Ruth Hubbard

She became known as a strong critic of sociobiology. Geneticist Richard Lewontin has said, "No one has been a more influential critic of the biological theory of women's inequality than Ruth Hubbard." In a 2006 essay entitled "Race and Genes," she wrote:

In her essay "Science and Science Criticism," published in 2001 as a chapter of The Gender and Science Reader, Hubbard iterates that she is a scientist and states that "[n]ature is part of history and culture", but not vice versa. She goes on to say that scientists are largely unable to grasp the concept of nature being part of life--- noting how she needed several years to understand the statement. Going into her scientific history, the narrator mentions how she originally never questioned how her efforts fit into society. Narrowing her focus, she exposits that the Vietnam-era women's rights and women's liberation movements helped teach her of the roles of science in society.

In the late 1980s and 1990s, Ruth gave several interviews challenging the power structure in STEM fields. 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.”

Like her second husband, Ruth remained scientifically active until about 1975, and she made an excellent scientific presentation of George Wald's work at a symposium in his honor. George Wald was 18 years older than Hubbard and he died in 1996.

After being promoted in 1973 from what she called the "typical women's ghetto" of "research associate and lecturer" positions to a tenured faculty position at Harvard, she felt increased freedom to pursue new interests.

In the late 1960s, her interests shifted from science to societal issues and activism.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Hubbard became interested in social and political dimensions of biological issues. In her book The Politics of Women's Biology, she wrote that she had been a "devout scientist" from 1947 until the late 1960s, but the Vietnam War and the women's liberation movement led her to change her priorities.

Around the same time in the late 1960s, as a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Ruth was asked to give a talk about being a female in the sciences. While conducting interviews of her fellow female scientists, Hubbard discovered that they were all in similar situations. Each of the women were accomplished in their fields, yet none of them had real jobs. They all had what Ruth called “nonjobs.” They had titles such as lecturer or associate which meant they had little to no job security, while their male-counterparts were either on the path to professorships or had already received tenure. This led Ruth and others to join a group that petitioned Harvard to reevaluate the job statuses of its female faculty. Ruth Hubbard was the first woman to be offered a tenured Harvard professorship in the Biology Department in 1973.

Ruth had met her second husband, George Wald, while they were both at Harvard. Wald was a Professor of Biology and Ruth’s boss in the research lab. However, the two began and kept their love affair a secret for more than a decade since they were married to other people at the time. After their respective divorces to previous partners, Ruth and George married in 1958. The couple had two children: a son, musician and music historian Elijah Wald, and a daughter, attorney Deborah Wald. Hubbard would go on to publish a book, Exploding the Gene Myth, with her son Elijah.

After receiving her PhD from Harvard, Ruth became a research fellow. She worked under George Wald, investigating the biochemistry of retinal and retinol. According to an interview given by Ruth, together they built on the work that Wald had researched during a fellowship following his own doctorate degree. He had confirmed the long-held belief that vitamin A was related to vision. Not only did he find that light absorption liberated vitamin A, he also found an intermediate of the visual pigment rhodopsin and vitamin A. This intermediate was the base of Ruth’s early work, where she attempted to determine the chemistry of the rhodopsin cycle. In 1952, Ruth received a Guggenheim Fellowship at the Carlsberg Laboratory in Copenhagen, Denmark. Wald shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1967 for his discoveries about how the eye works. In the same year, the pair was awarded the Paul Karrer Gold Medal specifically for their work with rhodopsin.

Ruth decided to enroll at Radcliffe College with the intent to pursue a pre-medicine degree, which she attributes to the fact that everyone around her was a doctor. At that time, Radcliffe was a sister institution to Harvard since women were not yet allowed to enroll at the university. Ruth sensed the disdain that the distinguished Harvard professors had for the system that required them to travel to the Radcliffe campus to teach the small female classes after teaching the same lecture to their male students at Harvard. However, by 1946 most classes were coeducational and taught by Harvard professors. For a brief period, Ruth was interested in pursuing a degree in Philosophy and Physics, and even though she was never explicitly told not to go into Physics, she got the feeling that she was not welcome. She attributes this feeling of unease to the time that she took a coeducational Physics course in which she was only one of two women in the class of 350 students. Ruth finally settled on biochemical sciences, and in 1944 graduated from Radcliffe College with a B.A. in biochemical sciences.

Out of a desire to help the Allied War effort in World War II, Ruth joined the laboratory of George Wald, where they conducted research on infrared vision. She briefly relocated to Chattanooga where her first husband Frank Hubbard was stationed. When the war ended, they returned to Cambridge. Ruth returned to Radcliffe in 1946 in pursuit of her doctorate in biology. She was awarded a predoctoral fellowship by the U.S. Public Health Service in 1948, allowing her to study at the University College Hospital Medical School in London. Ruth received her PhD in biology in 1950.

Ruth Hubbard was married to WWII GI and fellow Harvard graduate Frank Hubbard in 1942. Ruth fondly remembered the months that the pair spent traveling via motorcycle across Europe as Frank researched harpsichords. The couple divorced in 1951.

During her active research career from the 1940s to the 1960s, she made important contributions to the understanding of the biochemistry and photochemistry of vision in vertebrates and invertebrates. In 1967, she and George Wald shared the Paul Karrer Gold Medal for their work in this area.

Ruth Hubbard (March 3, 1924 – September 1, 2016) was a professor of biology at Harvard University, where she was the first woman to hold a tenured professorship position in biology.

In 1924, Hubbard was born Ruth Hoffmann in Vienna, Austria. Her parents, Richard Hoffmann and Helene Ehrlich Hoffmann, were both physicians and leftist intellectuals. Her mother was also a concert-quality pianist, and as a child, Ruth showed promise on the piano as well. When Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938, the Hoffmanns immigrated to the United States to escape. The family settled first in Brookline, Massachusetts, where Ruth graduated Brookline High School, and then in Cambridge.