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By 1974, when she became the first female biology professor to be awarded tenure at Harvard University, Ruth Hubbard was shifting her focus from the laboratory to the petri dish of politics. Already an antiwar activist, she became a prominent feminist critic of science and later raised privacy concerns in the debate over gene research.
What constitutes science, she told the Globe in 1990, usually is decided by “a self-perpetuating, self-reflexive group: by the chosen for the chosen,” and those “chosen” historically were upper-class white men.
“Women and nonwhite, working-class and poor men have largely been outside the process of science-making,” Dr. Hubbard told The New York Times in 1981. “Though we have been described by scientists, by and large we have not been the describers and definers of scientific reality. We have not formulated the questions scientists ask, nor have we answered them. This undoubtedly has affected the content of science, but it has also affected the social context and the ambience in which science is done.”
An award-winning biochemist who studied vision earlier in her career, Dr...