How Art Advanced a Scientist
Four artistic inspirations of MIT Emerita Professor JoAnne Stubbe
When Barack Obama placed the National Medal of Science on MIT professor JoAnne Stubbe’s neck in 2009—32 years after she was captivated by a report of the first free radical on a protein, 17 years after she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and three years after she’d presided over my Ph.D. thesis defense as chair of my thesis committee—she was just getting warmed up.
JoAnne is best known for her meticulous and nearly half-a-century-long study of the enzyme ribonucleotide reductase (RNR), which converts ribonucleotides to deoxyribonucleotides in all organisms and is therefore responsible for all life on earth. No RNR, no DNA.
Lesser known is that JoAnne harbors a deep appreciation for the arts. Alongside her legendary science courses at MIT, she taught winter study courses in the science of art authentication and restoration of the Sistine Chapel. Though she majored in chemistry at UPenn (and graduated with high honors), her favorite class was art history. She delighted in Philadelphia’s art museum and Rodin sculpture garden. There are, in particular, four works of art—two poems and two paintings—that guided her through her long career.
The first arrived in high school when she discovered Robert Frost. Sixty years later she would get choked up reading the following excerpt at her self-described last seminar, the Alan Davison 2024 Lecture at MIT.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Hitting adolescence in early 1960s Worcester, Massachusetts, she wasn’t into sock hops or American Bandstand. She didn’t even have a TV. She snuck a radio to bed at night to listen to Johnny Most broadcast the Celtics games. A childhood spent outdoors had nurtured a love of nature that lured her to science, but it was colorful crystals that made her a chemist. In high school, she spent her free time learning to do organic chemistry in Ed Trachtenberg’s lab at Clark University where her father taught mathematics. She says that The Road Less Traveled gave her the self-confidence to pursue the life she wanted. It might have rung in her head years later when her first-choice Ph.D. advisor at Berkeley told her he didn’t take women in his lab. It might have given her the confidence to stand up and walk out of her second-choice advisor’s office when he told her he would give her a project that would prepare her for a career as a technician.
Because of the strength of her singular devotion to science and the unbridled glee that an insightful result brings her, JoAnne refers to herself as “a weirdo”. Feeling like an outsider in her career, she strongly identified with Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World, in which a woman lies alone in a field, propped up on her hands, her body language telegraphing to JoAnne a yearning for acceptance. Incidentally, the subject of the painting was Wyeth’s neighbor, a young woman named Anna Christina Olson who was unable to walk but refused a wheelchair. “The challenge to me,” Wyeth explained, “was to do justice to her extraordinary conquest of a life which most people would consider hopeless.”1 Olson reportedly loved the painting. She and Wyeth remained close throughout their lives.
JoAnne faced different challenges, but she never let anyone tell her that her career aspirations were hopeless, even when it took her twelve years and three jobs to get tenure. She put her head down, grew tougher with every slight, and conquered one extraordinary life. She is grateful to have lived the life she wanted, had a blast doing science every day, and she was never alone. She is close with her family—her sister Jennifer and niece Kendra were in the audience of the Davison lecture—and she always had a surrogate family through a handful of colleagues over the years who welcomed her into theirs.
In her science, JoAnne herself painted with a small brush, depicting in meticulous detail, atom by atom, the inner workings of the first enzyme whose function was shown to require a free radical on the protein itself. Before its discovery, free radicals had long been seen as nothing more than harbingers of destruction, disease, and, most dreaded of all, aging. Rather than a threat to life to be vanquished with dietary antioxidants and dubious supplements, RNR’s free radical is essential to life.
To achieve the detail she sought, JoAnne constantly apprenticed herself to master new techniques as they were invented over the decades. When RNR turned out to use metal ions, she became an expert in bioinorganic chemistry. When Peter Schultz’s lab at Berkeley invented a method that would allow her to tune the speed of the free radical as it darted from amino acid to amino acid, she sent her students there to bring the skills back. This was how they were able to achieve snapshots of the lone electron on its surprising journey through the enzyme to the spot where it does its chemistry and then all the way back again.
When she reached retirement age, JoAnne bookended her Robert Frost with her other favorite poet who won the Nobel Prize in Literature "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition"—Bob Dylan. She quotes The Times They Are a-Changin’, seeing herself as part of the fadin’ order, the first becoming last, her present slipping into the past. Believing strongly in the creative power of young scientists and her obligation to make room for them literally and figuratively, she let her lab space dwindle until she had only a small office in the chemistry building. At the Davison Lecture, her final slide read, “And so we're at the end, or are you at the beginning?”
She also has a bookend for Christina’s World. In Distant Thunder, another Andrew Wyeth painting, the subject (his wife) lies on her back in a grassy field with a sunhat covering her face. A paperback, coffee mug, and faithful dog2 are scattered nearby. She appears to be completely at ease, with the satisfying weariness that follows the achievement of a monumental task.
Although JoAnne feels the necessity to follow the subject's lead, to settle in with her books about other people’s mysteries, she’s still not quite ready to hang it up. To this day, eight years after her retirement party, she goes to work in her longtime collaborator’s lab at Harvard, not yet satisfied with her picture of RNR, still adding layer upon layer of brushstrokes to her masterpiece.
MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum of Modern Art.
The dog is particularly poignant since JoAnne might have chosen a canine companion for such an outing herself. In the early 2000s she began arriving at lab with an adorable Cairn terrier named McEnzyme. “Zymie” came to all of her lab meetings, ever in pursuit of the elusive laser pointer.