Some Context of What Came Before … Shyamala Gopalan Harris’ Scientist Life

Kamala Harris: “We cannot support and help our young people if we don’t also look at the context in which those young people live and are being raised…[We] have to be clear about the needs of their parents, and their grandparents, and their teachers, and their communities, because none of us just live in a silo. Everything is in context. My mother used to – she’d give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’ (Laughs.) You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”

From: Remarks at Swearing-In Ceremony of Commissioners for the White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Hispanics. May 2023 (video excerpt) (transcript).

At the 2024 Democratic National Convention (DNC), first Maya Harris, and then Kamala Harris, drew a vivid picture of their mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, as a trailblazing woman – physically small, and a towering influence on their lives. Between that and the coconut tree, I was very curious about who Gopalan was as a scientist. (She didn’t change her professional name when she married.) I’m still curious about her professional motivations and inspirations. But I found enough to get a picture on this scientist with such an extraordinary personal legacy.

If you’re interested in reading more about Gopalan’s life generally, and her influence on her daughters, check out the DNC links above, and those below this post. Those articles are also sources for the details in this post.

This photo accompanies an article describing Lady Irwin College as “a veritable Vassar of the Orient.” It was a women’s college offering studies in domestic science. When Gopalan chose to study there, her family teased her about the homemaker focus. They thought it was beneath her. Her progressive father and feminist mother wanted more for her.

However, Gopalan wanted to be a biochemist – I didn’t find any explanation of what inspired her interest in the field. Studying biochemistry doesn’t seem to have been an option for her locally. She had set her sights on studying in the US, and Lady Irwin College offered a stepping stone. In 1950, the College had become affiliated with the University of Delhi, offering the degree of Bachelor of Science. Gopalan matriculated in 1955, enrolled in the College to study nutrition, and got her undergraduate science degree under her belt by the time she was 19 – graduating at the top of her class.

While she was at the College, Gopalan’s family moved to Calcutta. She followed them after graduation, enrolling for a diploma at the All India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health. According to Harris, a classmate remembers her “pursuing her US plans relentlessly.” In 1958, still aged only 19, Gopalan had secured a scholarship from the University of California Berkeley for a masters degree, and set off on her own for Berkeley and becoming a biochemist.

Her masters thesis recorded her work on proteins and bread – Biological evaluation of protein quality of chapatis (1960). That year, Gopalan presented her results at an international Congress on nutrition in Washington DC. The next year, she reported some results in a letter in Nature, with a full publication following in another journal in 1962. She was working, then, as a teaching assistant in the Department of Nutritional Science.

With PhD work finished, she took on post-doc work in the Department of Physiology at UC Berkeley in October 1963. She married Donald Harris that year, too. Gopalan’s PhD in nutrition and endocrinology was awarded in 1964 – the same year she gave birth to Kamala, her first daughter. Titled The isolation and purification of a trypsin inhibitor from whole-wheat flour, her 1964 dissertation was followed up that year with a publication in the Canadian Journal of Biochemistry. From then on, Gopalan had a steady stream of publications.

Meanwhile, in her 2-year post-doc at Berkeley, Gopalan was learning enzyme chemistry and radioactive measurement. She studied adrenal glands and tumors, and atherosclerosis. The goal was isolating the adrenal enzyme involved in the metabolism of cholesterol.

By 1966, Gopalan and her husband were both working at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She was studying the mechanism of action of estrogen, in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics. In 1967, their second daughter, Maya, was born. Somewhere along the way, the couple also did a brief stint at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

After a short time as a research associate at Northwestern University, Chicago, Gopalan was awarded an NIH research fellowship. She joined the Ben May Laboratory for Cancer Research at The University of Chicago, investigating the nature of control mechanisms in normal and cancerous tissue.

Gopalan moved back to Berkeley with her daughters in 1969. She was 30, and the single-parent part of her life had begun. (The couple were divorced in 1971.) Until 1975, she was Assistant Research Biochemist in the Department of Zoology and Cancer Research Laboratory at UC Berkeley.

There, she befriended fellow scientist, Mina Bissell. Bissell told a reporter “that she and Gopalan were once finalists for a job opening, but said it turned out they were being interviewed only so the hiring managers could tell the government grant-writers they had considered women for the position. She described encountering a ‘terrible chauvinist’ in the hiring process who demeaned her. The job went to a man.” After that disappointment, Bissell said, Gopalan left UC Berkeley and moved to Canada.

Gopalan would stay at the Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research (Jewish General Hospital) and McGill University for 16 years. There, she became a professor, and participated in NIH study sections. According to a mentee of hers, Michael Pollak, she “developed a method of assessing cancerous breast tissue that became standard procedure at the JGH and other hospitals.” Gopalan was, he said, “a strong and independent woman and part of a small minority of woman scientists at the time.”

It was there that Gopalan worked on one of two notable achievements often cited as her major contributions to the science of breast cancer. One of her collaborators in that work, Stephen Ullrich from the US National Cancer Institute, was interviewed about this for an NIH newsletter. (The post has the best photo of Gopalan at work in a lab that I’ve seen.)

Ullrich sat next to her on a bus to the airport after a conference in Keystone, Colorado. Gopalan was a leader in the study of progesterone receptors in normal and cancerous breast tissue, and Ullrich invited her to partner with him in his work on the role of heat shock proteins (HSPs) in cancer. The result was a pair of influential publications. In the first, their findings suggested that HSP90 could be augmenting tumor growth in mice. In the second paper they reported similar results in human breast tissue.

In the early 1990s, Gopalan returned to UC Berkeley. Bissell was then in a leadership position and recruited Gopalan to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Gopalan remained there for the rest of her career, gaining several NIH grants to progress her work. Several reliable sources report that Gopalan was appointed a member of the President’s Special Commission on Breast. I think it must mean this one, with a report presented to President Clinton in 1993. (The list of members isn’t digitized.)

I don’t know enough about biology to pinpoint the publications related to Gopalan’s main notable achievement – isolating and characterizing progesterone receptors. She published many papers relevant to this (like this one, in 1991). According to Google Scholar, one of the papers she co-authored on progesterone receptors has over 2,200 citations (this one).

I hope someone familiar with this branch of science tackles reporting this aspect of Gopalan’s work properly: It would be great if her Wikipedia page better documented her scientific work. It’s been getting around 20,000 views a day lately – spiking to 300,000 during the DNC (including me!). The curiosity about this inspiring woman is surely likely to grow, including among women in science.

I’ll leave the last words in this post for Gopalan. Harris wrote this on Facebook in 2022:

“My mother was the first person to tell me that my thoughts and experiences mattered. My mother would often say to me: ‘Kamala, You may be the first to do many things. Make sure you are not the last’.”

 

You can keep up with my work at my newsletter, Living With Evidence. And I’m active on Mastodon: @hildabast@mastodon.online (For other social media, see LinkTree.)

Further reading (and post sources) on Gopalan:

• Article from the LA Times on Harris’ Indian family (2019)

• Tal Kopan’s article in the San Francisco Chronicle (with a big collection of photos) (2020)

• Excerpt from Chidanand Rajghatta’s biography of Harris (2021)

• BBC article on Gopalan (2021)

• Article from Today on Harris’ parents (2024)

• Article in Mother Jones, drawing on the author’s 2007 interview with Gopalan (2024)

• NPR story on Gopalan, with a good collection of photos (2024)

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Featured photo of students at Lady Irwin College: Public domain work by US army photographer, James Minnick in India-Burma Theater Roundup, February 1946.