When Marianne Schiffer is asked to tell about the submicroscopic world she has been studying for the last 25 years, the conversation quickly bogs down in scientific terms, each one harder to understand than the last.
But ask for a glimpse into that world, and her excitement about science becomes infectious.
Schiffer is head of the Biophysics Section at Argonne National Laboratories, near Lemont, one of four women and 175 men who hold the prestigious title of senior scientist at the lab.
Her specialty is protein molecules.
A short, sturdy woman of 56, Schiffer speaks slowly and deliberately, an accent revealing her Eastern European upbringing. Her gray hair, done up in a twist, is secured with a wide leather barrette.
Only when she sits at her computer screen does the layer of shyness disappear.
”Just wait until you see this one,” Schiffer says with the enthusiasm of a school girl. Inviting her visitor to look through a 3-D viewer that comes out from the screen like wings, she twirls a dial to call up the image of an important protein molecule called the photosynthetic reaction center.
To the untrained eye it is a spectacular work of art, a beautiful design of coils and angles vividly colored thanks to the magic of cutting-edge interactive computer graphics.
Schiffer spins more dials to zero in on one portion of the image to examine it more carefully.
The photosynthetic reaction center, a maze of more than 7,000 atoms, is where photosynthesis takes place. Hidden in its structure is one of nature`s most closely held secrets: how light is turned into chemical energy.
Without photosynthesis only the most primitive organisms could survive on Earth. There would be no plants, animals or man.
Scientists seeing the molecule on the computer screen for the first time have called it a religious experience. Laymen, too, sense the excitement.
The technique Schiffer uses to study its structure is crystallography. X- rays are bounced off the protein molecule crystal to form patterns. By analyzing the patterns, the crystallographer can determine how the atoms that make up the molecule are laid out. Once scientists understand its structure, all kinds of secrets are revealed.
Schiffer also studies antibody structures. Antibodies are nature`s tools for fighting disease.
”By seeking more understanding about the structure of these molecules, researchers one day may know how to make better vaccines,” says Schiffer, explaining that her work is basic research, the first step on a complex chain of knowledge.
At Argonne, she works closely with chemist James Norris in the work on the photosynthetic reaction center. Together they are part of the worldwide effort to unravel the puzzle of how photosynthesis works.
But that`s not the only puzzle that fascinates Schiffer. Back in her cubbyhole office, stacked high with scientific publications (she tries to keep up in an explosive field of knowledge), Schiffer talked about another quandary: why more women aren`t successful in science.
According to an August 1991 article in American Scientist, ”Women are still seriously under-represented in the sciences, and they have made comparatively little progress in the past five years.”
Schiffer believes roadblocks discouraging women from pursuing science careers are thrown up early in their lives. She remembers her daughter Celia`s 2nd-grade teacher. While showing off the science corner in the classroom, the teacher said, ”The boys like to go there to read.”
Celia, who today is studying for a doctorate in biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco, apparently didn`t get the message.
Celia remembers growing up in a close-knit family with her parents asking more questions than the kids. Her father, John, is a noted physicist at Argonne. Her brother Peter, 24, is now a physics graduate student at Stanford University.
”My parents asked a lot of questions and made us think about what is going on in the world around us. On the other hand, they didn`t push science down our throats,” said Celia, who grew up with only a vague understanding of her mother`s work.
”I have an image of being in a room with a mirror and lots of things hanging in it. It was an early technology that I only learned about once I started graduate school,” she said, obviously proud of her mother`s accomplishments.
The intellectually exciting atmosphere in the Schiffer home ”came naturally,” according to Schiffer`s husband, John: ”If you`re interested in many things, that atmosphere is transmitted to the children.”
He said he is proudest of his wife for the way she managed to develop in her career and the way their family functioned.
”She did extremely well in both these areas. We enjoy our family and we enjoy each other,” he said.
Having two scientists in the same family made it ”easy to get along,”
said John. ”We can always talk with each other about the problems we are concerned with.”
Explaining her mother`s work with photosynthesis, Celia Schiffer said,
”Understanding photosynthesis is understanding energy harvesting. If you can understand the structure of that molecule and how it is able to take a beam of light and make it into electricity, you`ve understood a very powerful phenomenon, one that affects a lot of things.”
To Celia and her young women colleagues who are striving to get ahead in the fiercely competitive scientific world, Marianne Schiffer is an important role model.
”It`s nice to know you don`t have to be weird to be a scientist, that you can be somebody`s mother,” said one of Celia`s friends.
To Marianne Schiffer, science is fun and exciting. That`s the message she likes to convey to young women, such as the 200 college students who attended the Waterfall Glen Science Careers in Search of Women conferences held at Argonne in 1987 and 1989. Schiffer was one of the organizers of the events.
Also at Argonne, she started the First Friday Women`s Forum with another senior scientist, Margaret Butler. The forum is a monthly luncheon where women scientists, from students on up, get together to talk about their work and challenges in a male-dominated world.
It was Schiffer`s leadership role encouraging young women to pursue science careers and her own scientific career that led to her being named an Outstanding Women Leader of Du Page by the YWCA in 1990.
Regardless of her own success, she laments the fact that progress for other women in science has been slow.
For one reason, too few decision makers share the attitude of Schiffer`s own division director at Argonne.
”I judge people by whether they`re good or bad scientists,” said Eliezer Huberman, director of the Division of Biological and Medical Research. ”If they are male, female, red, green, blue, square, round, that is of no concern to me. I consider Marianne Schiffer to be an outstanding scientist; by coincidence she is also a woman.”
Schiffer can barely remember when she didn`t love science. As a child, she had trouble with writing and spelling. To improve her skills, a cousin spent hours dictating to her from a book called ”Little Scientist.” The science stuck; writing remained difficult.
Growing up in Hungary during the 1940s and `50s, Schiffer`s childhood and adolescence were fraught with fear, leaving toughness rather than scars.
At age 9 she was hidden in a convent during the Nazi invasion. Her parents were shipped off to concentration camps on separate trains. They both narrowly escaped death when they were rescued by Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat credited with saving the lives of 100,000 concentration camp-bound victims during the closing days of World War II.
Later, during the Stalinist hysteria of the early 1950s, her family was once again plucked from a comfortable Budapest apartment and forced to spend the next two years living in a single room in a peasant family`s cottage.
”This was our darkest time,” Marianne Schiffer recalled.
Although she was a star student at a chemistry high school in Budapest, Marianne had to give up her studies. The family was not allowed to leave the perimeter of the village. With Stalin`s death, regulations loosened, but Marianne was not accepted at the university nor was anyone allowed to leave Hungary. Only when the Hungarian Revolution opened a crack in the door to the West did the family escape.
Arriving at Camp Kilmer in New Jersey in 1957, she and her parents had the clothes on their back and little else. Schiffer quickly discovered, however, that ”we`d been dropped into paradise.” Three weeks later, she was accepted at Smith College, part of a special program for gifted refugee students arranged by the World University Service.
After the end of the first semester at Smith (her first schooling beyond high school in Hungary), she was offered a choice: ”Do you want a bachelor`s or a master`s degree next year?” she was asked. Earning a master`s degree in a year and a half, she enrolled in a doctorate program at Columbia University in New York and came to Argonne in 1961, where she completed her work toward a doctorate.
By the mid-1960s, she had already made a name for herself in science by being the first to describe the helical wheel, an important tool used by biochemists today in their study of protein molecules. It`s a standard way of predicting which segments of a protein are helical or spiral shaped.
Schiffer was also one of the key members of the important Argonne research team that solved the first antibody crystal structure in the early 1970s.
”By 1974, this Argonne group was one of the most productive research groups in the nation in the crystallography field,” said Edwin Westbrook, director of the Structural Biology Center at Argonne.
Her latest work with antibodies may be a breakthrough for scientists trying to figure out how the body controls diseases.
”It challenges the long-held `lock and key` theory that each antibody forms only one structure,” said an Argonne press communique, explaining that Schiffer`s discovery could help explain how the body can produce enough different antibodies to fight off an infinite variety of disease organisms.
Her enthusiasm for science has never waned. ”Maybe you shouldn`t tell anyone how much I enjoy my work,” says Schiffer with a wry smile. ”They may not let me do it.”
