Q&A: Marcia McNutt

Marcia McNutt, president of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) has a resume that would make a Nobel laureate blush. Among her many, many accomplishments, the sub-going oceanographer can boast high school valedictorian, a perfect SAT score, B.A. summa cum laude from Colorado College, doctor of earth sciences from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Griswold Professor of Geophysics at M.I.T., fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Scientist of the Year, Chair of the President’s Panel on Ocean Exploration, and, of course, U.S. Navy Seal training in underwater demolition and explosives handling.

Now 55, the Minnesota native has participated in 15 major oceanographic expeditions (leading half of them) and authored nearly 100 peer-reviewed scientific papers. Yet she still finds time to encourage young women to get into the sciences and to move up its ranks. In January, McNutt traveled to the Arab Organisations Headquarters in Kuwait to address a conference on women leaders in science, technology and engineering. We wanted to know more.

How did you end up as a geophysicist?
We were on the block system at Colorado College, where you’d take one course at a time. I signed up for Intro Geology for my first two blocks. We packed up our backpacks, rolled up our sleeping bags, and spent two months in the Rocky Mountains learning about the geology. We figured out four billion years of history using common sense - no books. That method, and the grandeur of the forces of nature, had a huge impact on me. I ultimately decided not to major in geology and opted for physics instead because I had an uncomfortable sense that people were waving their arms about phenomena in geology; geologists were still invoking mysterious vertical forces that would push Earth’s crust up and down. Then when I learned about plate tectonics two years later, the Rocky Mountains just fell into place.

So no more mysterious forces?
After the plate tectonics revolution, which began to spread to places like Colorado College while I was a student there, it became clear that these vertical motions were but a minor consequence of very much larger lateral translations of Earth’s tectonic plates. The driving forces were not something mysterious, but simply the cooling of the plates themselves.

Attending grad school at Scripps right as plate tectonics science emerged must have been amazing.
It was a good time. The seminal papers in plate tectonics were written in late 1960s. I graduated from college in 1973. I remember reading the very first Scientific American article on tectonics, written that year by John Dewey. Starting grad school in ‘73 was so exciting because it meant that as a student, rather than reading decades of prior dogma, no paper prior to that time really mattered much. All of my cruises going out to sea were staffed by fellow graduate students. We were the people making the observations in the field when many of the older scientists weren’t ready to embrace the revolution. It was wide open for young students and postdocs ready to accept new models and run with them. It was equivalent to becoming a biologist right after Darwin writes Origin, or going into physics right after Einstein writes the theory of relativity, or going into genetics right after Watson and Crick discover the double helix. Suddenly, a blueprint shows the way and everything needs to be filled in according to that blueprint.

You left MIT in 1998 to help make MBARI into the cutting-edge research institute it is today. How would you describe it?
We’re sort of the NASA of the oceans. NASA builds the cool hardware and the neat space vehicles and provides the country - if not the world - with access to space. MBARI is a private institution, but it also takes on the high-risk, long lead-time projects that develop the cool new tools and the avant-garde projects that fundamentally change our relationship with the ocean.

So what’s the most avant-garde project at MBARI these days?
Ocean observatories. The principal way that researchers study the ocean is in expeditionary mode: Scientists go out on ships for 30 days, make measurements, collect data, then come back. But that’s not the way the ocean functions. It functions in events. There’s a major storm, fish spawn, an undersea volcano eruption, a plankton bloom. In expeditionary mode, you’re generally not going to be there when these things happen. A better way to catch the events in action is to develop technology that can be there seven days a week, 365 days a year and relay the data back to shore.

So these observatories are sort of like the International Space Station of the sea?
Except these are unmanned. Some observatories will be on the bottom of the ocean, some at the surface. The challenge has been to create instruments that can have power and communication for at least a year. At the surface, you can use solar. But at bottom, we have to be more creative.

Rising to the top and succeeding in such a demanding field must have taken a lot of ambition and hard work. What has driven you?
I’ve never thought of myself as a hard-driving person. But I have only daughters, three of them. And I come from a family of only sisters. My mother has two sisters, and my mother’s mother had five sisters. So I come from a long line of women. I was talking to a friend the other day who commented on how well my daughters did in a horse-riding competition. He said that they just don’t know how to lose. That statement was more describing a mental attitude than anything, and maybe that’s what it was with me too; a mental place. I was there to do well.

Have you ever felt that you were being treated differently than if you were a man in the same role?
I guess very early on when I was a graduate student I probably noticed that there were awkward moments. Especially when I’d go out on research vessels when women rarely did. But I’ve been in oceanography for so long now that many of the people at other institutions were students or shipmates with me. I don’t think they even think of me in a gender role anymore. It’s just a zero issue now. Young women starting out in oceanography don’t face any of the issues that I did. Students in many of the sciences are at least 50 percent female today. But there’s attrition going up the ranks. By the time you get to institute director there are very few women.

Have there been changes in the number or acceptance of female scientists over the years?
I’ve definitely seen changes in the numbers of females in the early ranks, but I’m still not seeing enough change at the top. I’m frankly coming to the conclusion that this is boiling down to a lifestyle decision. It may not even be all that specific to science, although science, particularly oceanography, is harder. For example, how are you going to go out to sea for a month at a time if you have a two-month old baby? With the ocean observatories you can be home, with your data coming to you over the Internet.

How did you come to speak at the conference in Kuwait for women leaders in science?
I was invited by the state department, who co-sponsored that event with AAAS [the American Association for the Advancement of Science] and several organizations in the Middle East. The goal was to promote the careers of women scientists in the region. Because of tradition and customs, women in the Middle East haven’t had as much opportunity in the sciences commensurate with their ability.

What did you talk about?
The title of my talk was “Professional Development for Women.” On the surface, that sounds dry. But I focused on the contributions of young women here [at MBARI] and the discoveries they’ve made. Like Shannon Johnson and Shana Goffredi, who worked in Bob Vrijenhoek’s lab on worms called Osedax that feed on whale carcasses on the seafloor. These worms have dwarf males, and the females actually have male harems. For women in the Middle East to hear about other young women whose work made Discover magazine’s top 100 stories - they were really impressed. They latched onto this idea of Osedax immediately. They kept referring to this worm for the rest of the meeting. Even the male organizers were talking about how their goals were to change the status for women lest they be turned to spineless, gutless, male parasites.

Do you think women will be playing a leading role in science in the future?
It’s hard to look into a crystal ball on something like this. I think women leaders of interdisciplinary teams are very balanced in terms of their recognition of the contributions of various team members. I think they’re good at keeping project teams moving, and good at keeping track of the details as well as the big picture. Women don’t tend to get bogged down in ego things as much. They don’t tend to get sidetracked by the “I’m the star” issues that can easily derail projects.

What do you say to encourage women in their pursuit of scientific careers?
I’d just say that it’s just a wonderfully exciting and rewarding life. So many times I’ve run into young women who look at the list of cool discoveries that have been made, and rather than being energized by them they think, “Gosh, everything’s already been discovered.” But each year, the list doubles. Discovery in the ocean goes on unabated. I got in on the ground floor, but everyone starting out in oceanography today is still getting in on the ground floor - that’s what’s so amazing about being an oceanographer. The other thing that’s rewarding for me is that my kids love what I do. Even though they themselves have chosen other majors, they all agree that I have the coolest job in the world.