On Monday, I met Wellesley classmate Sally Phelps at the Copley Marriott for The Women's Union's 22nd Annual Amelia Earhart Award Luncheon honoring MIT President Susan Hockfield. Sally and husband Dick were in town for just a few days before resuming their peripatetic life, so it was a great chance to catch up while doing our part to support the excellent programs of The Women's Union. The annual luncheon is an amazingly popular event. There were over 1,300 people in attendance and more than $400,000 was raised for the Union. The lunch served was quite modest - a few slices of rolled, stuffed chicken breast served over a very small salad (sans dressing, which did seem a bit strange) with coffee and petits fours for dessert. No threat to the waistline and you could eat knowing that almost all of the price you paid to attend was going to the charity, a win-win situation.
The well organized program featured an excellent video about the Union's programs and accolades for President Mary Lassen, who is leaving the Union after almost a decade of service. For me, though, the best was the speech given by President Hockfield, both the first woman president of Charles' Alma Mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the first life scientist to hold the post at that institution. She did her duty and summarized the history of MIT and women. I was amazed to learn that it welcomed its first female undergrad in the '80s - the 1880s - even though she was considered a one-time exception. Today the undergraduate student body is roughly 45% female.
President Hockfield then shared personal stories about how she ended up being a laboratory scientists instead of a doctor and why and how she made the move into academia. (When she talked about her childhood passion for taking things apart and putting them back together with more or less success, it brought to mind our granddaughter who seems unusually drawn to solving spacial problems.)
The part of her speech that impressed and inspired me most, however, was her discussion of how little of its gross national product the US is devoting to science and technology and her well-articulated conviction that scientific research is critical to the future of our country. Of course, given that she is both a scientist and the president of an institution with a world-wide reputation in the sciences, you would expect her to express these views. And, in my case at least, she was preaching to the choir. Still, I left the Marriott ballroom with a renewed conviction that our society needs to do more to foster scientific research and development and that we have to find a way to have the science versus religion debate without it's turning into a zero sum game. OK. I'll take my tiptoes off the soapbox. Suffice it to say it was an inspirational and thought provoking few hours for me.
