As a graduate student at Harvard University in the late 1950s, one of three women among 100 students, Evelyn Fox Keller encountered nothing but scepticism among her fellow students and professors that she might “make it” as a theoretical physicist. She later wrote about how “painful and unsettling” it was to meet “unmitigated provocation, insult and denial” as she pursued her PhD.
These early experiences drove her to become a pioneer in studying the interplay of gender and science, and to challenge the very notion of science as a purely objective pursuit. Interviewed by the Boston Globe in 1986, she said: “When there are more women in science, everybody will be free to do a different kind of science.”
Following the upheaval of second wave feminism in the 60s and 70s, historians such as Margaret Rossiter began to expose the glaring gender inequalities that had always existed in science, and also to celebrate the achievements of female scientists whose work had been forgotten. Keller, who has died aged 87, first made her name in this field with A Feeling for the Organism, her biography of Barbara McClintock published in 1983.
McClintock had toiled from the 20s to the 50s on studies of maize genetics, publishing prescient results on how one gene controlled another that were largely disregarded until confirmed by modern molecular biology. She won the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine five months after Keller’s book appeared to widespread acclaim.
Keller went on to explore in detail how the practice of science had come to be perceived as intrinsically masculine, and to think about what a gender-neutral science might look like.
In her influential book Reflections on Gender and Science, she went back to Plato in exploring beliefs about male-female relations and their relevance to the life of the mind, concluding that by the time of the founding of the Royal Society in 1660 the idea that “mind” was male and “nature” was female was thoroughly entrenched. The Renaissance thinker Francis Bacon’s dictum “knowledge is power” enshrined the perception that scientific inquiry was all about control.
Keller argued, in contrast, that the dominance of white males and a rigid conception of objectivity not only disadvantaged women but also were detrimental to an understanding of the natural world that needed to encompass feeling and intuition. Her feminist critique added momentum to the social science movement that viewed science as socially constructed, a product of human beliefs and values rather than cold hard facts.
Keller was an active combatant in the “science wars” of the 90s, but rejected some of the more extreme positions of the cultural studies faction. She retained her commitment to science as a means of understanding and transforming the world, and did not think women would do a different kind of science from men.
Alan Sokal, the physicist who led the charge against cultural relativism, gave her a grudging compliment when he wrote: “Keller is a different can of worms entirely.” More sympathetically, the science writer Tom Wilkie told the Guardian in 2000 that her work “fills out a fuller picture of the relationship between science and the world around it”.
Keller was born in the New York borough of Queens, into a family of first-generation Jewish immigrants from what is now Belarus. Her father, Albert Fox, was largely absent as he ran a delicatessen in the city, and Keller recalled that her mother, Rachel (nee Paperny), was a fragile person who needed care from her children rather than the other way round.
Evelyn and her elder siblings, Maurice and Frances, flourished in the New York City high school system and all went on to academic careers. Evelyn first thought of becoming a psychoanalyst but, encouraged by her mathematical brother and a college professor, switched to physics and graduated from Brandeis University in Massachusetts in 1957.
The huge disappointment of her first year at Harvard as a graduate student was tempered by her experience of spending the summer with her brother at the Cold Spring Harbor laboratory on Long Island, where she first met McClintock and was “appropriately intimidated” by her. There she found a brilliant collection of scientists working flat out to understand the biological implications of the recent discovery of the structure of DNA.
They welcomed her expertise in theoretical physics and, as she put it, “treated [her] like a queen”. Returning to Harvard she chose to write her PhD thesis on theoretical aspects of molecular biology.
Moving to New York University in 1962, she began research in mathematical biology, and the following year married the mathematician Joseph Keller.
Despite the success of her work she faced challenges in juggling her roles as an academic and the mother of two small children, taking a series of short-term and part-time posts until she became an associate professor teaching natural sciences at the State University of New York at Purchase in 1972.
She separated from her husband, and began to think about the predicament of female scientists such as herself.
Well aware of the perils of anecdotal data, she undertook a statistical analysis and was appalled to discover the rate at which women dropped out of scientific careers. In 1974 she presented her findings as part of a lecture series at the University of Maryland on mathematical biology.
In that lecture she first proposed that women’s lack of success had nothing to do with their ability, but was a consequence of “the widespread belief that science was an inherently masculine endeavour”.
After 10 years as professor of mathematics and humanities at Northeastern University in Boston, during which she wrote her McLintock biography, in 1988 Keller consolidated her shift in discipline by accepting a chair in the history and philosophy of science at the University of California, Berkeley.
In 1992 she received a MacArthur fellowship (dubbed the “genius grant”) and moved to the science and technology studies programme at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she had previously held visiting fellowships and where she continued to research and teach until her retirement.
Her later books included The Century of the Gene (2000), in which she argued that the term gene had “come to outlive its usefulness”, a view that brought her into conflict with the British embryologist Lewis Wolpert, among others.
Keller relished debate and her arguments were always well prepared: she challenged the scientific community to recognise that not only the general public but also scientists themselves could sometimes be misled by metaphors such as the “selfish gene”. She went on to write about Wolpert’s own subject in her next book, Making Sense of Life, of which the physiologist and historian Matthew Cobb wrote: “An external view of our work can provide not only legitimate comment and study, but can also enrich our own understanding of what we are doing, and why.”
Keller received many prizes and honours, donating the $300,000 Dan David prize that she won in 2018 to Israeli organisations committed to defending human rights in Palestine. She continued to speak and publish into her 80s, and her favourite recreation was spirited debate around the dinner table with her many friends from the arts and sciences.
Concluding the memoir that she published in 2022, she reflected that, “Mine has clearly not been an easy life,” but that, in contrast to the dismissive predictions of her Harvard professors, “professionally, at least, I have obviously ‘made it’.”
Keller’s marriage ended in divorce in 1976. She is survived by her children, Jeffrey and Sarah, and granddaughters, Chloe and Cale, and by her sister. Her brother died in 2020.
• Evelyn Fox Keller, physicist, philosopher and feminist, born 20 March 1936; died 22 September 2023
