Science: what is masculine about it?

A FAVOURIT`E cartoon character of my son and possibly many kids today is Dexter from the 'Dexter's laboratory'.

In this cartoon Dexter has a secret laboratory in his basement where he invents robots, fights monsters from outer space, practices genetic engineering and is busy writing secret formulae to help mankind.

His sister Dee Dee, on the other hand is portrayed as sometimes practicing her ballet lessons, doing the usual 'girly' stuff like dressing up , wanting to be famous, disturbing Dexter in his pursuit of science and sometimes even destroying his experiments.

I thought about this casual image of DeeDee uninterested in science, whether such an image is realistic and wondered why children seem to approve of such an image of females and science. A survey conducted some years ago among school children in England about their opinion on science as a profession and the images they had about scientists, showed that nearly 85% of them talked about either an absent minded male professor in a dirty lab coat or someone crazy like Robbin Williams in the movie `Blubber'.

Even most of the girl students identified males in the role of scientists and few of them mentioned studious myopic females in scientists' garb! In the Charter of the Royal Society of London which had its beginning in mid 17th century the society's business was stated to be the `raising of a masculine philosophy'.

Aristotle called femaleness 'a deformity, a mutilation' and extended these terms to describe our universe where he saw the eternal invincible heavens as male and the ever changing earth as female. In America, in the 20th Century articles published in the journal Science Education asked the scientists to deliberately renounce all emotions and desire and to think coldly, be impersonal and dispassionate.

If we associate the qualities of feeling, nurturing, co-operation and intuition to femininity, does it mean that we do not have to value the feminine side of our humanity, of our world, of our very existence? Is there then anything feminine about science and what are we missing? Is this why science is seen as a domain where men are thought to be more at home than women?

The concept of `jumping genes' that Prof. Barbara McClintock discovered and won the Nobel prize for in 1983 had been shunned for years by the established geneticists (most of them males). .

In fact Prof. McClintock worked in isolation for nearly 30 years with little funding and all those years she attached herself emotionally to her corn plants-her objects of study. While most geneticists relied on statistics and probabilities she knew each of her plants individually , emotionally and this brought her closer to the chromosomes she studied.

In her first interview after her Nobel prize announcement she said' if you look at these objects continuously with such intensity, they become part of you and you forget your self ' and that it was this connection with nature that lead to her concern for consequences.

Normally nurturing is a function that is not very seriously talked of in the society and in fact in some cases science even devalues it. Consider the example of `glial cells' found in the brain. These cells play the role of helpers feeding the 'nerve cells' and clean up afterwards-playing the typical `little lady role'.

Although glial cells are ten times more numerous in the brain than the neurons their role of nurturing the neurons has been side lined and they have been ignored in favour of the more active and exciting nerve cells.This meant that for a long time their role in communicating between the brain and various parts of the body was totally neglected. By moving back and forth between the brain and the body (where they become a type of white blood cell of the immune system) they have demolished the myth of the blood-brain barrier.

In fact, it has been found that as mammals ascend the phylogenetic scale the number of glial cells per neuron increases from mouse to man.

Often approval of work women carry out (especially if this approval comes from a man) is talked in terms of receptivity of the female. While receptivity , possibly means for a man only an openness to possibilities and requires halting busyness and activity , it is not all that passive. It takes a lot of patience, alertness, openness, and responsiveness and is a process of listening and responding to nature- as in a conversation or as a co-creator of nature.

Thus , even the cellular activity of egg and sperm which was for a long time thought of in terms of the egg being just receptive somewhat like `the sleeping beauty' from the fairy tales and sperm like the prince charming going and waking her up from her slumber has now been shown by Heide and Gerald Schatten to be a cooperative phenomenon between the egg and sperm which itself is initiated by the egg.

In our culture, knowledge gained without any rational thought is unpredictable and beyond explanations-and so intuition has been termed unfairly a feminine quality.

But all of us would definitely miss seeing important aspects of reality by denying intuition. Scientists often cite example of Kekule who dreamt of the snake biting its own tail and gave the structure of Benzene. Physicist Niels Bohr dreamt of the planetary system as model for atoms which lead to the Bohr model of the atomic structure. Because intuition is individual and unpredictable, coming as a whole in a flash , it cannot be broken down to study its component parts. Feeling, nurturing, receptivity, co-operation, intuition are all based on interdependence.

To be a good, objective scientist one may need to look into these qualities too. In contrast to this, science has been pursuing a path of logic and analysis based on separating and compartmentalization. Of course looking at science and trying to define the way we could and should carry out experiments does not mean rejecting 'masculine' aspects of science. But inclusion and integration of the 'feminine' qualities in a balanced way would definitely help us see more of reality.

Therefore we must review and revise science at every level: the science we fund, the questions we ask, the methods we use, the way we teach science, the way we run our laboratories, the way the scientists and the lay persons interact .

Every shift in the perspective would make a difference and add to our overall picture of nature. Now more than ever we need the wisdom to handle science with a `human face' and teach our children that Dee Dee could be an expert in solid state Physics who just happens to be good at ballet dancing !

Aruna Dhathathreyan

Central Leather Research Institute Adyar, Chennai 600 020

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