UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM

Interview #751
SEAVEY, BEVERLY

Narrator: 	Seavey, Beverly
Interviewer: 	Sandy Pfahler
Date: 		2006
Location: 	Madison, Wisconsin
Oral History#:	751
Series: 		Women in Science and Engineering

00:00:00	Start of First Interview Session

SP:	My name is Sandy Pfahler from the University of Wisconsin Madison Oral History Project. Today I'm interviewing Beverly Seavey, a pre-doctoral trainee in the Department of Computer Sciences. It is Wednesday, March 15th, 2006. 

00:00:21

SP:	Beverly, would you start by talking about your childhood and your schooling, where you grew up, where you went to elementary school, high school, and anything you'd like to talk to us about that influenced your life. 

BS:	Well, I grew up in a small town that had 500 people when we first-- we moved there when I was three months old, near Cape Cod in Massachusetts. It was a very small town. I don't know what else. But I grew up knowing that I would be a scientist. 

SP:	Did you go to public school? 

BS:	Yes, I did. People these days, if they don't like the public schools, they often home school or go to a private school, but when my father saw that the schools were not perfect, up to his standards, he ran for school committee and became chairman of the board and made some changes. And that's more public minded than a lot of what I see now. 

SP:	Sure. What did your parents do? 

BS:	My father's an engineer. He graduated from MIT. My mother was a stay-at-home mom for a long time. When I was in high school, she went back to being a librarian, which is what she had done during the war and before we were all born. 

SP:	So you have brothers and sisters? 

BS:	I have two sisters. I'm the baby and they never let me forget it. And let's see. One is very like me, the eldest. She's been a scientist and faculty at a med school. And one is-- she's just different. She was always blond and boy crazy and just not so academically oriented. 

00:02:28

SP:	Does your family still live in Massachusetts? 

BS:	Yeah, my parents do. They're getting pretty old. My mother's 84, about to be 85, and my father's a year older. I can remember when I was about 13, maybe. No, I had to be younger because we still lived in that town. Told my father I want to be a lab tech and he said, no, that's not good enough. So I think there was some indoctrination. And there was the lady across the street. She was a neighbor like people don't seem to have anymore. When I was too old for a babysitter and my parents weren't going to be home, they'd drop me off at her house and she would say-- she was a lab tech at the hospital and that's obviously what inspired me-- oh, you know, I can't remember if I turned off this machine. We'd go and she'd plunk me in front of a microscope, tell me what to look for, like a tuberculosis cell or something. I just loved it. 

SP:	And did you have support in school for wanting to be a scientist? 

BS:	Well, I went to-- you mean here? 

SP:	No, in your elementary and high school. 

00:03:46 

BS:	Let me think. When I was in seventh grade and we started having separate classes, like English and science and all that. My math and science teachers were both women and they were-- I was just crazy about it all. It was-- I couldn't imagine anything else. 

SP:	You're lucky. Now did you have other role models? You said-- obviously your father was a role model-- 

BS:	Yeah. 

SP:	And the neighbor. 

BS:	Yeah. My mother was-- until I got to be a freshman in college, I didn't realize that other people could do other things and it was OK. I remember at a freshman reception, my father introducing my mother and saying, she's an example of what happens when you don't know physics. That's the first-- that was the click, when I thought, wait a minute. That's not very nice. I don't know how much-- kids always make fun of their moms. 

	So my science teacher in seventh grade was-- I was crazy about her, too. 

SP:	So your undergraduate education, you went to MIT. Could you talk about that a little bit, why-- 

00:05:08

BS:	Let me say a little more about high school. 

SP:	Please do. 

BS:	We moved when I was about in eighth grade to a much better-- a town with a much better school system, a suburb of Boston-- and in that high school was this math teacher from Austria who was absolutely demanding. Unfortunately she'd start every class with about 10 minutes of telling us how terrible we were, but I loved her and I had her for three years. There were these things called math contests around the suburbs of Boston. We'd go once a month, I think, and we'd train for them. I was just so facile with algebra and geometry and all that. And calculus. I just-- it was clear to me I was going to be a math major after that. 

SP:	And did you take physics in high school? 

BS:	Oh yeah. Two years. 

00:06:10 

SP:	I see. OK. So then you went on to MIT. And why did you choose MIT or did they choose you? Or was it mutual? 

BS:	It was my first choice. And I guess there's been some MIT in my family. My father and his brother both went to MIT, and their sister, who was treated very differently, I understand now. went to Radcliffe, but spent a year or two at MIT somehow during the war. And my great-uncle, my grandfather's brother, was one of the first people at MIT. I mean, when it was still in Boston, which was-- I don't know-- first 20 years or so. And he was the one that put my grandfather through college and he died very-- he went down South for something about reconstruction. That sounds very-- I'm not sure I have the time right, but he caught pneumonia and died then. So did my grandfather. My grandfather was a professor at Harvard Law, up from totally nothing. 

SP:	So you were destined to go to MIT. 

BS:	I was at least programmed. 

SP:	At least programmed, right, right. And why did you decide to go into mathematics? 

BS:	Well, this sounds very childish, but it's also very deep. I think around age 13, I sort of came to grips with my mortality. And there's just so much going on in a 13-year-old's brain. And I thought I would leave behind some math. And also, it just seemed so pure. 

SP:	Did you have any idea when you were-- as a freshman, what you were going to do with that degree? Did you just assume that was the first step? 

BS:	I thought I was going to work with biologists, in fact. I thought I was going to-- I had actually-- the summer before I went to college, I worked at Brandeis and I remember telling-- people asked me what I was going to do with the math degree and I really wasn't-- I was a little ignorant, I guess, and I said, I'm going to work with other people and show them math. 

00:08:38 

SP:	What courses and instructors stand out in your mind at MIT and why? 

BS:	Well, they're interesting for various reasons. One was a complex analysis professor who during a class once stopped and said, why are you all doing this? Why don't you go out and protest against the war, the Vietnam War? And that was sort of a problem the whole time I was in college is should I focus on this and be selfish or should I work on social issues? In at least two semesters, we had strikes and you weren't a good person if you continued to work for grades and everything. And I was also very insulted that anyone would think I would work for a grade. That wasn't my motivation. I was very put off by those issues. 

	So when professor said to me, well, if you stop now with the strike, you'll get a B and if you keep going, you'll get an A. I was always just so mad that I'd take the B, and I didn't realize things are different down the line. And at MIT, class average was a C and students here now, they're upset. I was in the locker room the other day. I swing at the surf and I heard two students talking and one said, the thing about that class, you have to get at least a 90 to get an A. I mean, that's hard. My brain just locked up. 

00:10:30

SP:	Anyone else you can think of that you want to talk about from MIT? 

BS:	Oh, my friends. I learned so much more from students than from the professors. I thought I was going to be the one that was sort of the humanist coming to MIT-- and no. They were all-- almost all of them just into different things. One of my friends was just crazy about James Joyce and physics. My freshman year, I met some people very early in the semester and they convinced me to join what was called ESG, which is Experimental Study Group and the idea is, you don't learn much in a big class, which freshman year at MIT is almost totally. So we had this small group of about 30 students and professors that would come in and work with us, and how could you lose? I mean, personal attention. So I remember my friends from that group and the professors from that group. 

00:11:35

SP:	As a woman, what kind of support did you receive from faculty and staff at MIT? 

BS:	I was not distinguished from men at all that I remember. We had to live-- freshman year, we had to live in the women's dorm and it was very isolating in a way. They had what were called parietals. You had to be in at a certain hour and I was given a single room. And I really wanted a friend, a roommate to go eat with. No, I wasn't encouraged because I was a woman in any way that I know of. 

SP:	Were there a lot of women? 

BS:	My class, the ratio was one woman to every 18 men. And it actually-- it was a hindrance in that guys in my class-- this thing called the freshman yearbook, which was a picture of everyone, the guys obviously had circled all the girls' names and just zoom. Party! It sounds dumb to say that I was fighting off boys, but I didn't want to sit around with these guys. I wanted to get some work done. 

SP:	I never thought of that angle. 

BS:	I learned to not wear tight T-shirts and just be very, I guess, asexual when everyone-- I'm sure that's probably all they saw. 

SP:	Let's have you talk a little bit about the women's movement because a lot was happening at the time you were in college. In what ways, if any, was your thinking affected by the women's movement? Were there writers or speakers, intellectuals who influenced your thoughts about women's roles in society? 

BS:	Well, right before I started my freshman year, we had a choice of being-- different floors in the women's dorm had different levels of restrictions and I went for the seventh floor, which was the least restricted. You could have guys over any time. Of course, they had to wear their buttons that had your name on them to get up the elevator. And I came home on Thanksgiving and I said to my parents, you know, I think they're all feminists there-- and they said-- my sister-- my older sister and my mother sort of looked at me like, hmm-- and then I realized, feminism was-- I was brought up in a fairly feminist way. I mean, there are things-- women don't handle money in our-- publically. My mother-- if they're eating out, my mother used to hand my father money under the table rather than-- but other than that, I hadn't been treated so differently. I'm from an all-girl family and my oldest sister came to the realization that all her friends were from all-girl families and I think you end up different. 

00:14:39 

SP:	Probably. Did you participate in any organizations for women while at MIT? 

BS:	Yeah, I think I did. They were probably a bunch of so-called consciousness raising groups and sitting around and complaining. I remember joining SDS my freshman year and I was terrified because I had a national defense loan and you're supposed to not advocate-- you signed something saying you weren't going to advocate to overthrow the government. But that was the most male oriented-- the men were in charge of that. And there's this famous quote-- "The only position for a woman in the movement is prone." And I remember that. Guys-- you're just a girl. In my undergrad career, that was the most male superiority thing I was in. I was very interested in folk dancing, just very popular at MIT. Music and dance-- these little mathematical brains. 

SP:	I'm sure. 

BS:	And I was very active in that. They had the library on the top floor of the student center. It was open 24 hours a day, closed on Christmas, New Year's Day, and Fourth of July. And I'd be up there studying and I'd hear folk dance music coming up through the floor. I'd run down. It was always a conflict-- should I be dancing or should I be studying? 

SP:	So give me some examples of the folk dancing. All cultures or-- 

BS:	No. It's a phenomenon called international folk dancing that probably started in the '50s or early '60s and it focuses mostly on Balkan dance and Bulgarian, Macedonian, all that-- and a little Israeli folk dance, which I suspect was created to keep Jewish girls in this country hanging out with Jewish boys and not marry anyone else. But I liked the dance anymore. 

00:17:00

SP:	In 1972, two key pieces of legislation were passed. The Equal Employment Opportunities Act and the Educational Amendments Act, Title IX. Were you aware of this legislation? 

BS:	Yeah, I think I was, but the funny thing is-- well, the year before I came to MIT, the women's sailing team won the nationals and there was a big discussion about whether they should get a letter. And they finally agreed. Something else I learned much later-- in fact, just a year ago. The burser-- whoever was in charge of scholarships and everything-- said a woman could have a scholarship if she had a 5.0 average, which is 4.0 here. They have their own numbering system. My father always thought that we didn't get funding because I was a girl and I thought that was just so ridiculous, but apparently it was true. 

SP:	It's true. 

BS:	So anyway, I was on the women's swimming team, which is very ad hoc. No letters, nothing like that. And I swam from about my junior, senior year-- for another three years after that because I was still in the area. And sometimes-- I mean, I vaguely was aware that Title Nine-- but it didn't-- I guess it didn't really come home today that it applied to me too and that our swimming time-- our pool reservations-- the men's swimming team would come in and throw water polo balls at us. I mean, we were both scheduled-- they were scheduled for water polo practice and we were scheduled for women's swim team. So it's very-- I mean, I was very serious about swimming in high school. I was in a AA youth swim group-- no, it didn't apply-- in my freshman year, I was very bad. 

	I helped "liberate" a sauna with some friends. So it was late, late at night and I remember walking past all these signs-- the sauna was only for men. Now they have one for every-- one for each. So some friends convinced me-- they were all guys, of course. I remember walking past a sign saying, men only beyond this point-- and we went to the sauna and took off all our clothes. I was pretty proud of that, but I don't know what their motivations were totally. 

00:19:42 

SP:	Well, good for you. OK. Let's talk a little bit about your work history and your graduate training. After your undergraduate degree, did you have career plans? Did you know what you wanted to do at that point? 

BS:	No. They dumped me out in the world and I was like-- nobody told me. There were no jobs for math majors. So the first job I had was going door to door for something called Ecology Action with newsletters and trying to get contributions and people would call the police and stuff. It was horrible. I lasted about two days. People were so mean to me. My mother later told me-- I didn't tell my parents because this isn't what I was supposed to be doing. She said, this poor person came to our house for this group called Ecology Action. I felt so sorry for him, I made a sandwich and let him sit inside. 

00:20:38 

BS:	So that didn't last. I had a boyfriend that gave me some programming tasks, said it's subcontracted-- part of his job. Then finally I get a job at BU Med School-- professor of thoracic services. I surveyed patients that had worked in an asbestos factory and I did all sorts of lung tests on them-- their volumes and-- they're just some standardized things for measuring lung damage. And I think he got me because he thought he was going to get something for-- a lot for not much because he knew I could handle computers and all that. And he could just pay me like a lab tech. And he was such a jerk. I took x-rays and when I took them over to the hospital to get them developed-- there was a blind lady that worked in the darkroom, very appropriately-- and she'd let me in and let me just stay there. And all the people, when they'd meet me in the elevator, they'd say, who do you work for? And I'd tell them and they'd go, you poor thing. It was before there was word processors or anything like that and I had to use a Leeward lettering set to make presentations for him. It's this little thing. It's a template and you put your pen in it. He wanted to make a change once and he just scribbled on it. 

	But he was-- I just didn't like it and I started worrying that maybe I'd get tuberculosis because the level at which they sterilized machines wasn't good, to put it very mildly, and I was used sometimes as a control. I got out of that job. 

SP:	That's good. 

BS:	And then I went to Intermetrics, which was a computer start-up and worked there for a few years. 

SP:	Now that was in Boston? 

BS:	Yeah, in Cambridge. I liked it there, but I really didn't have a lot of formal-- back then no one had much formal computer training. It's just people that had an aptitude did it. I was a little bored with it. We worked on the space shuttle project, in fact, which is very exciting. And the house I lived in at the time-- big old Victorian house with a two door entryway so that the cold air wouldn't get in when you opened the first door and then another-- we called that the airlock. We pretended we were on a spaceship. It was just so fun. 

SP:	And was that mixed? Was that men and women that you worked with there? 

BS:	Yeah. And it was very interesting. More men than women. And the president of the company grew orchids and when he had enough, he'd bring in orchids for the secretaries, one for each one. And if there were enough after that, the women engineers could get them. So it's a big division on just how feminine we were. But my coworkers-- they didn't distinguish. We were all nerds. 

00:24:06

SP:	What happened after that and why did you leave? 

BS:	Well, I became-- one day I woke up and I said-- I remembered a show I'd seen in the '50s-- Mr. Science-- and it talked about DNA. And I hadn't thought about it for ages and suddenly I thought, there's this stuff called DNA. I know nothing about it. But it must be just fascinating. And I started taking courses at MIT. It's a special student in biology. And the more I took, I could see the sort of mathematical aspect to it that I couldn't quite bring together, but fascinated me. 

SP:	So what you-- did you keep working then or did you just-- 

BS:	Yeah, I was still working and Intermetrics paid for my classes occasionally. So ultimately I quit, went for a year full time and applied to grad school. And this was the only place I got in because I had virtually no lab experience. My brother-in-law offered to let me be in his lab as a lab tech for a year and then try again, but I came here. 

SP:	Had you heard about Wisconsin when you applied? Was it your first choice or-- 

BS:	MIT was, but MIT has a policy of not taking their undergrads., I just looked up the top 10 schools in molecular biology and applied to them. I thought Wisconsin was about where Ohio is. I really didn't-- I never thought of Wisconsin. I didn't know if Minnesota was a state or was it Minneapolis. I had them mixed up. I was pretty ignorant about that, even though my father was born in Bloomington and my aunt was born in Nebraska. My grandfather was a young professor when all the kids were born. 

SP:	Sure. 

BS:	Kid were all born in different places. 

00:26:15 

SP:	So you entered graduate school here. What year was that? 

BS:	1976. They had store bars or red, white, and blue. Remember the Bicentennial? 

SP:	I do. I do. 

BS:	It was a big deal. 

SP:	Yeah. And then did you come in as a teach-- this was for your master's degree, right? 

BS:	No. People usually would just come for a PhD and a master's degree is a consolation prize in biology. 

SP:	OK. OK. So you came here. You were a student. Did you also have-- were you working, too? 

BS:	Well, I was given a fellowship. Most biology students get one because there's so much tedious work to be done in a lab that a professor-- there's just more money for biologists and humanities stuff. I mean, it's very-- very few people out of a class of south Asian studies majors get a fellowship and maybe for a year or two, but biology's not a problem for three years at least. 

00:27:19 

SP:	So how would you describe the climate in the sciences at the university at that time? In your department or just in general? 

BS:	Well, it seemed that biology was a women's field and-- well, apart from my experience here, it seems I immediately lost status by becoming a biologist. It's not so much-- people are smarter and more analytical now in biology, but at the time, I could see people making really logical mistakes in biology and the real problem was, nobody wanted me. I rotated through three labs. One, I told her I didn't want to be in the lab because she was a woman. It's not that I didn't want to work with her, but I didn't want to choose her because she was a woman and I really didn't like what she was working on. The other two just said no. One of them in the old hospital, he asked me what experience I've had. Then I told him I'd taken this lab at MIT. It was Annamaria Torriani, and he said, oh-- her husband was dying at the time-- of leukemia, I think. He asked me about it and I said, they don't tell the students much. I came back the next time and he said something to me like, it's not nice to tell stories. I have no idea what he was talking about. 

	And then also-- we were supposed to be doing an experiment together and I absolutely refused to mouth pipette carcinogens. He had this mutagen, this bright orange liquid that he dumped on his cells that would cause them to mutate and he could look for mutants. It's just like, no way. He said, well, it's not fast enough to use a probe pipette. I came back another time and he referred to how slow the cells we used in the lab were and I finally realized, he thought I had told him I was working in her lab as a student. 

SP:	So then you left that lab. 

BS:	Well, I wasn't accepted in. And the other lab-- I mean, it's so ridiculous to think that I would lie to get into a certain lab. They worked very closely with the lab where my sister post-doc'd. So the head of my sister's lab had worked very closely with that lab and I didn't mention that. I didn't-- I'm sorry. I didn't want to call in connections. And they were so surprised later when they found out, but they didn't want me either. 

SP:	Beverly, we don't have to talk about this if you want to talk about something else. 

BS:	That's it. That's it about that. 

00:30:57 

SP:	OK. OK. So you stayed in Madison, though? 

BS:	Well, I finally-- I knew I had to get a lab. So I found a lab with Gary Craven, who was still an old hippie with banana curls. He looked like Captain Kangaroo. Everyone said that. And he wasn't getting a lot of grad students so he didn't know-- and he was in an open marriage-- from his point of view, but not his wife's point of view. So he could go fool around, but if she thought about it-- not allowed. And—

00:31:38

BS:	You're so good about—

SP:	I hope so.

BS:	So I ended up in Gary Craven's lab. He wasn't serious about science. He wasn't in very much. I smelled alcohol on his breath. 

SP:	What was he doing in his lab? What were you doing? 

BS:	Not much. 

SP:	What was the project? 

BS:	Well, he devised an experiment for me with ribosomes and I put it together and-- that was just like a four week project to see if I could do it. 

SP:	And you did it. 

BS:	Yeah. In fact, some interesting things came out of it. After that, I was-- I think maybe I was doing a choice of projects that had been going on in the lab and one was called brown ribosomes, where people had used acetic acid instead of phenyl to extract ribosomal RNA and somehow they had more proteins associated with them than the standard way of trying to find ribosomes. And so people had gotten their PhDs with that. So I started to work on it and I was a little suspicious. I sort of wondered if maybe other junk was just-- when you try to find ribosomes, at least then, you put some cell extract in a test tube and you put it in a ribosome and stuff would end up on the bottom of the ribosome. A little suspicious. 

	So I went to a professor in biochem who was in membranes and I said, well, I'm a little concerned that maybe membranes are coming down with ribosomes and he said-- well, first, he was very, very strange personal skills. He said, well, what you do is you increase the volume of the extract relative to the stuff. See, I had add more water, and spin it down and the ribosome coming down won't be so likely to attract little pieces of membrane. I did that. Proteins went away. This guy, he said that to me and then he just walked out of the lab-- I mean, out of the office we were in. I was like, I guess it's over. I tried that and they were gone and I was about to write my proposal, which is you write a paper about what you've done and what you plan to do and I-- what could I do? I had just disproved everything that my project was predicated on. So that went very badly. 

00:34:34 

BS:	I had won a bottle of champagne for a Halloween costume and I was saving it for that. I didn't pass. I drank it, anyway. Didn't know what else to do. And at that time, my adviser said to me, what did your father do to make you go into science? The implication that this was sick for a woman to be in science. And I'd been taking a class in zoology development, which I suddenly got really interested in. Where does a tree leaf bud come from and how do people turn into people from eggs? And there's this guy Enzo, whom I thought had a deeper-- more of a goal in biology, not to document the next protein, which-- almost like the last protein. I call that me-too science. Me too. I looked in this other organism. That protein's there, too. I thought that was so dumb. 

	So I thought he had more of a deeper perspective. And I asked-- there was a woman that had just left his lab and I asked her if he was-- if there was a problem with women. She said, no. This was all me. So I joined the lab. It wasn't all her. He introduced me to the lab as a piece of feminine pulchritude. Not as a scientist. It was an all guy lab and they were really hot stuff. And they weren't that great. So when they told me they made the best gels in the world, I just- said no, that's OK. 

	But that professor wouldn't talk to me. Things went a few months. He-- I found Cena and I said, I need your help. You're a professor. You're supposed to be helping me. He got furious, just totally furious. Said he didn't want to spoon-feed students. Fine. 

	The guys in the lab started picking on me. We had desks with keys, and sometimes I forgot and left my key in the desk, and they'd steal it, and I'd have to go to the building manager and ask for another one. He'd say, this is the last one. You know what they'd do? They'd lock my desk and take the key. 

	There was one guy-- at one point, I was the only one handling radioactive materials in the whole lab. And so the senior grad student in the lab wouldn't let me in his room, the lab he used, where all the microscopes were. None of that stuff allowed. And there was this really horrible grad student who would-- he'd come in in the morning, turn the light on in his room, and go to the union and have coffee. And if I turned that light off, he was furious because there's no evidence that he'd been there, other than the fact that he never did any work. 

	So that student would come up to me and say, are you handling radioactive material? Hoping I'd spill it, right? And he would go around and do wipes. That's how you monitor-- you put it somewhere by accident. He'd do wipes intensely. It was not his job to do wipes, but he would do it all over the lab to try and catch me. This is post-doc that had been a salesman for a drug company and decided he wanted to go back to science. And as a joke, once when I did my-- a joke-- wipes, they took-- the wipes were-- you take a little filter. You rub whatever you're testing, you put it into what's called scintillation fluid in a little bottle, with a screwtop. They took a sample that was very, very hot and put it in the spot that I had labeled "doorknob" of our office. And they all sat around and watched and waited for me to freak out. And in fact, I didn't freak that much because I thought, hm, that doesn't make sense. I'll do it again. I'll check again. Checked it, was not that hot. And they all said, you should have seen your face when that-- you should have seen it. You were going crazy. I know I wasn't, but they wanted me to go crazy. I complained to him once about the students. He said, you know what you do to them, don't you? It's like, what is going on here? 

	What else? Oh, I know. The lyophilizer-- the freeze dryer which we had and which broke down at once point. It was by the star senior student. It broke down, so they brought in a motor with an unguarded belt and put it about three feet behind my lab bench, and I was scared that I would fall into it. So I just-- I had learned to be very careful. I said, how long is that going to be there? I think I'll go work in the library. My adviser said, don't you mess with me, pretty mama. 

SP:	OK. Let's talk-- you can-- 

BS:	Well, and the other thing is, no other professor would help me because they knew I'd be gone. They'd still have to work with this guy. 

00:41:10

SP:	Talk about some of your colleagues. Did you have any positive experiences? What about with Bleier? 

BS:	Oh yes. Well, first of all, let me say that in that cell building, there was a British post-doc that was teaching me stuff. He was showing me how to do assays for different carbohydrates. It was wonderful because I was having to read books and that's not the same. My adviser found out and he banned him from directing my project, which was-- so ultimately someone in my committee suggested I drop it. And I didn't want to, but that guy in my lab, Armando, who was such a jerk, we had dispute about a shaker and something was bathing in it and it was radioactive. And he started yelling at me and towering over me. He was much taller-- and badgering me and just pushing me back with his presence. And suddenly, I had slapped him. I didn't know where it came from and that scared me so I dropped out. 

	I finally got a-- it was hard to get a job.  I mean, the guys that had bombed the Army research building, one of them was getting into law school at the same time I was looking for a job. And I swear I was treated like a cocaine addict. Very few people would hire me. 

SP:	You were looking for a job here in Madison? 

BS:	Yeah. In fact, someone on my committee had suggested-- the one who told me I should drop out. He said, I've got a job for you. There's going to be this potato grant and you can be the lab tech for this guy-- and in fact, he didn't get the grant. It's funny. I finished every project in the house. I had a quilt that I had started early '70s. I finished it. I mean, every unfinished project got finished. In fact, I hadn't-- I didn't know how to drive at that point. I'd never been interested. I even learned to drive. So I had a lot of excess energy. 

00:43:38 

BS:	Finally, I got a job in the Waisman Center-- and yes, Ruth Bleier was in that building. She worked on the most amazing projects. I never knew exactly where her work was coming from, but I knew that-- she did work on genitalia and they had female mice that if they gave them the right hormones at the right time, grew penises. And I was in a class once, in a development class with that-- one of those grad students and a very proper professor and we discussing that, but talking around it. Just totally not exactly saying what they were doing. Finally, the grad student said, well, they have penises, if that's what you mean. The professor was so shocked. 

SP:	So did you get to work with Ruth Bleier? 

BS:	No, but at that time, there was a tenure lawsuit going on. There had been this woman, Marion Namenwirth, who had worked until-- and they didn't give her tenure. And it came out she had been at Harvard to do her undergrad or post-doc. I'm not sure. And her-- when they-- when you apply for tenure, there's this folder of stuff about you that's passed up to the committee that decides-- and there were letters, I've heard, that were from her advisers at Harvard, saying she was the best grad student she'd ever had and so on-- just glowing reports. The woman was a little sloppy with her radioactive materials. They took out a lot of letters, is what I've heard, and inserted a letter saying she didn't do her own work. She didn't get tenure. I just dropped out of school when this trial was coming up and I thought, oh, there's so many things that had happened there-- like my adviser taught a development class and one thing they worked with were eggs from this African clawed frog called Xenopus. And what you do is you squeeze the female in a certain way and eggs come out. And you can do experiments on the eggs-- and one of the students reported to me, he said, just give to her the way she wants and she'll do anything for you. 

	So anyone that was in grad school couldn't say a word because that would be the end of their career. Mine was already gone. So I agreed to testify against him in the trial. And he hadn't expected it. He saw me on the elevator up. They had just done a recess-- I mean, they were about to recess. He saw an hour before that I was their witness and I went on and it was so funny because the court recorder-- I started telling my experience-- couldn't spell pulchritude and they had to work that out for her. And the first thing their lawyer said was, "Isn't it true you were thrown out of your first lab?" I said, "No. They said that?" I was just so shocked and I didn't even say, "I left because there were all these things that weren't true and I didn't want to work with that anymore." So basically they just made me look bad and they lost the trial. A lot of the stuff I said was considered hearsay so it wasn't counted. 

00:47:40

BS:	So when I worked at Waisman Center and Ruth Bleier was around, she came around once and she said, we're gathering money to-- not have a retrial, but to have the judge reread this stuff. It was never a jury trial. It was just a judge that. So we all contributed money. All the women were just so-- I don't know-- just so mad. And they lost that one, too. I remember her coming to me in the lab and telling me-- and just crying, both of us. We couldn't believe how this was all happening. 

00:48:30

BS:	So I worked there for a year at the Waisman Center, decided I had been happier as a programmer. I applied to grad school to get a masters in programming because now you couldn't be a programmer without formal training. I applied to get in and they wouldn't even take my application at the grad school, because when I had dropped out, I told my adviser I didn't know I had to formally withdraw, and he laughed. And people at the grad school said you don't meet our standards. So I went to the head of the department. I said-- no, first I went to the dean of students and she said ask for it to be changed. Say you were sick or something. So I went to the head of the department. He said, well, you don't have to do that. I'd have to call together a committee and it would be very embarrassing for you. You don't want that, do you? I guess not. 

SP:	How did you get in? 

BS:	I finally went to the dean of the students and from this lady-- what she said, Write a letter to this guy. Wave a little dirty laundry from the department. saying, for instance, your adviser had had, what, 11, 13 grad students and two had finished? Tell him to change it. So I did that and he changed it. There was no committee. What a jerk. 

	So then I applied-- I was able to take classes as a special student in computer science and that was very hard. It was before electronic registration. There were a few spots in every class saved for grad students-- special students-- what you had to do was pick up your registration materials, run over to Peterson and there's where you had to get it. Run back from Peterson computer science department, wait in line to get it-- a spot-- and if you didn't make it, you weren't in the class. In the summertime, they didn't have that rule so I was one of the people that got there 24 hours in advance and waited. 

	Ultimately-- they wouldn't admit me as an undergrad in computer science because the math was too similar, they said. When I start talking about grad school-- I talked to the head of the department, who was a jerk. He said, well, you have a degree from MIT in math, but we'd like to see how you do in our courses in math. So I have to take this stupid math class. And also-- by that time, my brain was Swiss cheese. I couldn't focus. I got through that and ultimately, they accepted me as a grad student. They sent me a letter saying, "Dear Beverly Seavey, unfortunately we're not giving you money, but you have been accepted." I had to read it about three times before I could tell if I was in or not. 

00:52:16 

SP:	So how is the computer science department? Is it different from—. The culture? 

BS:	Very different in that-- actually, changing from biology-- from math to biology was a real paradigm change, a way of thinking. Because in math, one way to do a proof if something is true or false-- if it's false, you find counterexample that can't-- it's not universally true. You do that in biology and that's-- some organism's doing it differently. So what? And that's how biology works, by being different., So switching back to computer science, I had to cross that line again-- and I felt it. I could feel it. It was funny. It was sort of-- very interesting intellectually. 

	Oh yeah, before I got admitted, there was this other guy that said-- I'd been seeing him and talking about this and he said, well, if you're going to say you have a lower grade average because you went to MIT, usually we like to see GRE scores that are really high. And I had been warned by this person in the dean of students office to bring my GRE scores, which were, in fact, 99 and 98 percentile. I don't think they do 100. And he said-- I handed them to him. It was so sweet. And I got in after that. 

SP:	How long have you been in now? 

BS:	I was here for only two years probably and I got a masters and went to get a job elsewhere. 

00:54:08 

SP:	And where was that? 

BS:	That was at Unisys near Philadelphia. The head of what is now DoIT, Larry Travis, was also my adviser and I had always been trying to do projects in biology, in computer science, and they were doing projects there. It was way before bio-informatics was a concept. So he put me in touch with them and I got a job there. I interviewed with places like AT&T, but I was so terrified. AT&T-- one of the places, they had this huge room with telephone switches and you had two hours a week. You could plan your project and write your code. You had two hours to test it. And I'm just not a real time person. I just couldn't face that. I was so scared. And let's see-- there's a place in Schaumburg, another AT&T place. They put that they wanted to interview me. So I went there and when I got there, they said-- well, I had taken the classes-- I took Indonesian. I was studying Javanese dance and I think that's what kept me alive because it was so meditative and just gave me something else to think about. They said, we wanted to see what you looked like. So they didn't make an offer. So I went to Unisys. 

	And we-- it was called defense systems, but in fact, we were working on an NIH project in biology. 

SP:	In biology. 

BS:	And it had nothing to do with defense. It was about GenBank, which is where they were starting to store DNA sequences and the guy-- guy that was my boss was a jerk. I hate to keep saying people were jerks, but I think it was true. And he would come up to me and he'd learned one phrase-- "That's incomplete, you know." He had a PhD in biology. And that means it's what's called intractable. It would take too much time to compute. And some problems are NP complete and some are not. You can solve the ones that are not NP complete, that are lower in hardness. It became clear he was-- he didn't know anything. And I would write little tech reports and he would take them and remove my name from them and put his name on. 

	How did I find out? Well, it was pretty easy to just sort of telnet over to his computer and see what was there. So that was not strictly kosher on my part, but I saw them and I talked to someone-- a professor from Penn who also sort of consulted with us. I forget. He just said-- suggested I start writing freelance articles instead. And I never quite got it together and I tried. That guy was-- and then Unisys started having layoffs and I was a fairly recent hire and-- and this-- he was such a jerk. He was having an affair-- he hired this woman from Cambridge. They were so clearly having an affair. There's something about when two people are totally in love or infatuated and they're looking at each other. You can just see it. I'm sorry. There was no doubt. They would sit together in the dark looking at a computer screen together and they were doing a lot of cocaine too. 

00:58:12 

BS:	When I complained, he dumped me off the project and I was going to work on some ADA stuff, which is the language that the defense department had decided to do everything in. So I started looking for jobs elsewhere and I thought Madison was a place where computation and biology was going to really take off. And I think that's turned out to be true. It's definitely one of the top places. So I started looking at it here and I had worked at GCG, Genetics Computer Group, which was sort of a spin-off from the genetics department. They had-- this guy had started writing code for the genetics department to analyze sequences and ultimately, there was a complaint that the university was supporting them and their competitors were complaining that they had support. So they had to disengage from the university and I worked for them for awhile. 

SP:	So that was after-- you were working for Unisys and then you came-- 

BS:	No, that was before. 

SP:	That was before. 

BS:	And when I decided to leave Unisys, I called them up and talked to them and they said, yeah, we have an opening and there's someone else on campus that has an opening too. So I interviewed for both of them and I got the one in bio-chem instead of the genetics one, on NMR. Creating a database of NMR data. Databases-- I was very familiar with them. I set up one in neurology as part time and I had the education now. 

	And my first day there-- apparently the guy that had written a grant proposal to get the money to do this had gone to work for a drug company. So three different people my first day told me they were the interim director of the database. Of course, the professor was the one that decided he was. And it was very embarrassing because he knew nothing about computers. I found out that he had written a paper-- it was just gobbledygook from my point of view-- and put my name on. He didn't run it past me or anything. Any computer scientist who saw it would just laugh and I was very annoyed. And I told him-- not in an angry voice-- I just told him, don't do that. Meanwhile, the grad students thought I was all stupid because I didn't have a PhD. One of them told me, "I've been thinking about this database project and I've come to the conclusion--" I thought he was giving me great insight. He said, "You should work very quickly, but efficiently." And that was his insight. I'm like, OK. 

	And any of those databases involves some human hours of reading articles and trying to extract the data from them, what pH was this experiment done at? And people a lot of times were not clear. They'd say their experiments were done at pH 7 and 7.1. And then they'd give you data. Some of it was from pH 7, some was 7.1 and that wasn't consistent. It was very hard to extract the data. So I had to go ask people. And I practiced on the students. I developed this little form and I asked them all to fill it out and they ignored me totally. They didn't have time. They didn't want to do that. I didn't have a PhD. Who was I to take up any of their time? Ultimately, we got some people called annotators-- people with bachelor’s degrees. And computer science. I had a masters. And they did that work and I know people in the NMR community-- these big important professors who were really annoyed by this, but if they'd written stuff clearly in the first place, it wouldn't have been a problem. And now they're are required to do that now. It's just-- you don't get your stuff published unless you submit it with all that stuff. So people can to the database and say, what happens when it's pH 7? 

	The professor once said to me-- I wanted a raise because it was a big drop in salary between Unisys and here. One time I went to him and I asked for a raise and he said, that post-doc whose funding is running out, his wife just had a baby and you wouldn't want to take money away from that, would you? And I said, sure, because that means I got a job. Who are you to pay me less money? So ultimately. He actually recommended me—

01:03:44 [end tape 1; begin tape 2]

SP:	How long did you work in that job? 

BS:	I worked for more than five years. 

	And when I went to talk to the education people, for some reason, this whole thing was run by people in the humanities side. They were also reexamining job classification and rates of pay, because the sense was scientists were not getting paid as much. The people who made the decisions were on humanities side, so they always valued their work more. I don't know. I went and talked to the people in this distinguished fixed committee, and asked them what was up. And they said we didn't get a couple of the recommendations. One of them was glowing, but it was too short. Scientists didn't know the official phrases that one's supposed to use. I went to the head of the department, DeLuca and I said, how come I didn't get these responses because they told me they sent them? And right outside of DeLuca’s office-- he didn't even know about it, and he was supposedly involved-- was our lab secretary, this old guy, who knew which side his bread was buttered on, totally. And he was just hanging out listening. And, DeLuca called him and said, Mike, you send out for those recommendations, and make sure they get in. And we all realized he'd thrown them out. 

	And before that, while I was on his bad side, the guys in the lab thought they were much better at computer science then me, had forged my signature on requisition. My project had a certain amount of money and I was the one who had to sign to buy stuff. They decided we need a whole bunch more PC's which were not good enough computers. I mean this is an intense project and it needed good computing power. A PC was not it. There were much more expensive machines that could do more. They forged my signature and told me about it later. So in my meeting, I have to think very carefully. I said, OK. You did that. But my signature is mine. You do not do that again. And one of them came up to me and said, why did you blindside me like that. I didn't know that was coming. OK. 

SP:	So what happened after that? So when did you decide you wanted the PhD? 

BS:	Well, I still wanted one. I could tell that I was being treated like such a second class citizen. The guy that ran the lab, twice, he asked why I hadn't gotten a PhD, and I told him. And I just didn't fit in with his ideas because he would forget. I mean why would he forget so easily? So ultimately, I told him-- I finished a certain degree, a certain amount, met a deadline. And said-- oh I know what pushed me. The guy that had written the original proposal was coming back. He's still there now, but we had several fights-- not fights-- but while I was still at the drug company, and he'd say, well I want to do it this way. And I'd say, it can't be done that way, because for instance--. And he would just get all pig headed. So he came back to me-- the director-- and I said, two weeks, I'm outta here. I'm going back to grad school. And I really didn't like that way I was treated. So that's why I went back to grad school. 

01:07:40

SP:	And when did you start? 

BS:	Back to grad school? That would be early 1984. 

SP:	And what happened since 1984? 

BS:	The adviser I picked-- because I thought she asked different questions the way I did-- people would always say, well you have to have this, and you have to do this, and then she'd say, why? Sort of the counter example in math approach and she'd been a math major. So I went to her and she really wasn't interested in science anymore. Much more interested in her dogs, which she took to trials and went hunting with. And she, every time we met, if she remembered to show up, she forgot what we'd been doing before, and she'd get angry at me because I wasn't keeping her up to date. And it got worse and worse. She started screaming to me. 

01:08:38

BS:	Meanwhile, bioinformatics had started to be more important area and there was actually going to be a class, so I was asked to TA it. 

SP:	Which class? 

BS:	Bioinformatics. Everybody in computer science-- it's just like a godsend to computer science because it's something to work on. I was asked to TA. And I met the guy who is my adviser now-- was sitting in on the class-- and I, ultimately, switched to him. I asked him if he wanted grad students, he said yes. He was new, he had one grad student. 

01:09:16

BS:	Meanwhile I had got married, Soon after I started the database project. And it wasn't the model of marriage I was used to. He was a professor, and he came first all the time. And I really couldn't put a lot of time into grad school. I had to have so many lab parties, and get angry if I didn't spend a lot of time. And his scheduling was go home for supper and dawdle for an hour or two, and then I could come back and work. And by then, I'd be dead. I'd go to bed really early. So during that whole time, which was about 15 years, I didn't get much work done. I was extremely frustrated. And he said started telling me I didn't meet standards because I wasn't graduating. Ultimately, I left. And my problem was still that I didn't have much focus. It was so hard. 

	So when I got a divorce lawyer, she'd also been a counselor in a former life. I was taking anti depressants. And I said, you know not being able to focus is a symptom of depression. I'm taking anti depressants. I still can't focus. Is there some other drug I should be taking? She said, go find out. So I called up the HMO and I said, I want someone that's an expert in medication. They sent me to someone, she gave me a different medication. My focus returned. 

SP:	So that was, what? Last summer? 

BS:	Yes. Last summer. Not even a year. And I've been able to focus since. 

01:11:10

SP:	So now you're back with a vengeance. 

BS:	Yeah. I'm in a bit of a tenuous position, because I've been there way too long, and if anyone ever really notices, they'll toss me. But I'm so much happier now. I can focus. For the first time, after three advisors-- this is my fourth-- I have a decent one. One that doesn't think I'm a feeble grad student asking to be spoon fed, or all that stuff. So that's where I am now. 

SP:	Are you teaching too, as a TA now? 

BS:	Well, when I came back to computer science department, and Lary Travis had promised I could, and they were all shocked, and said, who said you can do that? And I told them. OK. But we're not going to give you any money. So I had to pay my own tuition until that TA-ship came up. And then, once I taught for a year, then other students who had been promised money took that job. Because why should they pay extra money when they'd already promised money to spend. So that, until this semester, I was paying my own tuition. But the person that was scheduled to TA this fall suddenly got funding elsewhere. And my adviser, who was teaching the class, offered me the job. So it was great. I had health insurance a day after mine ended because I stopped being married. New health insurance. And that was a lot of work that semester. But I'm TA-ing the next one, and it's no work. 

SP:	So what's your timetable as far as you're concerned? 

BS:	Oh. My adviser says I can finish within a year. But he's always shocked-- well, I'm always shocked, too. I'm modeling protein protein interactions using hidden marker models and we come up with a twist on it. And I have to read papers, extract data, I'm being an innovator again, and it take an incredible amount of time. But I'm focused. I'm so focused. And there's like nothing else I want to do now. I'm pretty focused. 

SP:	That's great. 

BS:	Sorry to tell such a tale of horror. 

SP:	No. No. No. 

01:13:47

SP:	Well the last question is, any final comments on your graduate career, and your positions in the University? Your plans and hopes for the future? And then, if you could go back, are there things you would do differently? 

BS:	I never developed social skills that involved massaging people's egos. The woman that shares an office with me now is-- she tee-hee's a lot and strokes guys' egos, and they're so comfortable around her. And I won't do that. I just cannot do it. I wish I'd had more social skills back then and realized how feudal a society a university is. I wouldn't even have come to grad school here. 

01:14:39

SP:	What are your plans for the future? 

BS:	My parents are getting very old. And it looks like they're not going to be able to stay in their house for more than a year now. I really want to go back, get a job in the Boston area, with all my friends from MIT who are so much more like me, and we still keep up quite a bit. My college roommate, especially. And maybe help my parents stay in the house. None of us live in that area now. I want to get a job. For years, it seemed like that was an impossibility. With this new drug, I'm able to envision it. 

SP:	That sounds wonderful. 

BS:	Yeah. That's what I want. 

SP:	Any other final comments you want to make? 

BS:	I don't think so. 

SP:	Well thank you. 

01:15:37	 End of First Interview Session

End of Interview #751