{"id":5778,"date":"2019-06-10T21:28:29","date_gmt":"2019-06-10T20:28:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/?p=5778"},"modified":"2019-06-11T08:22:53","modified_gmt":"2019-06-11T07:22:53","slug":"the-matilda-effect-and-jean-purdy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/2019\/06\/10\/the-matilda-effect-and-jean-purdy\/","title":{"rendered":"The Matilda Effect and Jean Purdy"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are well-known instances of women in science being apparently overlooked for a Nobel Prize: Jocelyn Bell Burnell, springs to mind, as do Lisa Meitner and Rosalind Franklin (if one ignores the inconvenient fact that she was dead by the time of the award). These are names that could readily be associated with the Matilda Effect<\/a>, coined by Margaret Rossiter<\/a> and summarised on Wikipedia as<\/p>\n

\u2018bias against acknowledging the achievements of those women scientists whose work is attributed to their male colleagues.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Every day women continue to be up against these sorts of bias in matters small and large: whose name goes first on a paper, who gets to attend a conference to present work (too often it\u2019s not the woman who actually spearheaded it) \u2013 or who gets recognition from prize-giving committees way beyond the one sitting in Stockholm.<\/p>\n

In the case of Rosalind Franklin, not only did she miss out on the Nobel Prize, she was comprehensively damned as of little interest by Jim Watson in his memoir The Double Helix<\/a>. He says, of a talk she gave,<\/p>\n

\u2018There was not a trace of warmth or frivolity in her words. And yet I could not regard her as totally uninteresting. Momentarily I wondered how she would look if she took off her glasses and did something novel with her hair.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Repellent, utterly repellent as a description of a professional whose work he was in essence about to poach. A little later chronologically, when an early discussion of the possibility of a helical structure was being discussed by Watson and Francis Crick, with Franklin and her lab head Maurice Wilkins+, Watson gets even crosser when he discovers that actually she knows what she\u2019s talking about when it comes to physical chemistry.<\/p>\n

\u2018Most annoyingly, her objections were not mere perversity: at this stage the embarrassing fact came out that my recollection of the water content of Rosy\u2019s DNA samples could not be right.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Damning her with the diminutive name of Rosy (by which she was never known), he found he didn\u2019t actually know what he was talking about; she did.<\/p>\n

Much has been written about Franklin\u2019s role in uncovering the structure of DNA, these vignettes are merely meant to illustrate one familiar example of the Matilda Effect. Let me now introduce a much less well-known name who also suffered its consequences of this effect, someone whose contributions to scientific progress have not yet been properly resurrected to give the woman her due: Jean Purdy<\/a>. As Robert Edwards<\/a>\u2019 papers opened by the Churchill College Archives<\/a>* this week reveal, she played a key role in developing IVF, leading to the birth of Louise Brown<\/a> and subsequently millions more \u2018test-tube babies\u2019 Whereas Watson sought to denigrate Franklin, absolutely the opposite is true of Edwards who, along with Purdy and Patrick Steptoe<\/a>, were the driving force behind moving from a glimmer of an idea to a live birth.<\/p>\n

Edwards was a pioneer in all senses, a man who had to fight against a funding system that would not support his work, in part because of ethical concerns but also, as Martin Johnson<\/a> one of his former PhD students writes<\/a> Edwards was regarded as<\/p>\n

\u2018that charlatan, who worked on stuff \u2018down there\u2019 and spoke to the press\u2019.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Interestingly, this article also indicates how Jim Watson featured here claiming that \u2018monsters would be born<\/em>\u2019 by these novel procedures.) A lack of support from the funders may be a condition familiar to many scientists, but few will emulate Edwards\u2019 success both in the \u2018impact\u2019 of their work on hundreds of thousands if not millions of families around the world at a time when impact had not entered the funders\u2019 lexicon, as well as the award of a Nobel Prize (in Physiology or Medicine in 2010). This work was carried out at the private clinic at Bourn Hall<\/a> because (I believe) NHS hospitals would not give him space. \u00a0He was regarded as too much of a maverick and his approaches too dodgy but, despite these hurdles, had the strength of character and support to keep going until he could prove his ideas correct.<\/p>\n

He was in no doubt that Purdy, a trained nurse who worked with him as a researcher, was instrumental in the ultimate success of the technique. When Oldham (the long term gynaecologist collaborator Steptoe was based in Oldham) wanted to commemorate the success of the IVF project with a plaque in the town, Edwards argued that Purdy\u2019s name should appear on the plaque alongside the two more famous names. \u00a0He wanted fair recognition for Purdy who, he says,<\/p>\n

\u2018travelled to Oldham with me for 10 years and contributed as much as I did to the project. Indeed, I regard her as an equal contributor to Patrick Steptoe and myself.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

His support for her had no effect, despite being repeated several times. Oldham Health Authority proceeded with the plaque merely identifying Steptoe and Edwards.<\/p>\n

That the Nobel Committee did not include Purdy (or Steptoe) in the 2010 prize is less surprising than Oldham\u2019s response given Stockholm\u2019s rules about posthumous awards: Purdy died, like Franklin, tragically young of cancer in 1985 and Steptoe in 1988. But why does an organisation in which no personality clash or anything similar could have been at play, decide to ignore the wishes of the very person being honoured? Why should a woman who had played a crucial role in an extraordinarily important discovery be wantonly disregarded? Presumably some people back in 1981 could not conceive of a young woman as anything other than a \u2018safe pair of hands\u2019 or a \u2018good technician\u2019 who couldn\u2019t have been a major player in making the procedure succeed. It would be nice to think something similar could not happen today, but there are too many anecdotes circulating to convince me that women are not regularly being unfairly overlooked in favour of male colleagues.<\/p>\n

In Purdy\u2019s case there is a slightly happy ending (if you consider plaques a measure of success). Although in 2013 a plaque had been placed at Bourn Hall omitting Purdy\u2019s name, two years later Andrew Steptoe<\/a>, son of Patrick Steptoe unveiled a plaque acknowledging the three<\/u> people involved in developing IVF. Three years later in 2018 when celebrating 40 years of IVF, \u00a0Bourn Hall<\/a> unveiled a memorial to Jean Purdy, the<\/p>\n

“world’s first IVF nurse and embryologist. Co-founder of Bourn Hall Clinic.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

*Thanks to Churchill College archivist Madelin Evans who drew this story to my attention.<\/p>\n

+ Not Maurice Wilkes as I first wrote!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are well-known instances of women in science being apparently overlooked for a Nobel Prize: Jocelyn Bell Burnell, springs to mind, as do Lisa Meitner and Rosalind Franklin (if one ignores the inconvenient fact that she was dead by the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,27],"tags":[1326,1323,1325,1324],"class_list":["post-5778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-equality","category-women-in-science","tag-churchill-college-archives","tag-ivf","tag-patrick-steptoe","tag-robert-edwards"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5778"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5778\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}