Susan Hockfield on Biotech Innovation and Helping Women Break the “Opaque” Ceiling

Breaking the glass ceiling so many women face is especially tough because the glass isn't clear, it's opaque, making it difficult for women to see what's on the other side, says Dr. Susan Hockfield, President Emerita of MIT. As the first woman to lead MIT, Susan has had a distinguished career in higher education and science and is a leading voice when it comes to enabling women founders and getting more women in science into boardrooms. I recently spoke with Susan about tech revolutions and what we can do to bust that opaque ceiling.

Sue Siegel: In your book, "The Age of Living Machines: How Biology Will Build the Next Technology Revolution," you noted that we've entered a new era of scientific innovation—and at a critical moment, too. Why are you focused on the convergence of biology with engineering?

Susan Hockfield: I'm committed to helping to make the future better for all of us, and I've had the privilege of getting a glimpse of a new set of emerging technologies that could have enormous positive impact. If you think about the most transformative technology advances of the 20th century, they're digital technologies, hands down. These digital advances have developed from discoveries of the structure of the atom by J.J. Thomson and many others around the beginning of that century. The discovery of the electron (and proton and neutron) gave physics a "parts list." Engineers love parts lists, and they adopted the newly described atomic parts to build electronics. The electronics industry was the precursor of the computer and information industries of our digital era.

The 21st century's technology revolution combines a new parts list, from biology, with engineering. The discovery of biology's parts really took off in the 1940s and '50s, in a field we now call molecular biology. Understanding the basic components that control cell function and heredity (DNA, RNA and proteins), gave us a "parts list," which is now used in biotech (such as the new Covid vaccines that use modified mRNA packaged in novel lipid nanoparticles) and well beyond biotech.

The convergence of engineering and biology is rapidly accelerating. When I arrived at MIT in 2004, a third of the roughly 400 faculty in the School of Engineering were using biological "parts" in their work. Now engineers and scientists everywhere are using this convergence paradigm as the foundation of innovations for tomorrow.

It's always a huge challenge to imagine future technologies with any accuracy. Thomson did not discover the electron with the aim of creating the cell phone, and James Watson, Francis Crick, Rosalind Franklin, and Maurice Wilkins didn't discover the structure of DNA so that we could have mRNA vaccines today. (It’s one of the reasons why federal support for fundamental discovery is one of the most important catalysts for innovation.) One strategy to designing the future we'll be living in tomorrow is to understand how we arrived at the future we're living in today, to find some clues for the path to our better future.

SS: What is an example of that convergence that you are excited about?

SH: There are so many really amazing technologies now emerging. One of them aims to address our global, woeful shortage of clean water by using a biology-based solution to change the game for water purification. About 30 years ago, Peter Agre, an astonishing physician-scientist, discovered (accidentally!) a protein that he named "aquaporin," the first of a family of related proteins. Aquaporins are natural proteins whose job is to purify water. Every cell in our bodies, every cell in every living organism, uses a variant of the aquaporin protein as a channel to filter water into and out of cells. A new water purification company in Denmark, Aquaporin, makes this protein (in huge quantities) and builds filters that purify water, in the home or at an industrial scale. Typically, water purification has relied on chemical engineering to build water filters, but they're expensive and energy-intensive. Peter Holme Jensen, the co-founder of Aquaporin, told me that it would be hard to come up with a better solution than the biological one: "I could bust my brain trying to invent a new water filter, or I could just use nature’s genius." And his company, Aquaporin A/S, does just that.

SS: Let's do a little brain busting of our own. Not long ago some MIT members, including you, launched the Boston Biotech Working Group (BBWG), noting that women face enormous challenges when it comes to getting their ideas funded. Tell us about that.

SH: MIT is known as a place where good ideas and patents get turned into businesses that produce marketplace products. For decades, MIT has worked very hard to increase the number of women undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs and faculty. Yet, when the BBWG examined the rate of faculty founding companies, we found a big gender disparity: putting it simply, if MIT's women faculty had founded companies at the same rate as men, there would have been more than 40 additional new companies. Imagine the new pharmaceuticals, new therapies, new diagnostics, new technologies in all fields, that could have been developed!

Perhaps those MIT data shouldn't have been a surprise, given that across the nation, in the first eight months of 2021, businesses founded solely by women raised just 2.2% of all venture funding. This is a problem for our nation—and our world—we're not making the best use of our resources. At MIT we've launched a number of initiatives that pave paths for more of our faculty—and more equitably—to move their discoveries into life- and world-changing products.

SS: You have served on many corporate boards. In the spirit of understanding what's happening today so we can get to our future: what, beyond mandates, is the key to getting more qualified women in science and academia in these seats and building strong, diverse boards?

SH: We need constant, unwavering focus from leadership to identify new sources of talent. There's a kind of intransigence in the narrow networks where people currently look for board candidates. Going back to the same old well again and again will only yield the same candidates. We need to actively broaden existing networks, as well as build new networks, to identify new sources of talent. We also need to educate the "accidental misogynists" in those networks. I often hear that women don't have the experience to be on a board. However, boards of younger and smaller companies often include early career men faculty, but few, if any women faculty, even though women faculty could be identified with equivalent accomplishments.

Boards themselves should drive this effort aggressively. We've seen around the world and country that if companies don't diversify their boards on their own, legislation and oversight bodies will require them to do it.

I often used to say as president of MIT that if we wanted to make the game fair for all, I couldn’t take my eye off the ball for a second because it would get kicked off the field. We cannot sit back and assume things will change. The expectations for women are often much higher, that you have to run faster, jump higher. Many men serving on boards have never held a leadership position beforehand, but they are experts in their fields. I know plenty of women who are as expert in their fields but have not been invited to join boards.

And it's not just Boards of Directors. Scientific advisory boards tend to be predominantly (or only) men, even though there are women who are among the undisputed leaders in their fields. By opening the aperture through which we view future board members and leaders, we can give women opportunities to develop the experience to be on a board.

We often hear the description of "the glass ceiling," but it’s not glass: it's an opaque ceiling, because you can't see beyond it. You don't know there are conversations going on past that ceiling that you're not part of, because they're invisible to you. Once someone has crossed over, then I think the ceiling becomes glass because you actually see a path. That's the wisdom behind a now-current adage, "If you can see it, you can be it."

SS: So much of what influences us starts early in our lives. You've said you were interested in how things work from an early age. How were you encouraged early on?

SH: I grew up in the '50s with three sisters, and it is kind of miraculous that my parents didn't discourage any of us from doing whatever captured our interest. They encouraged our curiosity.

When I was young, I had this drive to take things apart so I could understand how they worked. I was not that interested in putting things back together. When I disassembled my mother's iron (and don't recall putting it back together!), I don't remember any bad outcome or disapproval. Thinking back, my father was both an electrical engineer and a lawyer, and fixed everything around the house. So I'm guessing that he, very quietly in the background, must have reassembled the endless trail of disassembled objects I left behind.

SS: What are your favorite activities outside of work?

SH: I always have several non-fiction books and news publications on my bedside table, and I play tennis and paddle tennis—at a very amateur level, just for fun. I learned in graduate school the importance of physical activity to clear my head to get my thoughts in order.  I've always loved walking the beach; when I was writing the book, I found that beach walking, in the company of just the wind and the waves, helped me to find the storyline again. I still do a lot of beach walking, often joined by Bingley, our Golden Retriever. 

Susan with her husband, Thomas Byrne, MD, and their dog, Bingley