{"id":15496,"date":"2024-10-28T14:18:12","date_gmt":"2024-10-28T15:18:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=15496"},"modified":"2024-10-28T15:30:14","modified_gmt":"2024-10-28T15:30:14","slug":"the-rebellious-scientist-who-made-kamala-harris","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=15496","title":{"rendered":"The Rebellious Scientist Who Made Kamala Harris"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The presidential candidate\u2019s mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, was a breast cancer researcher whose egalitarian politics often bucked a patriarchal lab culture.<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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: \u201cDid you eat that day?\u201d<\/p>\n

The younger biologist had not.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have to eat!\u201d<\/p>\n

The reply was not exactly warm \u2014 more \u201care you stupid?\u201d than \u201cI\u2019m so sorry you fainted,\u201d Ms. Vargis said. Nor was it as ready-made for a meme as Dr. Gopalan Harris\u2019s aphorisms, like the one about the coconut tree<\/a>, that caught the imagination of voters online during her daughter Kamala Harris\u2019s presidential campaign.<\/p>\n

But in the professor\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe wanted me to be in that room,\u201d 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. \u201cShe wanted to give everybody a chance, an equal chance.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The presidential candidate\u2019s mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, was a breast cancer researcher whose egalitarian politics often bucked a patriarchal lab culture.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: \u201cDid you eat that day?\u201dThe younger biologist had not.\u201cYou have to eat!\u201dThe reply was not exactly warm \u2014 more \u201care you stupid?\u201d than \u201cI\u2019m so sorry you fainted,\u201d Ms. Vargis said. Nor was it as ready-made for a meme as Dr. Gopalan Harris\u2019s aphorisms, like the one about the coconut tree, that caught the imagination of voters online during her daughter Kamala Harris\u2019s presidential campaign.But in the professor\u2019s 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.\u201cShe wanted me to be in that room,\u201d 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. \u201cShe wanted to give everybody a chance, an equal chance.\u201dWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15498,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lifestyle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15496"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15496\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15499,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15496\/revisions\/15499"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}