen field. The presidency
of the Carnegie Institution is a halftime
position, an arrangement that has al-
lowed her to continue her laboratory
work at NIH (with the title of scientist
emeritus). She confesses that her passion
for research is such that she can begin to

 

feel bored if her administrative duties
keep her away from the lab too long.

Her current work concentrates on
what she describes as “some odd and
poorly understood aspects of the way
human genetic information is organized”
within DNA. A significant proportion of
DNA—perhaps as much as 80 percent—
is not made up of genes. Within that still
mysterious segment (sometimes referred
to as “nonsense” or “junk”” DNA) are
many repeated sequences. One such
sequence appears almost a million times
and constitutes about five percent of the
total.

The sequence Singer is concentrat-
ing on, known as Line-1, exists in all
mammals, suggesting that it has an as
yet undiscovered function. (Otherwise,
Singer notes, evolution would have
eliminated it long ago.) Although no-
body knows yet what purpose such se-
quences serve, Singer and her colleagues
have discovered that Line-] is a “mova-
ble element,” a piece of DNA that can
shift from one place to another and create
illness. For example, hemophilia can be
caused by the migration of such a se-
quence into a gene required for blood
clotting. The next step for Singer and
her team is to figure out the chemistry of

Yale /February 1990 31
just how such elements move and how
they can be controlled.

In addition to being a respected re-
searcher, Singer has continued to play a
leadership role in the international scien-
tific community. In the mid-1970s, what
the public now refers to as “genetic en-
gineering” was just getting started. In
1975, Singer was among a group of
concerned scientists who organized the
Asilomar Conference, a gathering spon-
sored by the National Academy of Sci-
ences of the United States to develop
safety guidelines for what was perceived
at the time to be a highly risky enterprise.
“People were concerned that by intro-
ducing unknown genes into bacteria,
you might so alter the properties of the
bacteria that they would become hazard-
ous,” says Singer. Almost fifteen years
later, she is able to report that “most of
the speculation about the risks, even in
the scientific community, have turned
out to be essentially wrong.” The
groundwork laid at Asilomar became
the basis for what Singer describes asa
“very extensive and public process” of
overseeing genetic experimentation.
“Many of the concerns people had were
addressed,” she says. “This situation
has been monitored and regulated from
the start because the scientific commu-
nity raised the issue and started the regu-
lation itself.”

hile struggling with public miscon-
W ceptions about science, Singer has
also had to weather the storms surround-
ing the fact that she is not just a scientist
but a female scientist. In some ways, the
experience was made easier by the fact
that she was somewhat out of step with
her own generation. During the mid-
1950s, while she was working toward
her doctorate, the conventional role for
women was to stay close to home. But
Singer saw no conflict between her de-
sire to go to graduate school and to be a
wife and mother. “I was naive,” she
says, “and extraordinarily lucky.” At
Swarthmore, her closest female friends
had all been science majors. Arriving at
Yale to study in the Department of
Biochemistry (now the Department of
Molecular Biochemistry and Bio-
physics), she found herself working
with Professor Joseph Fruton, whose
wife, Professor Sofia Simmonds, was
also a gifted biochemist. “It didn’t mat-
ter to him that I was a woman,” Singer
says of that early professional relation-
ship. “If things happened that had to do
with discrimination, I was unaware of

32 Yale /February 1990

them. I tend to think they really didn’t
happen, and I suspect that made a very
big difference for the future in my at-
titude about myself.”

Not that she remained a Pollyanna
about the condition of professional
women. Until the late 1960s, women
were rarely asked to serve on profes-
sional committees. Singer vividly re-
members the day when that started to
change. Less than twenty-four hours
after President Lyndon B. Johnson or-
dered that all federal committees should
have female representation, Singer was
asked to serve on one at the National
Institutes of Health. “I had never been
asked before,” she recalls. “Nothing had
happened to my status overnight, but all
of a sudden they were calling me. It was
so transparent that I just said to them,
‘No, I won’t do that. If you didn’t want
me yesterday, you’re not getting me
today.” ”

One invitation from a heavily male
preserve Singer did not turn down was
the one to join the Yale Corporation.
Service on it has given her a close look
at how both professional women and
female students are faring at Yale. For
all the progress made in recent years,
Singer remains concerned about Yale’s

 

“Young women know
that they can’t have
career and family
without the right kind
of partner, but they’re
not finding supportive
young men.”

 

relatively slow pace at tenuring more
women faculty members, particularly in
science. At present, fewer than 10 per-
cent of full professors on the Arts and
Science faculty are women. Although
the University recently met the goal it
had set five years ago of doubling the
number of tenured women faculty mem-
bers, Singer hopes that the special efforts
made by the Advisory Committee on
the Education of Women will be con-
tinued.

But for women undergraduates, at
least, Yale strikes Singer as an especially
welcoming place. “Yale is theirs, just as

much as it is for the male students,” she
says. ‘They are energized, original,
enormously talented and enormously
attractive in every way, and their expec-
tations for what they will be able to do
are limitless.”

or all that, Singer sees difficult times
F ahead for these undergraduate
women in future relationships with their
male counterparts. “There is a tremen-
dous disparity between what the young
women see as the world ahead of them
and what the young men see,” she says.
“The expectations of young men are stil]
very similar to those of their fathers. In
looking for spouses, young women rec-
ognize that they can’t have both career
and family without the right kind of
partner, and they aren’t finding suitable
partners because we haven’t raised
young men to appreciate the reality of
what young women want. My husband
was a rare person for his time and men
like him are just as rare now. This is a
serious problem and I think it is a big
challenge for a university community
like Yale.”

As an example, she again cites her
own experience. “I don’t think anybody
knows completely what it takes to raise
great kids,” she says. “Obviously it has
mostly to do with the parents’ attitude
and the importance of family. But the
fact that I went to work didn’t mean that
I thought family wasn’t important.” As
it turned out, some of the same people
who had criticized Singer for “‘sacrific-
ing” her children in favor of her career,
turned out to have very troubled chil-
dren. “I have four great kids,” Singer
says, “so there’s a lesson in that. They’re
constructive, they’re original, they’re
motivated, they’re loving—they’re ev-
erything wonderful and they know the
importance of family. It’s not that I can
pontificate—all I know is that it didn’t
have to do with whether I went to work
or not. I think it’s important for men to
hear that.”

With her own children off on their
own, Singer’s retirement from the Yale
Corporation next summer will mean
more time for the laboratory work she
loves. “I don’t think there’s anything
more interesting,” she says. “Wondering
about things you don’t understand, and
then searching for the explanations is
exhilarating. The natural world is an
extraordinarily beautiful place—nothing
equals it in complexity and elegance.
Man-made things simply can’t come
close.” C1