TRANSCRIPT OF PENELOPE WALDEN'S ADDRESS TO THE MIT WOMEN IN SCIENCE STUDY GROUP, MARCH 22, 2009:
Greetings, ladies! I can't tell you how gratified I am to be here with you today. And not because I simply like hearing myself talk, either. [laughter] No, I'm gratified to be in the presence of so many young women who, like me, share an interest in the sciences. I won't pretend that we all share an identical interest; my field is chemistry, but yours may be robotics or genetics or astrophysics. We don't share a common discipline, but we speak a common language. We are all specialized in different fields, we all have different interests, but we all share that common love, that desire to understand just how the world works.
It has not been easy, pursuing that interest. Many of you, in fact most of you, have had to endure the discouragement of your peers. You've probably all heard it from someone during your academic careers, hurtful phrases like, 'Women aren't smart enough to study science', or 'Women don't have the intellectual discipline for this field', or even 'You should concentrate on finding a good husband instead'. We've all heard phrases like that. Many men have said phrases like that to me. In fact, one of them is licking my boots right now. [nervous laughter]
But all of us here have persevered through that discouragement, and due to the pioneering work of the women who have come before us, we have to battle less of it now than ever. Women are accepted as scientists, even encouraged to enter the scientific fields that were once barred from them. You have all traveled further along the path than the women before you, and you can hold your heads up high for that. [applause]
There is still a field, though, in which the female scientist is woefully underrepresented. Some of you have refused to enter that field through choice, but all too many of you have been discouraged from joining the most exciting branch of science of all. Some of you may not even know of its existence. I speak here, of course, of mad science.
[scattered murmurs of confusion] Of course, most of you are wondering exactly what I'm talking about. Surely mad science is the province of late-night movies and bad science-fiction novels, right? No. There is only one difference between the mad scientist and his weaker, less adventurous peers in the mainstream. The regular scientist desires to understand how the world works. The mad scientist desires to understand how the world works
so they can control it.
Think about it. Many of you have probably began an experiment not just with the plan to understand a phenomenon, but with concrete goals on what to use that phenomenon for once you've understood it. Perhaps you planned to build a robot to take out the trash. Perhaps you planned to use behavioral conditioning to train your roommate to do your homework. Maybe you planned to demolish Cleveland with a genetically engineered giant ferret. In all these cases, your peers, your teachers, your friends and your family discouraged you. They dismissed your ideas. They called you 'weird'.
I say to you today, ladies, there is no such thing as 'weird science'. There is only 'mad science', and it's time we started practicing it right alongside the men! [scattered applause]
I was once like you, a humble chemistry student toiling nights in my basement. My schooling was substandard; I dropped out of college due to disputes over an attitude they claimed was "arrogant", "amoral", "unethical", even "unstable." Notice the words, ladies. When a man creates brand-new recreational drugs, they call him 'mad'. When a woman does it, they call her 'unstable'. This kind of language-based gender discrimination continues on campuses today.
Despite my lack of formal training, though, my work continued. I didn't even know what 'mad science' was, then; I only knew that when I gave someone their first hit of Scatterbrain and watched as they asked me seven times in four minutes what they'd taken that I had created something unique, something inventive, something that would show everyone who had mocked me just what a brilliant chemist I truly was. I had conquered not just the chemistry of the human brain, not just the person whose ability to concentrate was reduced to that of a spastic lemur, but everyone who had ever doubted me. I felt that same surge of power that any good mad scientist feels. And you can feel it too.
