Ruth Hubbard

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 returned to Radcliffe in 1946 in pursuit of her doctorate in biology.

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.

Hubbard describes an instance where she was working with squid as one of the pivotal moments where her interests shifted from scientific research to social relevance.

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.

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.

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 1967, she and George Wald shared the Paul Karrer Gold Medal for their work in this area.

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.

Hubbard made many important contributions to the visual sciences but her single most important contribution was the fact that visual excitation is initiated by a chemical rearrangement of the visual pigment (rhodopsin) which is called a cis-trans isomerization.

She showed that this is the only direct action of light on the visual system.

She also identified the specific intermediate in the visual cycle (called metarhodopsin2) that leads to downstream effects, that culminate in a light-activated neural signaling to the brain Hubbard also described the bleaching and resynthesis of the rhodopsin molecule each time a photon is absorbed.

She also discovered retinene isomerase (now called RPE65) that converts all-trans retinal (the post-illumination form) back into 11-cis retinal.

She also studied the visual pigments in several new species.

Her early work focused on the basic properties of rhodopsin, which is a combination of the chromophore (retinal) and a protein called opsin, which is reutilized in the resynthesis of rhodopsin.

Hubbard published at least 31 scientific papers devoted to vision.