“I grew up in Boston in the projects, the Jamaica Plain Projects. I didn’t have any idea that there was a way out.”
A Woman’s Path: Lynda Marie Jordan, Scientist
It’s a steep uphill ascent for a poor inner-city black girl to become a world-class scientist. Especially since even on the cusp of the twenty-first century, only 1 percent of American scientists are minority women. Lynda speaks leisurely in a drawl acquired from going to school in the South-until the talk turns to science. Then she’s a woman transformed: her speech accelerates, her eyes sparkle. During Lynda’s sabbatical at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, a snowstorm slams the East Coast. As she winds up her story of science and self-discovery, the world outside has changed, too: the barren limbs are glistening with snow, and the ground is shimmering in winter white.
I grew up in Boston in the projects, the Jamaica Plain Projects. I didn’t have any idea that there was a way out.
What I saw was young poor women. My mother included. Young, poor women who were somehow disenfranchised from their mates-with children, with no education, and no money. And I was part of the struggle. Being the oldest of three children, my role was not one of a young child who was growing up and exploring. It was one of responsibility.
There’s one vivid memory that changed me. It was a time when we were waiting for the welfare check to come. If you know anything about the system, you know the checks never come on time when there are particular things that are very important. For example, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, Mother’s Day, on those holidays which exhibit family structure, the checks tend to be late. This was one of those times-it was Easter-when we were waiting for a check and we didn’t have any food. We were taking canned milk and diluting it with water so it could stretch.
Routinely the oldest child would be the one that waits, the one that has the responsibility to help the parent, the mother. So this is day number three that the check is late and I’m sitting downstairs, waiting for the mailman. And this time every apartment in the building has a representative there and we’re all like, “Is he coming? Is he coming?” And when he gets there, this public servant says, “No checks, ladies. Ha, ha, ha!” It was funny to him. I put my head down and said, “How in the world am I going to go upstairs and tell her?” I was angry because it wasn’t funny. To him it was like, Okay, you don’t have the check, but for us it was like, Okay, here’s another day that we’re going to have to survive and eat and we don’t know how. I was about ten years old and I decided I would not depend on the U.S. government for money. I couldn’t do it. I would not live like that.
When I was eleven my mother remarried and I was devastated. We’d gotten ourselves together, put our chin up, and become a family unit-the four of us, my mother and her three children. We’d just gotten ourselves stable to the point that my mother had recently gotten her high school diploma, she had a part-time job, and we were working our way off welfare. Then all of a sudden here was this man, this man that I didn’t know. It wasn’t only this man. It was this man with twelve children. Twelve children. They bought a ten-room house with one bathroom. We slept three and four to a room. Don’t make me laugh. If anybody wanted to take a bath, you had to go around and ask everyone if they wanted to use the bathroom, so you could have fifteen minutes of free time. To take a bath, really. It was a trip. We used to have to wake up in shifts. In addition, my mother had three more children. That’s another story. So altogether there were eighteen children. He was working and she started working full-time. She took care of children-in the home. More children. I’ m serious.
I was overwhelmed and angry. I started smoking cigarettes.
I’d ride the bus from where I lived all the way to downtown Boston, and I would also hang out on the corner of Blue Hill Avenue. Blue Hill Avenue was a long strip that was well-known in the black community. It was a place where there was a lot of drinking, a lot of smoking. I wasn’t doing alcohol, but I was thirteen, fourteen years old, right on the cusp of getting ready to learn other things. There’s a high pregnancy rate and I was getting ready to go to that level.
What kept me from that was the Upward Bound program. It was a mistake how I got there. Though I don’t call it a mistake. I say it’s fate. I say it’s God. We were in the girls’ gym and we were smoking cigarettes and the hall monitor smelled the smoke. Well, lo and behold, I did not want to get into trouble. So we split up and ran. I ran into the auditorium and there was a group of children sitting there with this big black man. I was like, Oh, I didn’t know this was going on. The hall monitor came in, so I sat down like I was part of the group. This man was talking to people about joining Upward Bound. The thing that got to me was that he said, “What are you going to do with the rest of your life? Stand on a corner on Blue Hill Avenue and smoke cigarettes?” It floored me because I thought, How does this man know this is what I do after school?
The thing that’s most significant is that the guidance counselors had selected who they thought should go to that meeting in the auditorium. I was not selected but I ended up going anyway. If it wasn’t for Upward Bound, I would not be here. I would have been a statistic, a person with five or six children, probably on welfare, and living in the projects.
I went to Upward Bound for the first time in the summer of my sophomore year of high school. It was a six-week program on the campus of Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. These people expected me to do my best, and there was no limitation on what the best was. I learned that I was capable. I was in a college preparatory chemistry class and it was difficult-the first time I’d ever had chemistry. In our home we hadn’t been able to afford a lot of toys, so what my mother had done was buy us jigsaw puzzles. You had to figure out how one hundred pieces went together to create this picture-say, a picture of a farmhouse with a boat and some trees and grass. I was used to doing my puzzles and escaping out. I attacked chemistry like it was one of those jigsaw puzzles.
They had a convocation to honor the top six kids. I was waiting there in the auditorium to see who these six children would be because this program was hard. We worked from six o’clock in the morning until eleven o’clock at night. They chose the six people who had the highest average. And I was one of them.
For the first time I felt like, Wow, maybe I am smart.
I don’t know why I’m crying. I’ve never cried before about this. I mean, that was the first time I realized that maybe I could do something. That was the first time I saw a door open as a way to get out of my situation . Education was the way to get out.
As part of the Upward Bound program we’d filled out applications to college. Usually what happens when a girl in my family graduates from high school is that they go to Boston Business School and become a secretary, and then they go back and help out the family. In terms of my immediate family, there was no one who had gone to college before. So you can imagine, in order for me to even apply to school-this is a new thing for my family structure. Here I was, breaking all these ties, and my family did not understand. They did not understand why I had to go to school.
It was suggested to me that I go to a black college so I could be around strong black women and see them as role models for what I wanted to do in life. I went to North Carolina A & T State University in Greensboro. I was a chemistry major, but my goal was to go to medical school. A lot of kids think if you mess up your first year, it’s over. I was not an A student my first year. People need to know that.
I was playing around and still making B’s in chemistry and enjoying partying. It’s good to make A’s, but if you don’t, don’t cry over spilled milk. Pick yourself up and keep going.
My junior year I went to a Harvard University summer program. I was going on rotations with doctors and I was squirming. But when they talked about biochemistry, I let everything else go. The teacher talked about medicine at a different level. He talked about diabetes, and the malfunction in glucose metabolism as it related to diabetes, and I was excited.
I matriculated at Atlanta University and did my research at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta-that’s one of three black medical schools in the country-and again it was biochemistry, the biochemistry of diseases, that excited me.
Chemistry is the study of molecules. What makes it so significant is that we’re studying chemistry of the biological system. We’re seeing how reactions occur inside the cell. And the most fantastic part is that we’re relating it to living things-plants, animals, and most important, humans.
I was completing my master’s and I was going to get me a job somewhere-at a pharmaceutical company, a chemical company. But I’d also filled out the Minority Locator, the student locator service of the GRE, and they contacted my school. My chemistry professor called me into his office and said, “MIT’s interested in you applying for your Ph.D.” I didn’t pay him any attention. I’d gone to school for six years. I was twenty-three years old. I was on my way out to get me a job and have a life.
A few weeks later, he paged me in my dorm on Saturday morning and literally brought me to his office, locked me in a room, and left me with the MIT application. He was an MIT graduate himself, and he said, “You’re not leaving here until you fill it out.” If you’ve ever seen the application, it’s crazy it’s so long. He came back about one o’clock and threw in a box of chicken so I could eat.
I come from poor inner-city blacks. I remember one time, this is when I was, say, around eight or nine, I had a conversation with my mother on one of our outings. There’s a bridge that separates Cambridge from Boston, and there’s a saying in the Boston community that “the bus stops at the bridge.” If you want to get to the other side, you have to walk. My mother and I did a lot of walking in the summer. We were sitting there on the Cambridge side of the Charles River. There’s some benches there and you can get a breeze.
I’d turned away from where it looks toward Boston and said, “Ma, what’s this?” She said, “That’s MIT.” I said, “What’s MIT? It’s so nice, it’s so beautiful.” She said, “That’s where rich white people go. Don’t worry about it. You’ll never get to go there.” She was being real, to her.
And then these people invite me to go there.
My mom was elated. She was like, “I don’t believe it. You must be smart if you’re going to MIT.” It took her all that time to realize it.
My first day at MIT I was at a graduate get-together. I’m sitting there and I’m waiting and I’m seeing all these different people and I wait and I wait and I wait. And I look and I look and I just keep waiting for someone else to come. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was waiting for other black people. I didn’t know until they said, “Let’s sit down,” that the whole class-about sixty to seventy people-was there. I looked around, and said, “Oh, my God, I’m it.”
That was the first time in my life that I’d felt like I was a minority. There was one Chinese woman. She looked at me and I looked at her, and I mean, we clung. Only three African American females have graduated with a Ph.D. in chemistry from MIT to this day. I was one of the three.
The thing that’s important to me is that during that difficult first year, this guy, this chemistry professor who took me to his office and gave me that tremendous application, he came to my lab and visited me. He was from Atlanta and he’d just show up in Cambridge. This is significant because I was going through a whole lot of crap and it was a crucial moment. I’d say to him, “Why am I doing this?” He’d say, “Your degree is not just for you. It’s for other people.”
What he meant is that from my success I’d open doors for other minorities. It wasn’t only the fact that I was an African American female, but that I was an African American female from a low sociological background in the Boston area. All those things were significant at MIT, and are still significant at MIT today. There is still this ideology that intellect is correlated with finances.
I don’t know how to explain how it is being black and poor in America, but it’s like if you’re successful then you’re pioneering a role for someone else. That was enough to keep me going.
There was a point at MIT when I was working on my dissertation research and I finally felt, I’m Lynda Jordan, a scientist. I wanted to figure out how this particular flavin played a role in the electron-reduction process of this enzyme. My adviser had one postulation of how it worked, and I had another. And mine worked. That was fantastic. Those things legitimate you, and you say, Okay, I’m a scientist.
In 1985, when I was twenty-nine years old, I was accepted to do postdoc work in Paris as a Ford Fellow at the Pasteur Institute. For the first time in my life I was working with a woman, a female scientist, who was married with children, who is an M.D./Ph.D., and her husband is an M.D.A. man who has no problem cooking dinner while she’s in the lab, which is wonderful.
I’d been in Paris for about ten months when I got married. He was a musician. This is very interesting. I think girls who want to go into science need to know this. One of the things young girls think about is who they will marry. Some of my colleagues in science, my male colleagues in particular, say, This is not related. I say, Yes, it is. Because that child’s choice in a man is going to make a significant impact if she’s going to be able to make an investment in a scientific career, or if she’s going to give it up.
In the twenty-first century, I hope men are able to accept women who are smarter, who have chosen different types of careers, and men are able to take that nontraditional role of maybe doing the cooking because tonight she’s running this experiment with this compound and it took her six months to synthesize it and she’s right in the middle and she has three more hours to wait, and if she leaves, it’s shot. And to understand that it fell on your birthday and I got your present and I love you, honey, but I won’t be home until eleven o’clock. Can you handle it?
What happened in my marriage was that he could not handle that I didn’t have a conventional life. He was a musician, so if I had a late night in the lab, when I was coming in, he was leaving to go out to play.
Bastille Day, July 14, is a big day in France and it’s a beautiful thing and I wanted to spend time with him, but I had to do this experiment. I couldn’t let my collaborator down. And so we made this wonderful lunch and put it in a picnic basket and brought it to my lab. That was one of the good times. I put him at the computer where he was learning how to type the lyrics to his music while I was working in the laboratory. It was definitely easier for him when I was the one sitting there waiting for him to finish his work-like I did a whole lot of times when he was in the studio — rather than him waiting for me to finish my work. It’s difficult for women who are scientists-whether they are geologists, astronauts, or oceanographers-unless their mates are scientists, and that doesn’t happen a lot.
My husband is still doing lyrics, but not with me. The marriage between music and science stopped in 1989. My husband had difficulty accepting that I-Doctor Lynda Jordan-was the intellectual heavyweight in our relationship.
When I was thirty-one and separated, I came back and started building a lab at North Carolina A & T State University where I would continue studying PLA2. PLA2 is involved in various diseases like asthma, arthritis, diabetes.
It wasn’t like I just came in and ran a lab. I had to build a lab. We had nothing. I went there on Sundays, put on jeans and a scarf over my head, and cleaned out crud myself. I wanted a facility where we’d have the opportunity to perform top-notch research. It was a continuous process, but I raised over a million dollars.
Now a lot of people are offering me positions at the administrative level at other universities. I’m at a crossroads because in academia when you get promoted you go into administration, a deanship. But I’d be going away from my heart. I don’t want to leave the bench.
I want to be considered an intelligent human being, an intelligent, full-figured, short-haired, African American woman who is making a documented contribution to society and to science. This is important. Let’s be real. When you think of a scientist, who do you think of? You don’t think of me. When you think of an African American woman, what comes into your mind-an entertainer. Maybe Ella. Or Josephine Baker. After I returned from Paris, one of my colleagues at this Beta Kappa Chi National Science Honor Society meeting told me, “You look just like a gospel singer.” I said, “I am a scientist! I am with you! I am your colleague!” Scientists come in all shapes, sizes, colors, and heights.
To be a scientist you have to be an independent thinker, you have to be a risk-taker.
You have to go beyond what anyone thinks would work, and you go on your own heart and your own intuition, and you try it anyway. You have to be willing to sacrifice everything.
There was a lot of sacrifice in a family that did not know how to support a first-generation college student, that did not know why I couldn’t come home for Easter, that did not know why I had to go out and do something like this. Breaking through my socioeconomic background and feeling isolated and alone-it’s been some sacrifice. All for the love of science. For the love, check this out, of doing what you believe that you were put on this earth to do.
Is all the sacrifice worth it? Is it worth it? It’s worth every bit of it when I see my first student get a Ph.D. and she didn’t even know she was capable of it and she’s not thirty years old and she’s doing her postdoc at Rutgers and she’s married successfully and her husband’s taking a nontraditional role. It’s worth it. It’s worth it. It’s worth it. It’s hard but it’s worth it.
At this historic time when the country is on the brink of electing our first woman President, my book A Woman’s Path resonates even more today than when it was published in 1998. In profiles of 30 incredible woman who are doing interesting work, the women answer the question: How do you get to do that? I want to share these fascinating stories of women succeeding in the workplace.
