This story is continued from http://www.princetoninfo.com/80121C01.html
As the head of the Advanced Networks and Computing Group for the Sarnoff Corporation, Maya Gokhale (GO-klay) confirms the observation that there are fewer women in computer science and engineering. "Many times, at a technical meeting or conference, I'll be the only women in a group of men. When I started out" -- she is now 45 -- "computer science was a relatively new field, and computers were seen as arcane. They were supposedly the domain of `hackers,' engineers who were young, obsessed, and male. In reality, computer science requires a logical mind and clear thinking -- attributes men and women share."
Gokhale finds more women at computer science meetings now, and their company is welcome. "It does make you feel a little lonely," she says. "When you're talking about technical subjects, you all have something in common, but when the men start talking sports or cars, that's something I really don't share." But gender differences have made no other impact in Gokhale's career. "In my first job, I did technical field support, and when I had a question at one customer site, I had one man say, `Come sit on my lap, honey, and I'll tell you all about it.' That's the only time that happened. Initially, people tend to underestimate me because I'm a woman and I'm small and I'm not white. But after we work together, it's no longer a problem."
And after a few minutes of conversation with Gokhale, it is obvious she finds Sarnoff an environment in which to thrive. "You can start with an idea and follow it through to a research prototype. Then you can be part of the spin-off company that takes it into the marketplace and get shares when the product starts selling. Sarnoff spans that whole spectrum, both in the topics addressed and the range from research through commercial product."
She compares Sarnoff to Lucent Technologies, "though we are smaller than one of Lucent's divisions. They have a very large product line in addition to basic research, while we spin off companies and let them develop products independently. We want to be able to devote ourselves to the next big idea -- and we find that small companies tend to be more nimble. Start-ups can make their own rules and really move, without all the government accounting procedures a large R & D company must follow."
Founded in 1942 as RCA Laboratories -- and a wholly-owned, for-profit subsidiary of SRI International since 1987 -- the Sarnoff Corporation retains much of the maverick edge of founding father, David Sarnoff, extending to its employees, says Gokhale, "pretty much an open charter. There is no built-in bias, as other companies might have, that `this isn't our product line' or `not what we do, don't work on it!' There are no restrictions at all to new ideas."
Sarnoff now employs 850, with about 100 in the Information Technologies division where Gokhale works. Other divisions include Electronics and Biomedical Systems, Integrated Circuit Technology, Solid State, and Ventures and Licensing. Each division is broken down into laboratories that are then organized into smaller groups. Gokhale works with the Communications and Computing Laboratory, heading up the five-member Advanced Network and Computing Group.
Sarnoff is a heady mix of research daring and commercial success, with a corporate culture, says Gokhale, that typifies "thinking outside the box." Within just a few years, the company has changed from contracts and consulting to aggressively pursuing licensing and spin-offs. That vision really turned the company around. While there is more biomedical research in Princeton than in electronics, I think Sarnoff really amplifies what's going on." Driving much of the company's innovation is the cross fertilization among diverse groups. "We have brainstorming sessions, pizza dinners in the evenings where we put together joint proposals. It's very fertile ground for the exchange of ideas."
Gokhale oversees many different projects. "In the computing area, we now have a new field called adaptive computing, a revolutionary way to accelerate computation by using Field Programmable Gate Arrays or FPGAs. I'm working with a semiconductor company to develop a new chip which will contain both a conventional processor and an FPGA. I am now building a compiler that targets this new chip, and the technology will allow you to write a software program that the compiler can transform to a combination of hardware and software. That technology will allow a computer to work much faster."
Gokhale's group has also built the world's largest Pentium cluster, connected to 260 processors with "a couple of levels of very fast Ethernet. We've basically built a supercomputer out of commodity parts, multiprocessing technology that can be used by financial houses, biomedical companies, and the visualization world -- all of which need many cycles and very fast communications." Her group has also developed a virtual network interface that "works as if it's a thousand interfaces. A program can now talk directly to the network interface without the operating system getting in the way. The implication of virtual network architecture is, again, to increase an application's effective speed."
Another possible implication is to increase Sarnoff's revenues, which have been robust for several years. "That," Gokhale says, "is what we were counting on."
Born in Bombay, India, she came to the United States when she was two. Her father taught history at Brunswick College in Maine. "I didn't know any English when I first arrived, and when we returned to India a few years later, I didn't know any Marathi." Her family -- "a very book-oriented family" -- settled here permanently when she was 7, her father establishing an Asian Studies program at Wake Forest College in North Carolina. Her mother's mother had been a gynecologist and her own mother held a Ph.D. in education.
Interested in biology and the natural sciences, Gokhale enjoyed math and logic even more. She majored in mathematics at Wake Forest, where she received a bachelor's in 1972 -- after a single college programming course. "I was so scared of the computer that I had my boyfriend write the programs for me," she now laughs. "I finished college in just three years, so I was tired of school and wanted to find out what the real world was like." With high marks on a logic test administered by Burroughs Corporation (now Unisys) to new applicants and a one-week training course, Gokhale was sent out into the field to install computers. "I started the year knowing nothing, and by year's end, I could reconstruct a corrupted database over the phone. I really learned a lot on that job."
Drawn more to research and development than to technical support, Gokhale moved to eastern Pennsylvania to help Burroughs develop software. "I wanted to tackle more complicated problems and I decided I wasn't sick of school anymore." She earned a master's in 1977 in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania, working for Hewlett-Packard for three years before "I decided I wasn't sick of school again." Her doctorate was also from Penn in computer science for her work on the development of compilers for data-flow machines.
She taught at the University of Delaware for five years, with research funded by the National Science Foundation, before going to work for the Supercomputing Research Center in Maryland. She stayed at SRC six years, and when her boss left SRC for Sarnoff, she was recruited to start a new group within his lab. It was at SRC that Gokhale wrote a program she calls her proudest achievement, an FPGA application used during the Gulf War.
Gokhale is now involved not only in management but in technical development. "I manage five programs, so I'm responsible for all the financials and deliverables. I'm also the major investigator and technical lead for all of the adaptive computing work, and I contribute technically to the other projects as well." She has come, in other words, a very long way from the 20-year old who was intimidated by computers, and now stays on top of a staggering learning curve.
"You have to immerse yourself in it," she says. "You have to stay current in your own subject and at least be familiar with related ones to gauge how what you're doing fits in. Many of the new trends are coming out of Silicon Valley, so you have to stay on the Web as well as pursue traditional ways of keeping up, multiplexing yourself because there is so much going on."
Working at Sarnoff, she says, fosters that flexibility. The company also permits flexible scheduling that has proved invaluable for her family. Her husband, Ron Minnich, also works at Sarnoff as a technology leader in computer engineering, and their two children, a 13-year-old son and a 10-year-old daughter, sometimes get computer-literacy overload. "My husband and I discuss problems that come up on joint projects -- to the point that our daughter at the dinner table says, `Stop that alien talk! I want to talk about something else!'" When her children were young, Gokhale would start work at 5:30 a.m. while her husband got them off to school and daycare. Her typical day now starts at home at 6 a.m., typing while her children have breakfast. After putting in a day at Sarnoff, she is back at home working on a laptop while her children do their homework.
"It is a non-stop and exhausting day, but the reward is that I'm there with my kids." The flexibility that has characterized her career is key to the parenting exchange she shares with her husband. "There's no easy way to deal with it, and it has to be a partnership," she says. "When the mother stays at home, the father often works long hours and the children never see him. With our kids, they know they're going to get one or the other, usually not both. But they've ended up being very close to both parents, and I think that is essential."
by Phyllis M. Maguire
These sidebars by Barbara Figge Fox were published in U.S. 1 Newspaper on January 21, 1998. All rights reserved @HEAD 24 = Ruth Daly: Persistent Astrophysicist
Ruth A. Daly made international news earlier this month for her discoveries about measuring the universe. An assistant professor and theoretical astrophysicist at Princeton University, Daly had postulated a cosmological model representing the expansion history of the universe; her model says the universe will not halt and recollapse on itself. Harvard/Smithsonian and Berkeley researchers, using a different method -- the maximum strength of supernovae -- have just come to the same measurement conclusions (New York Times, January 9).
"We can say, with 95 percent confidence, that the universe is open and will continue to expand forever," says Daly. "We are the only other group with a method -- my method that I published in 1994." "The supernova people are using somebody else's method. Our number has been out for two years. From my point of view they are confirming our number."
Women who want to be scientists need to find good mentors and be careful what advice they take, Daly says. Her own strategy is "to do lots of really interesting and important work and hope that someday it will account for something."
In college she had been shunted to the liberal arts. "I have always been interested in the stars," says Daly. "I was at the top of my class in math and science at Boston College, but when I went to the counseling center at the end of my sophomore year, I was advised to switch to the humanities. My advisor said I should really be in special education."
This was 1977 and the feminist movement was in full swing, so Daly can't imagine why that advice was given -- and doesn't say why she took it. But by the time she discovered the suggested major "wasn't a good use of my talents" she was too far off track to go back to science, and only later did she go back to get her advanced degrees in physics and astronomy.
Daly grew up in a family of nine in West Springfield, Massachusetts, where her father was a psychiatrist and her mother, a former Rockette, was nationally active in such arts groups as the Sweet Adelines. She left high school a year early and graduated from Boston College, Class of 1979, as an English and psychology major.
The psychology training wasn't, after all, a total loss: "There is an interpersonal element to science," says Daly. "Many scientists are completely blind to understanding motivations and prejudices. Having read a lot of psychology helps me to understand the politics and interactions, what is motivating people, and why they have the perspective they have."
After working in Scotland, she returned to Boston University for master's and doctor's degrees in physics and astronomy. After postdoctoral work at the Institute of Astronomy in England, she came to Princeton in 1988, and joined the faculty in 1990. She has taught two graduate courses, and is currently teaching physics for engineers. Rather than do the actual observations, she is a theorist, working with pencil and paper and trying to look at what is known with a different perspective.
Daly married Russell Mina, a poet who is also in the pet business, and they have daughters, 2 and 1. At the time of this interview Daly was packing her daughters' suitcases so they could stay with relatives while she and her husband went to a meeting in Europe.
Now, about that science of hers: Imagine all space constantly expanding, Daly explains. "If you are sitting at one point, the farther away something is, the higher the velocity at which it is moving." This velocity of recession is called the "red-shift." "The `distance' depends on the global geometry of the universe," says Daly. "The precise relationship between red-shift and distance tells us the expansion history of the universe -- and its fate."
"Now we have taken the data -- our predictions and our observations -- and folded them through our radio source model, matched it to our observations -- and compared it with what is expected by other cosmological models. The match-up is stunning," says Daly. "It is concrete proof."
Perhaps because of her college advising experience, perhaps because of her psychology perspective, Daly questions whether women are receiving sufficient encouragement to pursue careers in astrophysics. In the theoretical arena (postulating theories rather than concentrating on observations) she says that one percent of women are at her level and overall women represent two percent of researchers nationally. She wonders whether these ratios might reflect the subjective component in evaluating theoretical work, as opposed to experimental work or more concrete observational work. "It's not that women are not interested or motivated or smart or working hard," says Daly.
Mentoring, she believes, is extremely important: "If you work with someone who is supportive and will play the role of a mentor that could make a big difference." For her PhD thesis she worked with Harvard's Nobel prize-winner Sheldon Glashow. "Shelley is a category unto himself. I don't think he knew that I was a woman -- he is purely cerebral. I loved interacting with him because my gender was not an issue. We had wonderful scientific discussions."
She tries to make sure her own door is open. "That's important. I mentor both men and women but I am particularly sensitive to the experiences that women have that men don't have."
Daly stops short of saying that her work has been given less credence than if she were a man but notes that public relations is "a huge component" to science. "I have been working on other projects. They spend a lot of time making sure the press is aware of their projects. Our numbers are two to three years old but we haven't been calling the reporters -- we have been giving the results at scientific meetings. We have other results which I think are more important than this."
"Unfortunately there is a certain amount of promotion in science, more so than the public is usually led to believe, but other scientists usually recognize self promotion for what it is," agrees David T. Wilkinson, professor of physics at Princeton. "If you really want to impress your colleagues you'd better do good science rather than be out there promoting yourself."
Daly acknowledges it "would be fun" to win one of the major prizes, "but I am more interested in finding out what is happening in the universe, having the stimulation of figuring things out."
Says Daly: "The advice I would give to women coming along -- don't listen to people who dismiss your work as not interesting or important. Don't allow anyone to tell you that what you are doing isn't right up there with what everyone else is doing."
-- Barbara Fox
@HEAD 24 = Gina Kolata: Cloning's Consequences
This sidebar by Barbara Figge Fox was published in U.S. 1 Newspaper on January 21, 1998. All rights reserved.
It's a Sunday morning in Princeton, and New York Times reporter Gina Kolata is at a church breakfast, tirelessly addressing the issues in her new book. In response to headlines about a Chicago physicist who is determined to start a human cloning clinic, President Clinton has just announced he will ban human cloning research. Kolata is incensed.
A reporter first, she has staked out no personal positions on the ethics of cloning. But she is, perhaps even without knowing it, an evangelist for a cause -- the cause of getting Mary and Joe Q. Public to think seriously about cloning, to ponder its consequences, and to take a reasoned position, not have a knee-jerk response. "The discussion of cloning so far has been ridiculously simplistic," says Kolata at the Princeton United Methodist Church breakfast. "This is too important for the public to be as unsophisticated as they typically are."
Kolata is doing a publicity tour for her new book, "Clone: The Road to Dolly and the Path Ahead" (William Morrow, January 1998, $23). A resident of Princeton and a member of the Princeton Regional School Board, she graciously shows up for an 8 a.m. Sunday breakfast, yet she is also being featured on such eminent venues as Terry Gross's Fresh Air show and the Charlie Rose television show. She will talk and sign her book at Barnes & Noble, Marketfair, on Tuesday, January 27, at 7 p.m.
Kolata provides answers to what people are thinking -- here's the amazing story, here's what we are doing right now, and here's what might be possible in the future. She explains how Scottish scientist Ian Wilmut took a frozen cell from the udder of a now-dead sheep and reversed its development cycle, taking it back to the one-cell state of a just-fertilized egg, and how from this he grew a baby lamb. "To biologists," Kolata writes, "it was like the breaking of the sound barrier, or, perhaps more appropriately, the splitting of the atom."
Kolata has taken us to a technological and ethical precipice before. She wrote "The Baby Doctors: Proving the Limits of Fetal Medicine" and co-authored, "Sex in America" (U.S. 1, November 9, 1994). Here she has broken ground on The Issue for this decade, maybe this century. She has written so comprehensively and clearly that her book could be the basic text on cloning for years to come.
She emphasizes that research on cloning can do more than clone a child. It could result in wonderful new drug factories. A Dolly-like cloned sheep or cow could be cloned with a gene that would produce a particular drug in the milk. Instead of paying millions of dollars for each teaspoon of the drug, the cow would produce pails of it. Or cloning could allow someone to have their own bone marrow cloned. It could allow the creation of a new organ -- a heart or a kidney -- with no danger of rejection.
In person, Kolata tells her stories as fluently as she writes them. "She loves knowledge. She loves learning things, and she loves to explain what she's learned," says her editor, Toni Sciarra. "She loves to ask the questions everybody is thinking but not asking."
"Cloning may not be raising new moral questions," suggests Kolata at the breakfast. "It may be raising questions we are already disturbed by." Ethical considerations, she points out, surface at each and every turn in the discovery road -- Who gets use of a dialysis machine? Who gets an artificial heart? And so on. But in 1972 the scandal over the 1932 Tuskegee study (infamous because it left poor black men untreated for syphilis even after the discovery of penicillin) was, Kolata says, an "ethical watershed."
The uproar inspired Daniel Callahan and Willard Gaylin to found an ethical think tank, the Hastings Center. Gaylin used the cloning issue to whomp up funding, and -- 25 years before Dolly -- his chilling New York Times Magazine article "The Frankenstein Myth Becomes a Reality -- We Have the Awful Knowledge to Make Exact Copies of Human Beings" left the public aghast.
"It was this emergence of the ethics movement that generated the Greek chorus for the cloning debates," Kolata writes. The late Paul Ramsey, a Princeton University theologian, wrote in 1972 that cloning might be the "beginning of a journey down what he saw as a slippery slope," as Kolata puts it. Ramsey wanted us all to raise the ethical questions with a serious and not a "frivolous" conscience, not merely to find a rationalization for what is now possible to do, but to challenge what should not be done.
Yet scientists of the '70s generally ignored the cloning issue because they didn't really believe it was possible. They believed that a cell grown for one purpose could not revert to an earlier stage; that once a cell has reached its final form, it never alters; that a kidney cell remains a kidney cell for as long as the person is alive, and it never turns into a liver cell, even though its genes are the same. They could not imagine that one udder cell could develop into an embryo and then a lamb.
The other reason that Dolly surprised almost everybody: Dolly's creator does not move in the "fashionable" scientific circles. Ivy League lab scientists who work with mice don't pay much attention to scientists in the hinterlands who work with farm animals. And those who work with mice had been badly burnt, in 1984, by the searing, far-reaching exposure of a scientist who allegedly made false claims about his ability to clone mice. "Not only did scientific leaders turn their backs on the man who said he had cloned but they began to disdain the very pursuit of cloning itself," writes Kolata.
After that, "cloning left the high-profile world of molecular biology and retreated to the little known world of animal science," she writes, noting that eminent geneticists such as Princeton University's Lee Silver (author of the also just-published "Remaking Eden: Cloning and Beyond in the Brave New World," Avon, $25) don't talk to the agricultural scientists or even come to the same meetings.
"The scientists working in barnyards and gathering eggs from ovaries that they collected at slaughterhouses were increasingly isolated from the science superstars, whose universe seemed to be the only one that mattered," Kolata writes. The farm animal scientists "were the only ones brave enough to take up the cloning problems. And they had been motivated more by the economic promise of cloning than by a thirst to understand the molecular mysteries of development."
Now that the issue of cloning has once more been released from Pandora's box, Kolata emphasizes, the public needs to understand all the possibilities, not just the obvious ones. Acceptance of research on recombinant DNA had been very slow, and this delay hampered the research, says Kolata. "In the zeal to cut off cloning are we going to make it a crime to do research?"
In her talk, Kolata cites the case of a mother who desperately needed a kidney for her 15-year-old daughter and had another baby so she could donate one of the baby's kidneys to her older sister. How different is that, ethically, from cloning a kidney, Kolata asks.
"Cloning is a metaphor and a mirror," Kolata writes. "It allows us to look at ourselves and our values and to decide what is important to us and why. It also reflects the place of science in our world. Do we see science as a threat or a promise? What would it do to us as a people to think that the rich could have replacement parts?"
But the "just suppose" possibilities fascinate her nonetheless. Even now, would-be parents can choose an egg donor and choose a sperm donor, have the fertilized egg implanted in a uterus, and have an "almost just-like-us" baby. But Kolata poses the question, "Suppose I can add a gene that is resistant to Alzheimer's, how is that different from a vaccination against Alzheimer's? Each of us will draw the line in different places."
"Cloning is in the future. Cloning is for the very few. Cloning is for the very rich. Most people will want to have children with their partners," Kolata promises the Methodists. She quotes Princeton Theological seminarian Nancy Duff: "Many people wonder if this is a miracle for which we can thank God, or an ominous new way to play God ourselves." Kolata gently deflects someone who tries to pin her down about what is "right" by quoting theologians who used the same chapter of Genesis to prove opposing views.
This is just the sort of discussion Kolata wrote her book to provoke. She finished it in an amazingly short time over the summer. Yet she has diligently annotated her sources with 11-pages of footnotes and a 16-page index (even Joyce Carol Oates gets mentioned). Yet she has also captured the drama of how the news broke, how Dolly's birth took place, and how "the nation's leading scientists squared off in virtual phalanxes of Who's Who."
The very efficient Gina Bari Kolata talks like she writes -- with candor and speed, barely stopping to take a breath. Speed is her trademark (she once had to take remedial classes because she talked so fast) and perhaps her lightning-quick reactions are what deflected her from doing science into writing about it.
Kolata grew up in Maryland, the daughter of a diamond setter and a mathematician. She majored in microbiology at the University of Maryland (Class of 1969), but in graduate school at MIT she was dissuaded from pursuing that as a career because she did not like the tedium of long days in labs. She tried studying math in graduate school but -- again -- realized she was better at explaining theories than at dreaming them up.
An entry-level job at Science magazine led to numerous freelance assignments and a co-authored book on high blood pressure. When the New York Times hired her as a science reporter, she and her mathematician husband and two children moved to Princeton in 1990. Dedicated to fitness, she runs and works out at Gold's Gym. "I like to work. I really just like to be engaged. The most boring thing is when I have nothing to do," says Kolata.
"Events that alter our very notion of what it means to be human are few and scattered over the centuries," she observes. Gina Kolata works to ensure that when such millennial debates erupt, she's there at the axis, focusing public debate.
-- Barbara Fox
<B>Kathie Young met her first mentor at a breakfast at Marshall Fields in Chicago. A post doctoral student in Northwestern's molecular biology department, she had responded to a survey instigated by the launch of new perfume that was tantalizingly named "Destiny." The marketing firm for the perfume recruited 200 professional women to be mentors and then processed applications for young women asking for guidance. Young "won" as her mentor a chemist who belonged to the Association for Women in Science.
Young then moved here to work for American Cyanamid, and she helped establish New Jersey's first chapter of the Association for Women in Science. Though this chapter has no formal mentoring program, Young says it gives her a perspective to look at her situation in context. "We are so friendly in our group that people feel comfortable calling anyone. At this point we can mentor college or graduate students."
Young grew up in Lakewood, Ohio, near Cleveland, where her father was a technical salesman and her mother worked for the school board. She took a track scholarship to Penn State and was one of the few pre-vet majors with no intentions of being a vet. "I wanted to get a job in the zoo and work with species that were endangered to do captive reproduction and repopulate the wild."
Discouraged by the restrictions on zoo research she switched her interest to biology and earned her doctor's degree in reproductive physiology at the University of Florida. After her stint at Northwestern she moved to American Cyanamid and became a principal investigator. She has just moved from Cyanamid to work on Ridge Road for Wyeth Ayerst, a sister company also owned by American Home Products. She will be working on neuro-degeneration diseases such as stroke and Alzheimer's.
Young was the founding president of the AWS, Rosie Wong of American Cyanamid was last year's president, Deirdre LaMarche at FMC is this year's president, and Marcia O'Connell, who teaches genetics and does research on Zebra fish at the College of New Jersey, is the president elect.
In addition to its meetings the group has garnered corporate sponsorship to award a $500 scholarship to a high school senior who plans to major in science. Association members are available to speak at high school and college career days. Local dues are $10 and national dues range from $25 to $70 and include a bimonthly publication plus the privilege to vote and hold office. At a free meeting on Wednesday, February 25, at Bristol-Myers Squibb, Elizabeth Antry will discuss how to present technical information to a non-technical audience, "You've Got What It Takes." For information call Sandra Carson at American Cyanamid, 609-716-2000.
For the first part of this story go to http://www.princetoninfo.com/80121C01.html