{"@context":"http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json","id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/iiif/9k45q4s67d/manifest","type":"Manifest","label":{"en":["Polan, Mary Lake, 2007 November 28"]},"logo":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/013/original/yale-blue.png?1678220072","metadata":[{"label":{"en":["Preferred Citation"]},"value":{"en":["Polan, Mary Lake, 2007 November 28. Oral Histories Documenting Yale University Women (RU 1051). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.\n\n https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/12/resources/2559."]}},{"label":{"en":["Source Metadata URI"]},"value":{"en":["https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/12/archival_objects/801919"]}},{"label":{"en":["Publisher"]},"value":{"en":["Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library."]}},{"label":{"en":["Rights Statement"]},"value":{"en":["Access to the materials is partially restricted. See Collection Contents for details.\n\nOriginal computer files may not be accessed due to their fragility. Researchers must consult access copies."]}},{"label":{"en":["Identifier"]},"value":{"en":["mssa.ru.1051 (EAD ID)","RU 1051 (Call Number)","ru_1051_2012-a-050_polan_mary_lake_audiorecording.mp3 (Digital Object ID)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Date"]},"value":{"en":["2007 November 28 (Creation)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Description"]},"value":{"en":["Permission to cite or quote must be obtained from the interviewee until January 1, 2032, or death of the interviewee. (Userestrict)","The materials are open for research. (Accessrestrict)","Mary Lake Polan was born July 17, 1943, in Las Vegas, New Mexico and grew up in Huntington, West Virginia.  The eldest of four children, her father was an ophthalmologist, her mother a housewife.  After early schooling in Huntington, her high school years were spent at the Emma Willard School in Troy, New York.  She graduated from Connecticut College in 1965, cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, having also completed a Smith College Junior Year Abroad in Paris 1963-1964.  Polan enrolled in Yale University in 1965 as a graduate student in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry (M.B.B.), earning her Ph.D. in 1970.  From 1970 to 1972 she was an Instructor and Lecturer in M.B.B. as well as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr Joseph Gall, in the Yale Department of Biology, the second year of which was funded by a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellowship.\n\nProfessor Polan entered Yale University School of Medicine in 1972, gaining her M.D. in 1975.  She spent several months of her medical training at Oxford Medical School, Oxford University, England, as a Clinical Clerk in Obstetrics and Gynecology and in Pediatrics at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford.  From 1975-1978 she was a Resident in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Yale University School of Medicine, the first woman ever to complete a residency in that department.  In early 1978 she spent several months as an Instructor in Obstetrics and Gynecology at Pahlavi University, Shiraz, Iran, followed by a similar appointment at Yale.   After her residency she held two fellowships in the Yale Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the first in Oncology and the second in Endocrinology and Infertility, during which time Polan had the first of her three children.  \n\nFrom 1981-1985 Polan was an Assistant Professor in the Yale Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, then Associate Professor 1985-1990.  In 1986 she was a visiting professor at Hunan Medical College, China.  Polan left Yale in 1990 to become the Katharine Dexter McCormick and Stanley McCormick Memorial Professor at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Stanford University School of Medicine, where she was also Chair from 1990 to 2005.  Polan retired in 2005 but continued to practice, including a visiting professorship in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, at Columbia University School of Medicine.  \n\nProfessor Polan served on the boards of numerous medical boards and corporations including Wyeth, DuPont and Proctor \u0026amp; Gamble.  She was a founding member of the Board of Directors of the Society for the Advancement of Women’s Health Research; served on the Board of Directors, New York Academy of Medicine; and as a Trustee of Connecticut College.  She held many positions at the Institute of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health, and in such professional societies as the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. She authored Second Seed (Charles Scribner, 1987), wrote and co-wrote 150 scientific articles, and contributed to or edited numerous books. (Bioghist)","Mary Lake Polan discusses her upbringing and education.  She reflects on the ways in which her parents encouraged her to be independent and self-reliant, and how the all-girl Emma Willard School cultivated intellectual self-confidence, qualities which Polan believes enabled her to flourish in a scientific and medical environment.  She talks at some length about her application to the Yale Biochemistry Graduate program and the experience of being a graduate student at Yale.  She recalls her time living in the graduate women’s college, Helen Hadley Hall, and in particular her experience as a resident fellow at Timothy Dwight College.  She describes how women were excluded from Mory’s and the Elizabethan Club.  Particular tribute is paid to Dr. Joseph G. Gall, a pioneer in the field of cell biology, as an advisor and mentor.  She recalls what it was like to be one of “Gall’s Gals,” the soubriquet given to the women graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who worked in Gall’s laboratory.  It was one of the few places at Yale in the late 1960s and early 1970s where women far outnumbered men.   These women, whom Mary Polan acknowledges at some length,  included Joan Steitz, Mary Clutter, Susan Gerbi, Virginia Walbot and Mary Lou Pardue, all of whom went on to have distinguished careers.  Polan discusses how the postwar expansion of scientific education and the development of new areas of research in the United States benefited women.  She recalls the establishment of Women in Cell Biology in 1971, believed to be the first such women’s group in the American scientific community. Nevertheless she recalls that, despite growing opportunities for women in science, including new openings at Yale and other universities, many well qualified women remained at instructor or lecturer level.\n\nPolan contrasts her experiences as a science graduate with those as a medical student, and discusses what she perceives to be the very significant differences between science and medical education and culture, and why medicine was particularly difficult for women to negotiate.  She talks at length about being the only female resident in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology in the Yale School of Medicine and speculates on the extent to which difficulties for women in medicine were a result of gender or due to the hierarchical nature of medical training.  She recalls her experience on the faculty at Yale Medical School, including relationships with colleagues, mentoring, salary inequities, and the challenge of managing a career, marriage and children.  She explains why she left Yale and how her Yale experiences influenced her managerial style and vision as Chair of Stanford’s Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology.  She concludes by considering how medical culture has changed as a result of the increasing numbers of women entering the profession. (Scope and Content Note)","https://preservica.library.yale.edu/explorer/explorer.html#prop:4\u0026amp;2f143325-245e-4afb-9a3b-1c8245f05380 (Other Finding Aid Note)","This material was originally acquired in 2009 as a direct network transfer from Yale shared network attached storage and artificial logical AD1 forensic images were created. AD1 images were extracted in May 2020 and resulting files processed. Audio files which had been originally recorded in short sequential tracks, were merged together into a single processed master wav file with fre:ac software. (Processinfo)"]}}],"summary":{"en":["Permission to cite or quote must be obtained from the interviewee until January 1, 2032, or death of the interviewee.","The materials are open for research.","Mary Lake Polan was born July 17, 1943, in Las Vegas, New Mexico and grew up in Huntington, West Virginia.  The eldest of four children, her father was an ophthalmologist, her mother a housewife.  After early schooling in Huntington, her high school years were spent at the Emma Willard School in Troy, New York.  She graduated from Connecticut College in 1965, \u003ctitle render=\"italic\"\u003ecum laude\u003c/title\u003e and \u003ctitle render=\"italic\"\u003ePhi Beta Kappa\u003c/title\u003e, having also completed a Smith College Junior Year Abroad in Paris 1963-1964.  Polan enrolled in Yale University in 1965 as a graduate student in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry (M.B.B.), earning her Ph.D. in 1970.  From 1970 to 1972 she was an Instructor and Lecturer in M.B.B. as well as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr Joseph Gall, in the Yale Department of Biology, the second year of which was funded by a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellowship.\n\nProfessor Polan entered Yale University School of Medicine in 1972, gaining her M.D. in 1975.  She spent several months of her medical training at Oxford Medical School, Oxford University, England, as a Clinical Clerk in Obstetrics and Gynecology and in Pediatrics at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford.  From 1975-1978 she was a Resident in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Yale University School of Medicine, the first woman ever to complete a residency in that department.  In early 1978 she spent several months as an Instructor in Obstetrics and Gynecology at Pahlavi University, Shiraz, Iran, followed by a similar appointment at Yale.   After her residency she held two fellowships in the Yale Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the first in Oncology and the second in Endocrinology and Infertility, during which time Polan had the first of her three children.  \n\nFrom 1981-1985 Polan was an Assistant Professor in the Yale Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, then Associate Professor 1985-1990.  In 1986 she was a visiting professor at Hunan Medical College, China.  Polan left Yale in 1990 to become the Katharine Dexter McCormick and Stanley McCormick Memorial Professor at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Stanford University School of Medicine, where she was also Chair from 1990 to 2005.  Polan retired in 2005 but continued to practice, including a visiting professorship in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, at Columbia University School of Medicine.  \n\nProfessor Polan served on the boards of numerous medical boards and corporations including Wyeth, DuPont and Proctor \u0026 Gamble.  She was a founding member of the Board of Directors of the Society for the Advancement of Women’s Health Research; served on the Board of Directors, New York Academy of Medicine; and as a Trustee of Connecticut College.  She held many positions at the Institute of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health, and in such professional societies as the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. She authored \u003ctitle render=\"italic\"\u003eSecond Seed\u003c/title\u003e (Charles Scribner, 1987), wrote and co-wrote 150 scientific articles, and contributed to or edited numerous books.","Mary Lake Polan discusses her upbringing and education.  She reflects on the ways in which her parents encouraged her to be independent and self-reliant, and how the all-girl Emma Willard School cultivated intellectual self-confidence, qualities which Polan believes enabled her to flourish in a scientific and medical environment.  She talks at some length about her application to the Yale Biochemistry Graduate program and the experience of being a graduate student at Yale.  She recalls her time living in the graduate women’s college, Helen Hadley Hall, and in particular her experience as a resident fellow at Timothy Dwight College.  She describes how women were excluded from Mory’s and the Elizabethan Club.  Particular tribute is paid to Dr. Joseph G. Gall, a pioneer in the field of cell biology, as an advisor and mentor.  She recalls what it was like to be one of “Gall’s Gals,” the soubriquet given to the women graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who worked in Gall’s laboratory.  It was one of the few places at Yale in the late 1960s and early 1970s where women far outnumbered men.   These women, whom Mary Polan acknowledges at some length,  included Joan Steitz, Mary Clutter, Susan Gerbi, Virginia Walbot and Mary Lou Pardue, all of whom went on to have distinguished careers.  Polan discusses how the postwar expansion of scientific education and the development of new areas of research in the United States benefited women.  She recalls the establishment of Women in Cell Biology in 1971, believed to be the first such women’s group in the American scientific community. Nevertheless she recalls that, despite growing opportunities for women in science, including new openings at Yale and other universities, many well qualified women remained at instructor or lecturer level.\n\nPolan contrasts her experiences as a science graduate with those as a medical student, and discusses what she perceives to be the very significant differences between science and medical education and culture, and why medicine was particularly difficult for women to negotiate.  She talks at length about being the only female resident in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology in the Yale School of Medicine and speculates on the extent to which difficulties for women in medicine were a result of gender or due to the hierarchical nature of medical training.  She recalls her experience on the faculty at Yale Medical School, including relationships with colleagues, mentoring, salary inequities, and the challenge of managing a career, marriage and children.  She explains why she left Yale and how her Yale experiences influenced her managerial style and vision as Chair of Stanford’s Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology.  She concludes by considering how medical culture has changed as a result of the increasing numbers of women entering the profession.","https://preservica.library.yale.edu/explorer/explorer.html#prop:4\u00262f143325-245e-4afb-9a3b-1c8245f05380","This material was originally acquired in 2009 as a direct network transfer from Yale shared network attached storage and artificial logical AD1 forensic images were created. AD1 images were extracted in May 2020 and resulting files processed. Audio files which had been originally recorded in short sequential tracks, were merged together into a single processed master wav file with fre:ac software."]},"requiredStatement":{"label":{"en":["Attribution"]},"value":{"en":["Access to the materials is partially restricted. See Collection Contents for details.\n\nOriginal computer files may not be accessed due to their fragility. Researchers must consult access copies."]}},"provider":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/aboutus","type":"Agent","label":{"en":["Manuscripts and Archives Yale University Library"]},"homepage":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/","type":"Text","label":{"en":["Manuscripts and Archives Yale University Library"]},"format":"text/html"}],"logo":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/013/original/yale-blue.png?1678220072","type":"Image"}]}],"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/public/images/audio-default.png","type":"Image","format":"image/png"}],"items":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272","type":"Canvas","label":{"en":["Media File 1 of 1 - open-uri20210827-32762-1avp2hf.mpga"]},"duration":11814.97469,"width":640,"height":40,"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/public/images/audio-default.png","type":"Image","format":"image/png"}],"items":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/content/1","type":"AnnotationPage","items":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/content/1/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"painting","body":{"id":"https://aviary-p-yalemssa.s3.wasabisys.com/collection_resource_files/resource_files/000/122/272/original/open-uri20210827-32762-1avp2hf.mpga?1630069783","type":"Audio","format":"audio/mpeg","duration":11814.97469,"width":640,"height":40},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272","metadata":[]}]}],"annotations":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937","type":"AnnotationPage","label":{"en":["ru_1051_2012-a-050_polan_mary_lake_edited_transcript [Transcript]"]},"items":[{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Professor Mary Lake\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:I hope you enjoy doing this.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Oh, everybody loves to talk about themselves.  I can't imagine anybody telling you they wouldn't do it.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Well you know, I've had one or two people already say mm.  So for whatever reason, but I don't ever give up on anybody.  (laughter)  So, we're -- this is Florence Minnis, and I'm here to have a conversation with Professor Mary Lake [Polan], at her apartment at 160 Central Park South, in New York, and it's for the women's oral history, Yale Women's Oral History.  OK Mary, what I'll do is I've kind of divided this up into chunks of time, mostly chronological, because that sometimes is the easiest way to retrieve memories.  So the first section, by and large, are questions about your background and early influences.  Then ah, because you were both a student, as well as a faculty member at Yale, then the next two sections will be on that.  Then after that, your kind of life beyond Yale, and see how far your Yale experience played out in your life after Yale.  And, I find that, especially amongst the scientists for some reason or other, they have all been very keen to kind of reflect on where women in science are today, and where the ah, the effect, if any, that women are having actually on science and science culture, within an academic context.  So it may be something that some women like to reflect on as well, particularly since you have been active on the national scene, with the NIH and other things like that.  So we'll see how we get on today, and if we don't finish today, we can always carry on another date.  Maybe to begin with, you could say something about your own background and your upbringing.  I mean, I'm particularly interested, of course, in your mother and your siblings, and whether it was, it was assumed that women would work outside the home in your family and ah, where your father factored in, in all of this.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Well, I was born in -- actually, I was born during the war, in Las Vegas, New Mexico, in 1943.  My father was stationed there, and my mother got on a train and was eight months pregnant, and delivered when she hit New Mexico.  But -- and my father was an ophthalmologist, who had met my mother at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, when she was a nursing student.  He was a German/Latvian Jew, and she was really a red headed Scandinavian/Norwegian, which is a lot of what was going -- that's who lived in Northern Wisconsin.  She was a nurse, and as soon as she got married, she got pregnant with me.  She had me.  She never worked again in her life.  She read mystery stories, and she had my -- she had four children, one of whom died, and she never worked outside the home.  She volunteered as a Pink Lady, at the hospital, and I used to say to her, \"Why aren't you working?\"  And she would say, Because, if I earned money, I would just have to use -- spend it all in taxes, and even as a child, I knew that they didn't take everything away from you, and I thought it was strange that she didn't want to get out and work.  We grew up, my entire family, I have a big family, in Southern West Virginia at Huntington, which is a very small town on the Ohio River, where the major thing that struck you was how much you wanted to get out and go someplace else.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:That's certain a little me, growing up in Northern Ireland.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Yeah, it was -- I mean it was, it was the most -- it caused you to read, and there was really no TV then, so you didn't have TV but you read, and you read about places that were far away.  My father had -- my mother had a sister, and it was a very conventional Norwegian family.  My father's family had immigrated to the States, and they were peddlers on bicycles, through the hills of West Virginia.  And then they got a little bit of education, and all four of my grandparents were immigrants, so my father went to medical school, and he had four brothers and one sister.  He said, from the time I can remember, that he wanted all three of his children to grow up and be ophthalmologists, and come and practice with him.  And my mother always said -- \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=0.0,300.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/2","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"So he wanted us to get educated and he wanted us practicing ophthalmology, and my mother would say to me, at least once a month, \"You have to have an education.  You have to be able to support yourself and your children no matter what.\"  And as a child you say well, I'll get married, somebody will support me.  She would say, \"You can't count on that.  You must be educated.  You have to support yourself.\"\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Where do you think that came from in her?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I think it came from being a Depression child.  She was born -- she died a year and a half ago, at the age of 89, and so I think she must have been born around 1916.  So she was a young adult when the Depression hit, and I think she must have seen women who couldn't support families, because they had no education, and couldn't feed their children.  She -- that was her big thing.  You had to have an education.  You had to be able to be independent and support your children, and I think it was because of the Depression.  She never did it, and when I would say, \"You should go work.\"  She would say, \"No.\"  But I think that's where it came from.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:My father, I think it came from the standard you know, sort of background Jewish feeling, that you must have an education.  We had immigrants, German immigrants in Huntington who were doctors, with accents, and my father would say you know, \"They can take away your land, they can take your house, but they can't take what you know.\"  And they immigrated and they practiced in the United States.  So the entire thrust was to become educated, and to give something back.  If you -- that the more -- because my mother would also say, \"The more you have, the more you're obligated to give back.\"  And my father actually didn't say it, he just did it, and I never, I never thought about it when I was young, but my -- I went into medicine.  My brother went into politics in West Virginia, and was the youngest member of the West Virginia State Legislature for a long time.  My sister went into drama and acted and directed for a while, until she got married, but it was clear that you had to be educated and you had to do something.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Was there any sense -- I mean, I've read this many, many places, that in the 40s, after the war and in the 50s, there was this sense, as Margaret Mead said that yeah, women should be educated, but they're basically, they're taught to prefer marriage.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I don't -- I mean, I just grew up assuming you would get married.  I don't think anybody ever said that.  I don't ever remember somebody saying, well you have to get married, ever, neither of my parents.  My father did say, after I -- after college, I got a PhD.  I did two years of post doctoral work, and then I went to medical school, and by the time I finished medical school, I was 32.  Maybe by the time I finished my residency, I guess, I was 32.  My father used to say, in the last oh, couple of years of that, \"Are you ever going to get a job?\"  What is it about this, this school stuff?  But I thought school was terrific, and Yale was a wonderful place to be educated, and I didn't see any reason, as long as somebody was going to support your education, why you had to go out and work.  But I never had -- I guess I always thought I wanted to get married.  I always wanted children.  I wasn't so sure I wanted to be married, but I thought children were a really good idea, but that was something you could do later.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Would you say that your father had a strong role in developing a kind -- I mean, you signed almost, you not quite drifted into things, but you just took things as they came along, but you had a sense of belief in your own abilities.  Do you think your father was instrumental in that?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I think both my parents were.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Both of my parents would say -- my mother's favorite line was, and this is a woman who never worked outside the home, \"You had better be careful what you wish for, because you're likely to get it.\"  My father didn't say things, he just made the assumption.  I came home from camp, summer camp, when I was about 11, in North Carolina, and I had had a counselor I just idolized, and I said, I want to go to a private boarding school, because she teaches at a private boarding school.  My parents looked at me and said hmm, now that's an idea, and found a book, and we looked at schools, and I ended up in -- actually, in Upstate New York, at Emma Willard, in Troy, New York, which was -- \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=300.0,600.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/3","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"My mother picked it out of a book and said gee, this sounds interesting, and we went to visit and I ended up there.  I think a lot of it came from my father's -- my father just assumed that you were going to grow up and do something.  I mean, he didn't talk about it.  He just said, this is what happens, this is what you do.  What he said was, \"You do what you have to do and you do what's right.\"  Simple, life is very simple.  My mother grew up in a time when women couldn't do things, and I think her talking about it was, she wanted her daughters to do things she was not able to do.  She had been offered an opportunity to go to medical school.  Her sister married a doctor, who said Ruth, don't be a nurse, be a doctor.  This was along about in 1940, 1938, 1940, and she said the women didn't do that then, and so she said no, she couldn't do that.  And I think she, on some level, always regretted that she didn't feel that she had the opportunity.  She certainly had the ability, but she didn't have the opportunity.  She used to put, on the back of the kitchen cabinets, she would open them for myself, my brother and my sister, and put our class schedules, so she could look and see where we were.  And when I wanted to go to junior year abroad, my father said, \"No, you're not going that far away.\"  And I said to myself, I said watch me.  So I applied to the Smith Junior Year Abroad Program, and I was accepted, and I knew, once I was accepted, he would have to pay the tuition bill.  What was he going to do, cut me off and not let me finish college?  So I came in and I said, I've been accepted, I'm going to Paris.  He said, \"I told you you couldn't do it.\"  I said, \"Well, I'll tell you what, I'm doing it anyway.\"  And he said, \"Well, I'm not paying for you to go to New York.\"  I said no problem, I've worked the summers.  I will buy my own train ticket, and I bought my train ticket to New York, and my mother said, because she was the enabler, \"I'm going to give you some money, just so you can have a little fun.\"  She went me a $50, not a check, but she sent me a $50 money order every month while I was in Paris, which, at the time, was enough to enjoy yourself.  You couldn't do it now, but tickets to the comedy francais were 50¢ a piece, and she never told my father she did it.  So she would -- I think she enjoyed watching her children achieve, and would love to have done it herself.  She just wasn't in a time when that could, could happen.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Or not happen easily anyway.  Maybe there was more of a sense of it was an absolute choice.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:It was.  She perceived it as an absolute choice.  You either had a career or you had children.  You couldn't do both.  And I never -- I never understood that concept.  Actually, I don't, I don't like rules, and I've never understood rules, and on some level, I think that rules are just an enormous invitation to break them.  So I -- it never occurred to me that there was something you couldn't do, and unfortunately, I've done the same thing to my children.  I've said you know, anything you want, you've got about a 70-80% chance of getting it, and my mother somehow knew that.  And so be careful you know, but if you want it, ask for it.  The worst that could happen is somebody says no.  I don't know where she got that, but I think it was transference and a personal desire -- wish that she had been able to do it.  My father of course, was a man, so he had to do everything he wanted to do, so it never occurred him there was a roadblock in anything.  He just assumed you would go ahead and do it.  She had seen the roadblocks.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:But that's very empowering, knowing that they're there.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Oh yeah, in anything you want to do.  I mean, he was totally pissed off when I went to Paris, but I had gone on the experiment in international living two years before, which I paid for myself, because he said, \"You're going to where, Switzerland?  You're not going to Switzerland.\"  I said, \"Sure I am.\"  It's $800 to go to Switzerland for the summer.  Why wouldn't I do that?  And although he moaned and he groaned, he never prevented me.  Of course he didn't help me either, which was probably a good thing.  In retrospect, I think that's fine.  I have a friend whose father could have afforded to send her to Stanford and said, you'll pay your own tuition, and she turned out to be the President of the Stanford Student Body, because you got a free tuition, which she never would have done if her father had just written the checks.  So it's actually quite good ultimately, to have your father say, well I'm not taking care of that.  If you want to do that, figure it out.\r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=600.0,900.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/4","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"But it's very empowering.  I've always laid that at my father's feet, but my mother was the soft voice and enabler of all of it.  She was the one who would say well, we have to go buy you the sweaters you want, or we have to -- I have to send you a little money in Paris, or what is you need?  How could I make this easier for you?  He never did that.  He just said, yes you can do it or no you can't do it, and then figured you'd do it or not do it.  But it's -- it helps to have parents who will either -- who will allow you to take risks, either because they're teed off at you and they're not going to do anything about it, or they're supporting you while you're doing it.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:So it really is a recipe for boldness.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I think it is.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:It was probably something you needed, to do what you ultimately turned out to do.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I think all women need it.  My mother, when I was about seven, put me on a train in Huntington by myself.  She was very timid, and sent me up to Charleston, which is an hour away, to my aunt, who took me off the train, bought me a Coke, turned me around and put me back on the train to Huntington and said, I want -- she set up these little tasks, these little things.  She said, \"I want you to be independent.  I want you not to be afraid to travel.\"  She would send me into the store from the car, with money, to buy something.  \"I want you to be able to talk to people.\"  She always said, \"If you can talk, you can get anywhere you want to go.  You just ask.\"  So she had grown up in a time where people didn't do that, and she never felt able to do it on some level.  She never did it, but she was determined that her children were not going to have that happen to them, and so she, she had these exercises she would put us through, so that we would...  Now, the problem with that, and you may have seen this with your own children.  You do that because you want that kind of child, and then they turn around and they nail you with it.  I mean they don't -- they're not discriminating about who they use this with, so you have to be prepared to have a child who sticks it to you if you do that, but I happen -- I personally think that that's better.  I think that's really what you want.  You want to get your kids -- you want them empowered and you want them to feel they can do anything, because everybody gets slapped down a number of times, and if you don't have that basic sense that you just have to get off your bottom and keep trying, people give up, and you see that.  You see that all the time in academics, people who say oh well, it's too tough, I can't do that.  And I think you have to do that early, early on, and I was just very fortunate.  I don't think my parents had any conception of what they were really doing.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Was there any difference made between brothers and sisters within your family?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:There wasn't.  We were all treated the same, although we didn't -- my brother rebelled, and maybe it's because he was younger and because I had done so well in school.  He never graduated from college.  He is smart.  He just you know, dropped out of school, went to San Francisco, bought himself a corvette, and sold encyclopedias, almost door to door, and then came home and went into politics.  But he, it took him years to come to terms with, I think what he perceived as my father's rigidity, and he was rigid.  He really did see things in black and white.  I think that disturbed my brother.  It never bothered me.  I just nodded my head and smiled, and then went off and did whatever I wanted, and I think my brother, for some reason, felt he had to confront my father, and I never felt I had to.  I avoided the confrontations, because it was not -- it wasn't successful.  When I was a child, we were sitting at the dinner table and my father said, \"You will eat your lima beans.\"  I said, \"I'm not eating my lima beans.\"  He said, \"You will eat them or you won't get up from the table.\"  I said, \"Well, I'm going to sit here forever, but I'm not eating them and you can't make me.\"  He said, \"Yes you are eating them.\"  Finally, about three hours later, my mother said oh for God's sake, could we stop this?  And she brokered some kind of solution, but I learned that confrontation was not a good way of doing it, that really what I should have done was say sure, I'll eat them, taking one bite.  He gets up from the table and I stuff them in my napkin, it's done, that there's a better way than looking your parent in the eye and saying, I'm not doing it and you can't make me.\r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=900.0,1200.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/5","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Because then you're really at a stalemate with him.  But my father was rigid and my brother never learned to negotiate that.  He had to stick it to him all the time.  But in terms of expectations, the expectations were across the board.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Was it -- what age were you when you went to your private school?  That, I take it, was a single sex school?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Mm hmm, 14.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Fourteen.  That raises all sorts of interesting questions about whether single sex education helps or hinders women.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Oh, I think it's enormously positive.  I tried to get my daughter to go to Emma Willard, which is still women.  It's still single sex.  I took her there.  I gave the graduation address and I took her to Emma Willard, and they had just filmed Scent of a Woman at the school.  It looks like Oxford.  It's a beautiful old, you know it's got gargoyles all over the campus, in a beautiful shape, and she looked at it and said, \"Ooh, there are no boys.\"  So she went to -- she went to Hotchkiss, which is a co-educational boarding school, for three months, cried every day and came back to California.  I came from Southern West Virginia.  Most of the girls at Emma Willard were from New England.  There were a fair number from abroad, from the Middle East and from South America, whose parents wanted to send them.  This was an academic school.  This you know, was not a finishing school, and they beat you and you know, drummed it into your brain that you had to do something, you had to participate, and that was in the context of getting married and participating in your community, but you had to be educated.  So they just continued what my parents had said, and I loved it.  A little adjustment over six months, to be away from home at 14, and to have rules and have bells that woke you up and study hall and all that stuff, but I loved it.  My father -- traditionally in this country, public schools in the south were military academies, and people were sent to them as punishment.  If you didn't behave yourself, you ended up going to the military school.  And so my father -- and many of the kids were told that ah, this was going to change their lives and when my father agreed that I could go away to boarding school, he said -- and I didn't write home, and in those days people didn't make telephone calls the way they do now.  And he said, instead of saying if you were bad, I'm going to send you away to school, he would say, if you don't write home every week, I'm going to pull -- I will bring you home.  I will take you out of school.  I loved it.  I just loved it, and couldn't wait to get out of that little town.  If you grew up, as it sounds like you did, in a small, confining town, there is nothing better than getting out, and school is a very protected way to get out.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:And you were encouraged clearly then, to be academic also.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Yeah, and you had -- oh, the first -- I want to Paris for a year, to learn French, because the first time (phone rings) --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:I'll just turn this off.\r\n[BREAK IN AUDIO]\r\n\r\nOK.  We were talking about whether the school encouraged you to be academic, and in which way did it do that.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Very, very much so.  They -- this was a very academic school, and it was -- you stood up in the -- you know, when a professor or teacher came into the class, you stood up and you addressed everybody as Ms. so and so.  And ah, they actually sat us down.  I had never written anything, and they started you off with how to write a paragraph with an introductory sentence, the why, and a conclusion, and we practiced that.  Then we practiced writing several paragraphs, and I -- and the curriculum was set up, so for your freshman year, which I wasn't there for, it was ancient history, Greek and Roman.  Then it was Middle Ages and Renaissance.  Junior year was Modern European History, and senior year was American, and everything was coordinated; the music and the art classes, and the history and the English.  Everything was set up so it was coordinated, and you were expected to bring everything together.  The English teacher was talking about Henry VIII, and the battles of Crecy and Agincourt, and I'd never seen a French word in my life, and I said Agincourt, and she laughed.  She couldn't help herself.  And I thought to myself, I'm going to learn French.  \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=1200.0,1500.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/6","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Nobody's ever going to laugh at me for French pronunciation again, because if you didn't perform, somebody -- they didn't usually laugh, but it was very clear.  My first English paper, I had -- I got a D.  I had never gotten a D in my entire life.  It was a very academic school, and they were dead serious about educating women.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Were they educating women -- because this would have been in the 50s.  Were they educating women to make them good wives and mothers, or were they educating them to have careers and professions, and working in the broader community?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:They were educating them to contribute to their communities and to societies, and most of them were probably going to get married.  Now, the woman who founded the school is going to be, I want to say 300 years old.  It was the oldest girls’ school in the country.  It has the biggest endowment, and one of the few that stayed single sex, and has put out -- people -- Jane Fonda went to this school.  I mean it's put out a whole variety of women, all of whom are highly individual and I you know, the data, in fact that women at Harvard who has done all the research on single sex education, I believe it completely and certainly, maybe you don't need it now but you did then, you know?  It makes a huge difference to put girls together, and there has to be a girl President of the Student Body and President of the Senior Class.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:I'm assuming female teachers.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I had female teachers, and there were occasionally, there were men teachers that tended to get involved with the girls, but it was a huge -- it's probably the most important educational experience, to take a kid from Southern West Virginia and throw them into this very high level -- and these kids, this was quite a sophisticated group of young ladies.  They had speech classes, so that they would tape you, and you would have to get up and give five minutes.  The teacher would say, talk about that building over there for five minutes, and you would have to get up and extemporaneously give a talk, and they taped you, so that everybody lost her regional accent.  I mean, they were highly focused and highly organized, and I loved it.  I thought it was terrific.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:And clearly, not just the academics, but you were learning all sorts of other skills that would stand you in very good stead in a place like Yale, especially the medical school.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Well, it taught you that you needed to speak up for yourself, and then I went to an all girls college too.  I went to Connecticut College, which had the advantage of allowing me to go to Paris for a year, and they -- private schools have a unique ability to focus on what the student can do and wants to do, and depending on how big they are, they either pick students out and encourage them, or at least let the student come in and say they want to do something, and Yale is the same way.  I mean, all three of those schools, there were no rules that couldn't be manipulated or broken or bent.  Whatever you wanted to do, you could do.  You just had to find the right person to talk to, and Yale in particular.  Connecticut was like that, but that's a very small microcosm of 1,600 students.  The graduate school and medical school at Yale turned out to be the same way.  It was just a much bigger pond.  I had classmates who dropped out of medical school for two years and went to law school, and then came back and finished medical school.  When I wanted to go from the post doc, back to the medical school, that was pretty easy.  People moved around.  I never went to anybody at Yale and asked for help, that they didn't say sure, let me help you.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:That's very interesting.  I've never heard anybody say that before.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I just had no trouble.  I mean you know, when I interviewed for medical school, now I was going out with the person who became my husband, and the person interviewing me -- he was on the faculty -- knew that, but he said, and at least 15% of my class had PhDs, and there weren't all that many women, but there were a few.  He said, well we look for students, we have no exams.  You just have to pass your boards.  We look for students who have produced.  We look at what your track record is, because if you have a good track record, the likelihood is you will continue to do it.\r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=1500.0,1800.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/7","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"So we look for somebody who has come from a power place, you know, from a position of strength, and that was a -- I had never thought about that before.  I never found anything that I couldn't make happen at Yale.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:You know, that's an interesting way of looking at it, because I would have thought the counter argument to that is it means that then, women or men, for that matter, who didn't have the privileges of your upbringing and education for university, would not necessarily have the track record that people then could feel they could put a bet on, that you were going to be all right.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:That's -- that's possible, and I've always --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:And that would put women, maybe at a disadvantage.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:It would put them at a disadvantage.  The other thing is, I came both to Emma Willard, and then to Connecticut College, I was a chemistry major, and when I decided to go to Paris, I had to get all kinds of things done.  I couldn't take the economics course, so I got the economics guy to say OK, take a history course.  And I had to put three laboratory courses into my senior year, for the chemistry major, because all I did was French and history while I was in Paris.  I found, I learned, that if there was something I wanted, and I went and I talked to people, I could make it happen.  Now, you can't do that at the University of California, because of their rules, but in a private school, there are no rules.  So I had had enough success in manipulating the system, to make the assumption that I could always manipulate the system, and it turned out to be true.  It has turned out, and not just at Yale.  It turns out to be true just about everywhere.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:It takes being a little ballsy, and not in a mean or nasty way, and not in a pushy way, but it takes having a rationale, having a track record, going in and saying, I think this is a really good idea, and I'm going to convince you it is because I need you to support me in doing this.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:It's about knowing what you want.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:And you have to know what you want, and you have to be willing to ask people and be willing to hear no, because sometimes there is no.  But easily, 70% of the time, you get what you want.  I used to tell my residents that; you've got to ask.  If you don't ask, nobody gives you anything.  I just think it's -- and I think that came from the way my parents dealt with us, I guess.  I now have three children who do the exact same thing, and they drive me crazy.  (laughter)  But nobody does hand you anything on a silver platter, and if you don't go out and beat the bushes for it, it won't happen.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Would you have described yourself, looking back, at you as a -- when you got to college, to Connecticut College, would you have said you were an ambitious young woman at that stage?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:No.  No, I don't think so.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Because that's what you're describing.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Yeah, but I don't think so.  I just wanted to have fun.  I had been in a girls boarding school, where we were allowed off campus from noon to 5:00 on Saturdays, if we had been good, and I had been caught for smoking, cross country skiing on the campus.  I mean, Troy, New York is way the hell upstate.  I had gotten invited to Dartmouth Green Key Weekend my senior year, but we were not allowed to go to boys schools without parental permission or without all this stuff.  So I had forged a note from my mother, saying that I was going to go visit a classmate in Hanover, New Hampshire.  Well, the school figured that one out pretty fast, and I got caught doing that.  So I got campused.  I was pushing the envelope.  I had never done anything really illegal, but I've never felt -- but I wanted to go to Dartmouth.  I wanted to go to Green Key Weekend in the spring of my senior year.  I got campused, a big deal, and so I just always assumed that whatever you wanted, you should just go after.  But I wanted to have fun.  You know, when I got to Conn, and boy I was dating people at Yale.  I blew off a religion paper that I knew I could get an A+ on, because the boy I really liked had come up from New Haven that day, and we went to the beach, and I knew that if I wrote a conclusion to the paper, I'd get an A+.  I got an A-, because I knew, without a conclusion, it wouldn't be right.  I didn't care.  I didn't do it.  So you make choices, but I really wanted to have fun, until -- but it's -- I looked at graduate schools.  I decided I would never be a doctor, because my father wanted me to be a doctor.  He could go stuff it.  I wasn't going to do that.\r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=1800.0,2100.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/8","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"And I got accepted at Tufts for a PhD in biochemistry, and one of the professors at Connecticut, a woman who had a PhD in microbiology from Yale, said -- and this is Prokesh.  She said --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:And she was Mrs. Prokesh, not Dr. Prokesh?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Yes.  We called her Mrs. Prokesh.  I had two -- she wasn't a professor of mine, but Trudy Smith was a Professor of Chemistry, and we called her Mrs. Smith too, now that I think about it.  She had a PhD in Chemistry and a family.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:And what about the, the men on faculty, did you call them Dr.?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I don't remember.  They don't stand out in my mind.  These two women do.  I don't remember what we called the men.  I don't remember any of the men, frankly.  I remember these two women, and Mrs. Prokesh said to me, I know you're not in my class and I know you're going to Tufts, but you really ought to go to Yale.  This was February/March of my senior year and I said well, it's well past the deadline, this is silly.  Yale?  I couldn't get into Yale.  She said, \"Of course you can, let me make a phone call.\"  And she called down to New Haven and she said, the Department of Biochemistry, chaired by Dr. Joseph Fruton, a big, forbidding, white haired you know, tyrannical person, might be interested.  I didn't know that they had had two people drop out of their PhD class, but luck plays a part in everything.  She said, \"Why don't you give him a call?\"  I've talked to the people in microbiology and told them that you're really terrific and you should be going to Yale, so give him a call.  So here it is, March of my senior year.  I pick up the phone, in a phone booth, with a bunch of quarters at Connecticut College.  It's not too expensive because it's only an hour away, and I dropped them in and I asked to speak to Dr. Fruton.  He picks up the phone.  I don't know why they put me through, and I'm -- being dumb and naïve is a really positive quality, and I said Dr. Fruton, this is Mary Lake Polan, and I am a senior at Connecticut College, and I know it's past your deadline for applications for the Graduate School of Biochemistry, but I've just heard such good things about the Yale department, and I'd like to come to Yale.  (laughs)  There was this dead silence on the other end of the phone, and all of a sudden he started to laugh, this booming laugh, and I didn't know him from Adam or I never would have called.  If I had known who he was, I never would have called.  He wrote the classic biochemistry textbook used throughout the country, and he laughed and he said well, I don't handle the graduate student program, but you call Dr. George Taborsky, who was Hungarian, and talk to him, and here's his number.  I called and I must have sent the paperwork in, and the next thing I know, I was going to Yale as a graduate student.  Well that's how I got to Yale.  They had two people who dropped out.  I was the only woman in a class of six.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Why did you choose biochemistry?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Because it sounded romantic.  Because I had been a physical chemist and done physical chemistry, and I liked the biologic -- I thought I would like the biologic systems.  I was tired of weighing stuff out, and biochemistry sounded romantic and sexy, so I thought well, why not biochemistry?  So I -- that's all, and then I called Tufts and said I wasn't coming, but it was a complete fluke, but I learned that things like that -- boy, when somebody offers you an opportunity, you had better jump on it.  It doesn't matter if you're scared.  It doesn't matter if you think you can't do it.  You just hold your nose, close your eyes and jump, because you'd be surprised what you can get done.  It never would have occurred to me to call him up, if she hadn't nudged me and pushed me.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:What do you think she saw in you?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I don't know, because my roommate, Polly, was her student, and I only saw her peripherally.  I have no idea.  I think maybe what she -- if I had been in that -- and I have done that with residents and students and fellows now.  It's what attracts me to people, it's a weird history, a different history, and she knew that I had dropped all the chemistry and gone to Paris for a year, and then come back and finished and decided to go to graduate school.  That, at the time, in 1964, was very unusual.\r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=2100.0,2400.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/9","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"It was moderately unusual to go to graduate school, but it was very unusual to be a chemistry major and go to France, do a junior year abroad.  People didn't do that.  They do now but they didn't then, and I think that must have been it.  She must have said, there's something -- this is different.  You know, she's done well and there's something different about her.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Did she ever give you any advice, I mean apart from telling you to go and call Dr. Fruton?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Mm mm.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:No?  So there was no what we would call today a mentoring situation?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Nope.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:No.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:But I had the clear feeling that she thought I could do it, and I thought well maybe, who knows.  Yale sounds better than Tufts.  And then I got to Yale, an overwhelming place as a graduate student.  It's just an overwhelming environment.  (door closes)  Hey sweetie, Hi.\r\nM:Hi.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Come meet Florence.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:I'll just --\r\n[BREAK IN AUDIO}\r\n\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:I mustn't forget to ask you.  When you're describing just talking to Dr. Fruton and that sort of thing, I'm reminded of something that Matina Horner, the psychologist.  She did a lot of work on women and success, I think in the 70s, and she came to the conclusion that often, women fear success more, the fear of failure, and it seems to be a particular female thing.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I think that's -- my feeling about that was developed from chairing a department, from watching, and I hired, you know all our residents were women, and I hired a lot of women faculty.  There's a difference in -- there's a cohort difference.  The women in my age group had to work very, very hard, and nobody gave them much of anything.  There was very little indulgence.  So they you know, whatever it takes, they did it.  You know, if it took 12 hour days, 14 hour days, 16 hour days, they did it, and they didn't fear success.  They wanted it so badly, that they would do anything to be successful.  (phone rings, short conversation)  I'm not going to answer that any more.  I don't think that the women in my age group fear success.  The younger women aren't being as successful, from what I can see, and I think it's because they're not working as hard.  They somehow feel that it should happen for them, you know that they should get a little extra because they have children, or they should you know, it should be easier for them, or there should be some indulgence for them.  There was never the sense, when I was in graduate school or medical school or as a junior faculty member, that there should be any indulgence for you.  You knew it was going to be hard and you expected it, and you just worked harder.  And now, that's not what I found with the junior faculty, and I'm not sure -- I don't know that I would say they feared success.  I think they just -- it takes a huge amount of effort, and they just didn't want to put the effort in, and I see that in my own daughter and it drives me crazy.  She wants to be a dermatologist, because she likes the lifestyle.  She loved Ob/Gyn but it's too hard a lifestyle.  OK, so it's a hard lifestyle, duh, but still, you should do what you love.  You shouldn't pick your specialty on the basis of a lifestyle for God's sake.  And I know people have said women are afraid of success.  Not the women I know.  It just isn't true.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:I think -- I can't speak for Horner, but I think she was doing the research in the context of what the expectations were of women at that time, in the 50s and 60s, and that somehow success didn't sit easily with what women were supposed to be in the society.  I think that must have been where the hypothesis came from.\r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=2400.0,2700.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/10","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"MARY LAKE POLAN:That's true.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I think that's true, but it never crossed my mind that you wouldn't want to be successful.  Why would you do it if you wanted to fail it?  And I don't know anybody -- I don't know anybody within five years of me, plus or minus, who wouldn't have you know, done whatever it took to be successful.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:So there was a kind of hunger?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Oh, absolutely.  Absolute starvation for success.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:You would have been an undergraduate and then a graduate student, in the mid to late 60s.  At the time when certainly civil rights had kicked in, in the States, and feminism was beginning to make its presence felt, I just wondered how aware you were of those kind of equality issues, in the context of your own life and expectations.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I have had -- I've been extraordinarily fortunate.  I'm blind to a lot of things that happened.  It never occurred to me that I wouldn't get something because I was female.  It had occurred to me I wouldn't get it because I didn't work hard enough, but it never crossed my mind, because everything I wanted I got, except cheerleading in the ninth grade, and that's just because they -- I wasn't pretty enough.  It didn't have to do with brains.  I just made the assumption that if you work hard enough, you can do anything you want.\r\nM:See you in an hour.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:OK sweetie, I'll be over there.\r\nM:Nice to meet you Florence.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Right.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:It never occurred to me that because you were a woman, because my father, it never occurred to my father.  I had a classmate in grade school, Sally Ragel (sp?), who ended up to be an ophthalmologist.  My father did everything he could to get her into medical school and her residency, and wanted her to come back and practice with him.  She turned out to be flaky and he was disappointed, but he tried everything.  He supported -- my uncle supported a current ophthalmologist in Huntington, West Virginia, and paid for her medical school education.  My father and my uncles supported women.  They just you know, they just thought women should do everything, and so I never -- it never crossed my mind that women couldn't do whatever they wanted.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:So you never really had, I suppose what?  I hesitate to use the word I suppose, but a sense of victimhood?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Mm mm, no.  And in graduate school, in a science graduate curriculum, women are -- you know, it's how smart you were and how good your science is that matters.  It doesn't -- you know, sex doesn't make that much difference in science.  In medicine it did, but by the time I got to medical school, I had a PhD, and I was older, and I worked in the laboratory, in Joe's laboratory, for the first two years of medical school anyway, half time, because I needed to earn money because my father didn't pay for my medical school education.  So I had to earn some money and I worked at Joe's lab part-time, and then my third year in medical school, we went to Oxford.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:You were married by that time?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Well, I wasn't exactly married.  Joe was on the faculty, in dermatology, and I was in the department, doing my thesis in the department of dermatology, my PhD thesis.  So we started living together for ten years, and then I decided to go to medical school, because I watched him and I though hmm, he has a pretty good life, this isn't so bad.  What I liked about science was talking to people and I thought, well that's not going to work out in the long run, particularly well, and so I decided to go to medical school.  He was very supportive.  I have to say, he was quite supportive.  So I got to medical school and he wanted to take a sabbatical, and he wanted to go to Oxford.  So my third year in medical school, my last year, I went to Oxford for three months and had a wonderful time, because I worked both at Radcliffe informally, with John Radcliffe, and was going to stay and do medicine with [Besa?] at the Radcliffe Infirmary, but the Chairman of Medicine at Yale, who had said I could that died, and I hadn't gotten him to write it down, and so I couldn't stay, but Oxford was just a marvelous place for a North American medical student.  And so I really wasn't so much at Yale in the medical school.\r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=2700.0,3000.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/11","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"I mean, I was only there three years.  I was working part-time in the lab for the first two years, and three months of the last year, I was in England.  Yale is the kind of place, it was both the graduate school and post doctoral two years, and particularly the medical school, were just made for me.  Boy, you could do anything you wanted to do.  There you are, three years of medical school, and you work half time, and you spend three months in England for the last year.  Hey, it doesn't get better than that.  They just you know, whatever you wanted to do, you could do.  And then I was able to skip my internships, so I made up another year and just did the residency, and I, at that point, wanted to stay because Joe and I were seeing each other.  And so I applied -- well, I was -- I matched with Stanford for medicine, and then I applied to Yale for ophthalmology, Ob/Gyn and orthopedics for the residencies and got -- was accepted to both of the programs.  I chose Ob/Gyn and didn't want to go to Stanford for an internship, so I went to the Chairman of the Department of Ob/Gyn and again, I said I really don't want to go.  Can I possibly stay?  Two residents had died and he needed a body, and in the United States, if you drop out of a match, your entire school matches neither in or out the next year, because if they let one person do it, the whole system would fall apart.  And they somehow talked -- I said, I will stay and be you know, your resident if you get me out of Stanford match.  And I don't know how he did it but he did it, and again, you know, if you don't ask, you never know.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.  Let's backtrack a bit.  You squeaked into the graduate school with the phone calls and everything else, and it was to do biochemistry.  So who was your supervisor?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:A man named Saul Lande, who eventually went back to medical school himself.  I worked in the Department of Dermatology, which was chaired by Aaron Lerner at the time, and that's how I met my first husband, who was an academic dermatologist.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:What were your first impressions of Yale when you came up?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I used to -- I lived in Helen Hadley Hall.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Oh, right.  You're the first person I've met who actually lived there.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Oh yes, I lived there for a year, and I hung out with all the French graduate students, because I had just come off this year in Paris, and I thought they were a lot more interesting than the scientists, and they were.  And so the French graduate students and the philosophy graduate students, and I used to walk around New Haven and pinch myself.  I couldn't believe I was at Yale.  It was just the most awesome experience, and I was running very hard to stay up academically.  I didn't have -- I'd come from a liberal arts school, and I really didn't have the science background, and I didn't have the math background, and I'm not a very good mathematician.  I worked very hard, and I learned to study with my classmates, and for the first time I'd gone -- that was the first time I ever went to school with boys, males, and I learned that it was fun to go to school with them, and it was interesting intellectually.  There was no dating interaction, because it was stupid.  I mean, why would you date somebody you were trying desperately get to pull you through the organic chemistry course?  But I was scared, I was overwhelmed, and having a really good time dating and you know, going out, and not being in a girls school again.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Was it a friendly place for women, looking back?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I thought it was.  I mean, I had two friends who were in the French Department, and we wanted -- you had to have two languages at that time, and I spoke French, so that was no problem, but I had to learn German.  So the three of us found this wonderful German course in Salzburg, Austria for the summer, for $200, and we trucked ourselves off to Austria, got on trains and went to Hungary and Budapest and traveled, had a fabulous time.  Came back, flunked my German exam, because I had such a good time, and then the next summer I stayed in New Haven and took the German course there and passed it.  I thought it was a terrific place for women.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Because it wasn't co-ed yet.  I mean, there were lots of female graduate students.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:There were female graduate students.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:But it wasn't co-ed yet was it?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Mm mm.\r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=3000.0,3300.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/12","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"And, the other reason that I really enjoyed it was, I became a resident fellow because I was --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:This was in Helen Hadley?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:No.  I was in Helen Hadley Hall for one year, and then I got a resident fellow job at Timothy Dwight, which is where the undergraduate college is, and the headmaster or the -- yeah, I guess he was the headmaster there, was [L.T. Morrison?] an historian, and you -- a friend of mine lived in a two bedroom suite that had maid service, and our job was to give parties for the undergraduates.  So they supplied my room with essentially some of my board, because I was paying for this myself, and so it was terrific.  And then the second year, I decided -- I had a different roommate and I decided I was going to give a class.  You could give college seminars, and they paid you $2,000 for doing that.  So I put together a class, and I had invited speakers from the sciences, why they went into science, which meant all I did was buy a bottle of champagne for each of my speakers.  Then the students wrote a paper at the end.  It as easy and I got paid, because I was having to earn a living too.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Were there any women amongst that lot that you asked to come?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Yes, Joan Steitz, who had just come as a junior faculty at Yale, and I had Joe Fruton speak and I had a whole bunch of people talk.  And the master, the headmaster at Timothy Dwight, they had the Chubb Fellows at Timothy Dwight, and they still do, and they had fabulous people.  Edwin Land came, Kitty Carlisle came, Katherine Graham from the Washington Post had come for three days, and you meet them and talk to them, and give parties.  It was fabulous.  But I chose the second year to give this course, and the headmaster said he didn't like that.  I was supposed to be entertaining, and that's why he had female resident fellows.  Not because they were intellectually interesting or were to do anything intellectual, they were to give parties, and so I wasn't -- I didn't get the fellowship the next year, because he wanted somebody who would entertain.  I said well whatever, it's been two years and I'll be a post doc, and I'll earn a living.  But Yale was just -- and living in the college made a big difference.  That made it much more attractive, and so I had a lot of stuff going on in college, and I just had a -- I had a wonderful time at Yale.  I never saw any -- I couldn't think of a negative.  I just can't think of a negative.  It's the most intellectually interesting place, because it was so broad, and you could do anything you wanted to do.  I mean, there were no -- there were no brakes on it.  You know, you could be a resident fellow and you could go to the Yale rep, you could do anything.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Were there any places that you couldn't go to because you were a woman?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:You couldn't go to Maury's.  I was there when you couldn't go to Maury's, and I never -- and the Elizabethan Club.  I'm not sure when we were allowed in the Elizabethan Club.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:No, I don't think we were.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:So I couldn't do that, and it kind of pissed me off that I couldn't go to Maury's, but -- and of course, the secret societies were all male, but I wasn't an undergraduate, so that didn't really affect me.  Maury's did.  You know, the graduate students occasionally would go to Maury's, and I couldn't go, and that irritated me, and I remember when Maury's was integrated, and I thought that was terrific.  And I did go and have tea at the Lizzie after they let women in there, just not that I really -- I just wanted to do it.  But I never -- I never saw anything that was negative.  In medical school, yes, but not through the graduate school and in my post doc.  Well you've read the thing we did about Joe Gall?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Well, I'd like to talk to you about Joe, because so many people have mentioned him, have actually singled him out as somebody who appears to have been incredibly positive towards women.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:He was.  You know, he gave a lecture at Columbia about a week or two weeks ago, and I didn't get to it because it was up at 168th Street.  But I came back from California, when he retired and went to the Carnegie and gave a talk, and they had a big symposium for it.  I just think he's the most extraordinary individual, at a time when nobody was doing that, and that's one of the reasons I went to post doc for.\r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=3300.0,3600.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/13","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"INTERVIEWER:Was it his -- the work that he was -- I'm not a scientist, so I mean, I have only the vaguest notions of what microbiology and things like that are, but was his work intellectually way out ahead, as well as his --\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Yes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:-- way, the way he integrated his labs.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:He is an extraordinary scientist, and a fabulous human being, and somebody you should talk to is Joan Steitz. \r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yes, I will be.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:She was his -- she worked with him as an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota, so there's this long lineage.  When she came to Yale he said I should talk to her, and I did.  I had her come and talk in my class, the class that I gave, and then I was her infertility doctor and I delivered her son.  I think I delivered him.  I know I treated her for infertility.  She and ah, Tom have a son, Jonathan.  He's about Josh's age.  He's about 28 now, and a beautiful house.  If you can, you should do this in her home.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Well that's tempting.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:They live out on the -- in Guilford on the Sound, and it is -- maybe it's in Branford, but it's just beautiful.  But anyways, Joe had been doing this with women for years and years.  I mean, this wasn't new, what he was doing at Yale.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:So why do you think he was the exception, by and large the exception?  Somebody, an imminent scientist who was actively encouraging women and pushing them.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I have always tried to work for men who really liked women, who liked them to be smart, mouthy and pushy.  He wasn't afraid of women.  There was -- when you meet him, if you talk to him, he's very nebishy.  I mean he's very unthreatening.  I wouldn't say unmasculine, but every -- he's a little cross eyed and even then, he was balding and you know, he bought all of his pants -- he used to be so proud, he bought all of his pants, he'd buy a dozen at a time, at Sears Roebuck.  I mean he's the classic sort of smart, kind, absent minded professor, and I think he just -- he liked women.  I mean, he just liked being around women.  He was so supportive and non-threatening, and most men you know, if you're a graduate student or a post doc, there can be -- there's a sexual aura or you know, something going on.  There never was with him.  So people -- so women flocked to him, because he was supportive, and there was never a feeling of endangerment or fear, which there were with a lot of people.  You know, what is it they want?  You never got that with Joe.  We used to call him Gall's gals, but he trained, oh my goodness.  You know, there are professors older than I am, you know all over MIT and Brown, and they're just all across the country.  Stanford.  One of his students was at Stanford when I got there.  Jenny, the one who did the thing, I mean he was just -- he is just an extraordinary person.  I'm sure there are people like that now, but there weren't people like that then.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Again, you know, forgive me for my lack of scientific knowledge, but I wonder if his, his areas of microbiology was very much a -- or maybe in some ways, a newish area in science.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:It was.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:So maybe the rules hadn't been written, or stratified.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:It was new, but as a scientist, he's interesting too.  He has mutated.  He started off as a classical biologist.  Well, most of those people quit doing science.  Most people -- you know in medicine, you get used to the fact that you have to invent the next best thing, or your junior faculty and your fellows go out and set up shop across the street and kill you financially.  Most scientists continue to do the same thing over and over and over.  Instead of doing it in frogs, they do it in fish and they do it in tadpoles and they do it in rats.  He didn't.  He actually developed novel new areas.  He would read a point and instead of just kind of jumping to the next animal, he actually went off here and there.  So his science was -- \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=3600.0,3900.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/14","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"His scientific career would really make a fabulous book, because he has the ability to see where things ought to be in five years, and the technical skills to develop new techniques to get there.  Very unusual, very unusual in anything, to have -- and it makes for a very -- my scientific career, I would find...  And not just the science.  You have to, you have to, on some level, be able to project forward five or ten years, and see where the world is going, not just --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:See around corners.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:You have to be able to see around corners.  If you can do that, those are the people who do extraordinary -- not just do well financially, but have extraordinarily productive lives and fun.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Or maybe that kind of open mindedness and imagination that requires one to be able to do that, also allows the gender issue to be less of an issue.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I think that may be, and it may be that women are more imaginative, and he liked that, because when I went to look for a post doc, I kept wanting to stay at Yale, and everybody said, you should go with Joe, because Joe likes women.  And I have been very fortunate to work for three men that just plain liked women.  Never any sexual anything, but they just liked being around women, and that's not so common in my experiences.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Is this all three at Yale?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:No.  Well yes.  The other one was Alan DeCherney, who was head of reproductive endocrinology, who hired me as a resident at Yale, and then kept me on as a faculty member in his division.  The third person was the Dean at Stanford who hired me.  Of course, you're always partial to people who hired you, and they must be partial to you, or they wouldn't have.  So they all three hired me, and they were all three, very helpful in teaching me about things, and were fun to be around, and I liked working for.  I liked working for men who really liked women.  Frank really likes women and Hearst is a company of predominantly women.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah, I think that's true.  I think the media generally.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:The media in general are women.  All the editors are women, all the -- and so, I like being around men who like women, and I don't mean dating or physical or any of that.  I just like the way they think, and they're not threatened, and Gall was one of those people.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:That's very interesting.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:And I don't know what other people will tell you about him, but I would go to Joan Steitz, who knew him very early on, and I think he was quite instrumental in her career too, and she's had a spectacular career.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:I've heard her speak about her work, but I've never actually met her yet, because she's still on the faculty I think.  Well you know, I can keep her for -- she should around in a year’s time, no doubt we need to watch our time.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Oh, I'm fine.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Of course we've been talking about Joe Gall and the biology and all of that.  I just wondered, thinking back to him, were there any women on the faculty at that time?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Well, they weren't on the faculty.  Ian Sussex's wife is Mary ah, --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Mary Clutter.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Clutter.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:And she was a research associate.  Um, Frank Ruddle's wife had a PhD, and she was a research associate.  Joe Gall's wife was Sophia Simmons, and she was an associate professor.  She actually had a --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Was that not Joe Fruton's wife?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I'm sorry, Joe Fruton.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:That's OK.  Yeah, it's all right.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Yes, it was Joe, yes you're right.  Joe Fruton's wife was Simmons, and the textbook was Fruton and Simmons, and she was on the faculty, but he wants -- but she wasn't a full fledged, at least I didn't perceive her as a full fledged person.  He was a very opinionated, bombastic guy, who wrote an autobiography incidentally, that he gave me a copy of, years later.  They had the graduate students over to dinner, and I was wearing a dress that had been made for me.  In Huntington, West Virginia, people actually made dresses.  They had all the seamstresses that made dresses.  And she spilled something on my dress, and I said oh, not to worry.  She was horribly apologetic, and he was nasty to her about having spilled something on my dress.  So I decided that he was kind of a shithead.\r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=3900.0,4200.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/15","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"He also wanted people in that department to be his graduate students, and he called me into his office and told me about the great things he was doing, and how he thought I would be a good graduate student for him, and I wasn't interested.  I said, well you know Dr. Fruton, I'm not really interested in what so and so is doing over there.  Oh well no, you are not going to get a PhD with that person, da da da da, and I, probably foolishly, said oh, I don't care, that's what I'm interested in, and I went to work for Saul Lande, and I very nearly didn't get a PhD, because the project -- he was right, the project fell through.  So he was right, but I was so -- I didn't like the control aspect of it, and I decided I didn't care.  You know it wasn't -- he wasn't going to tell me what to do.  Where did he get off thinking he can tell me, and so I did something else, and actually he was right, intellectually he was correct.  It worked out and I got a degree, but he was --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Was he as controlling, in your view, of his male graduate students as his female graduate students?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Yes, because my best friend was his -- did work for him as a graduate student, and he was very controlling of him.  Many people have gender differences, but major traits, in my experience, are the same.  They treat men and women the same.  If they're controlling, they're controlling with men and women.  They may be more dismissive of the women, but the basic you know attitude is the same.  So yeah, he was very controlling with his male graduate students too.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Did you ever pick up that amongst the science faculty in general, that women, especially if they were married women, might not be quite as serious about their science maybe as the men?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I assume that that's why there were no female faculty members.  There really weren't.  Joan, I think was the first married female faculty member in that department, and I'm not sure when she came, but she was there when I was still a graduate student.  She had just come.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:I think she came around 1970.  Is that about right?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Yeah.  I got my PhD in 1970.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.  I think it was very late 60s or maybe even during the 70s.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Yeah, late 60s, because from '70 to '72, I was a post doc, and from '72 to '75, I was a medical student.  She was the first one that I remember.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:So all the other women that were around --\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Were research assistants.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Were research assistants and so it must have occupied a fairly liminal position within the hierarchy.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Yeah.  They did a lot of scutwork.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Scutwork.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I always thought, particularly for Mary Clutter, that it was really unfortunate.  I mean, here was a smart woman, and I'm sure Frank Rudder's wife was smart too.  I just didn't know her.  But I always thought Mary was getting screwed you know, and then they got divorced, for reasons that I never did -- I didn't know her that well, but I always thought that it was quite unfortunate that she wound up as a researcher, because there I was, and I had a very close friend, who is still a close friend, who was a good friend and in the same department as Mary.  Susan and I and Mary used to hang out, and Susan was a post doc and I was a post doc.  I was in Gall's lab and Susan was in -- I forget the name of her -- Walter Gehring's lab, and Sue and I did something very unusual; we worked together on a project, across laboratories, and published a paper, which most people weren't doing then.  They do it now but they weren't then, but -- and I always thought it was unfair that Sue and I were post docs, and going out and getting jobs, and there poor Mary was, a research associate, because she was every bit as smart and well trained, if not moreso, than we were, but she just happened to be married to somebody on the faculty, so they nailed her.  I'm sure if you talk to Mary, she'll tell you worse stories.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Well I'm -- she says she is going to talk to me.  I think she's abroad at the moment.  She's a hard woman to track down.  She's always running off somewhere, but yes, yeah, I'm very much hoping she's going to talk -- Dick said she went on to the NSF and all of that afterwards, so I'm really interested to see how she ended up, where she did.\r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=4200.0,4500.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/16","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Do you think that -- looking back again on your PhD and post doc years, that the male students operated in a different way, with different expectations, to you women students and post docs?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:No, but I was the only female in my graduate school, and I operated in just the same way they did, because it was a group effort.  As a post doc, there were so many women who chose lab, that it was the norm and not the unusual thing.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:In what way -- I don't even know if it's possible to answer this question, but in what way was Joe's lab different, culturally different, from other labs?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:He let you do what you needed to do.  You know, if you said I want to work on this, he might say well, I'm not sure that's so good, but OK, whereas Fruton had said oh, you're going to get into trouble if you do that.  He took a sabbatical while I was there, the two years that I was there, and I started working on something else, on the giant chromosomes, and I did something, and I made a discovery.  You know, one of two or three eureka discoveries, and it donned on me what I was working with, and he went off on sabbatical and he just left you alone, mainly he left you alone, unless you wanted to come and ask him something, and then when I decided to go to medical school, I told him, and he of course thought it was the dumbest thing he'd ever heard, because he thought doctors were stupid, and he had spent this time training somebody who was going to be a stupid doctor.  But I said you know Joe, I need money.  Do you think I could work in the lab and continue for a couple years, and he said sure, and I did something.  The first handheld calculators came out while he was on sabbatical, and I got $1,000 a year from the NIH for supplies, and the first handheld calculators cost $600.  All it did was add and subtract and divide and multiply, and it was not all that small.  He came back and I said, I've just spent most of my stipend on this calculator, look.  He said, huh?  He said, \"That's the dumbest thing I ever saw.\"  I said no but look, you can just carry it around with you and it's got batteries, and you don't have to plug it in the wall.  It doesn't have a roll of paper, it's got a LED or whatever, and I showed it to him and he thought it was so stupid.  Then about three weeks later he had one, and he was willing to live and let live, and that's what was -- my father was quite controlling too.  I hated it.  I don't respond well to that.  I never have.  I loved working with Joe, because Joe would say, well I think that's a stupid idea, but if that's what you want to do fine, I'll help you.  It was not -- there wasn't oh, you're going to you know, roast in the flames because you're doing something stupid, or I won't talk to you because you're going to be a doctor now.  I just thought that was really nice, and so you could walk in and say -- you could actually ask him what he thought and tell him what you thought, because he didn't force you into anything.  He listened and gave an opinion, but he didn't make you feel badly if you chose something else, like you've done a wrong thing, and that's very unusual.  Most people, if you do something they don't want you to do, like your children, you tell them that that's a very bad thing to do.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:And certainly I think it's true in academic life, that many people like their graduate students to be of their school.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Mm hmm.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Maybe it's something about handing on I suppose, but like one's children, as you say, --\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:They're like your children.  Your post docs are like your children.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yes.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:He was willing to let his children go out and experiment, and I never thought of it that way Florence, but you're right.  Parents who are willing to let their children go out and experiment get better results and have a better relationship with those children, than ones who try and force them.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:But it's a risk.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:It is a risk.  They may choose to do something really stupid, but I -- and with your own children you have to -- you sort of have to balance that very fine line.  You don't have quite that fine line if it's a mentor relationship, but I think that's really the thing that he did, and I never thought about it until just now, but if you ask people who worked with him, he was very open to everything.  He was interested in so many things himself.  His wife, first wife, (inaudible) Yale Art Gallery, and then he married, remarried, after they were divorced, for who knows what reasons.  He remarried one of the technicians in the laboratory.\r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=4500.0,4800.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/17","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"INTERVIEWER:Well that's certainly a whole other story.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:There's a whole story about that.  There's a, there's a -- he -- is this sealed?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:I think probably, if you don't want to say, don't say.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I think I'd better not say.  There's a whole story --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Right.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:-- about that, that isn't really negative about him, because he's such a kind, good person.  It was just a big surprise.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Right.  Shall we just leave it at that?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Let's leave it.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Because I know that you're going to have to wind up soon.  What I think maybe, there would be maybe one other question I'll ask you now, and then we can -- and then we can leave it, and I think after I've asked you this question, when we get back together again, I'd really like to ask you about life outside the lab, in terms of my understanding, from having spoken to Mary Clutter and read one or two things, that that was also the time when ah, women in cell biology was taking off, and all of that, and I think that will be a good point to come back into.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Where to start.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah, to start again the next time we meet, because I think that's a whole other aspect, which is very interesting for this project in particular, when --\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Yeah, because the people who started that all came out of Yale.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Well, I think this is really interesting, and I think having now got a sense of how Joe Gall organized his lab and the women with it, how they operated, I think it makes sense that quite a lot of this activism started maybe at Yale.  But before -- but we'll leave that for another time.  I remember Mary Clutter saying somewhere, and it's in print and I can't remember exactly where.  She, in response to a question about how it was being a woman amongst her male peers, she said that she felt she was a bit of a pet, and I think pet was actually the word she used, because she was a bit unusual, being a female amongst all these males.  And I just wondered, since you were an only woman amongst your graduate group, that did you feel that, or how do you think your --\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I never did.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:You didn't?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I didn't, and I know what it feels like to be a pet, because when I was at Oxford, when we went to Oxford for sabbatical, Timothy Dwight's coordinate college is Queens, and they had always taken coordinate fellows to live at Queens, but because I was a woman, I couldn't live in Queens.  I was invited, I was the first woman since 1300, to go to high table at Queens.  They did do that.  So I went down to ah, oh that English designer, and I got all these long dresses.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Laura Ashley.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Laura Ashley.  I went to Laura Ashley at Oxford, and I bought all these long, you know Elizabethan type dresses, and I went to high table and by then, well Joe and I were -- that's another story.  Joe and I were married very briefly.  We lived together for 25 years and we had three children, but we weren't really married, which everybody knew.  I mean, it wasn't a big secret.  But he was a fellow at a different fellow.  He was at Jonathan Edwards.  I was at Timothy Dwight.  So he went to a different college for high table, and I was a pet at high table at Oxford.  They were so astonished to have a woman there.  I was the only woman they had ever seen, who could go to high table, and I had the best time.  It was such fun.  I mean these guys who ran the college at Oxford, there's a difference between Yale and Oxford.  Yale is an intellectual living situation.  Oxford is a business.  The colleges at Oxford own dairies and fields and cows, and they run a business.  They have to have a bottom line.  So these guys talk business over the you know, the nuts that go around, so a very staged.  The nuts go clockwise and the candies go counterclockwise, and then they pass them.  You go from -- to four different rooms after high table.  It was -- that was being a pet, but I never saw that at Yale.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.  I was just -- I couldn't help but pick up when Mary used that word, and I just wondered maybe, if you weren't kind of ostracized because you're a woman, but maybe the alternative was to be a pet.  There was not a -- it might have been more difficult if had you had kind of a regular, normal relationship with your male peers.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I never -- I never had a problem.  \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=4800.0,5100.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/18","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Medical school was different.  Medical school and residency were a little different, but they require quite different skills than being a graduate student and doing science.  But I always thought science was pretty egalitarian, and I never -- I never saw any of that.  But I don't see a lot of thing.  It turns out that there's a lot of that stuff that goes right by me, and I don't see it, which is fine.  I don't look for it and when somebody points it out to me, I often say really, is that what that was going on?  I didn't get that.  So I'm lucky.  I don't see it.  I'm too busy trying to get from point A to point B to point C, to really get into that stuff, which is a really nice way to do it.  I mean, if you're busy, you don't see it unless it really hits you in the face.  But it's still going on, because my daughter, on a rotation, called me and said, this guy is hitting on me, and what am I going to do?  You know, he's going to write my recommendation for the medicine clerkship, and I -- we had a conversation about that.  So it's going on in the medical school.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Let's stop there.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:OK.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:And ah, we'll convene another time.\r\n[BREAK IN AUDIO}\r\n\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:It seems to be picking up quite a lot of noise from somewhere.  I wonder where it is.  Yeah.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Maybe outside?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah, maybe it's outside.  There does seem to be -- it's amazing actually.  Anyway, I'm back with Mary Polan, for the next part of her interview, here in New York.  Mary, last week, when we met the first time, we talked about the first part of your Yale experience, which was grad school and postdoctoral position.  We were just about to start talking about the ah, women in cell biology and ah, what was going on in the profession in a wider way, in the early 70s.  One of the things that struck me, at least from the research that I've done, is that a number of the leading lights of the -- of ah, women in cell biology in the early 70s were in fact Yale women, and I wondered why that might be so.  Maybe you could tell me a little bit about the foundation of the group within the American Society for Cell Biology, and those leading out personalities at the beginning.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Well, Joe Gall was the head of the laboratory, and he had -- when I was a post doc there, he must have had three other post docs and five or six graduate students.  It was a big lab, almost all women.  There was one other male post doc, but it was almost all women, because everybody wanted to work for Joe.  He had trained Susan Gerbi, who was a graduate student at the time, who is now a professor at Brown.  Mary Lou Pardue, who is a professor at MIT.  Joan Steitz, who is a professor at Yale, who had been in his laboratory in Minnesota as an undergraduate.  Those were just the people I know.  Pat Kila (sp?).  I don't know what happened to her after she finished, but she was also a graduate student.  And the sense was that you could do anything.  You know, you could be a professor.  You didn't have to be a research associate.  That was also a time of just after the Vietnam War, so there was all kinds of things going on; oral contraceptives, women's liberation, people were questioning all kinds of authority, and so I think of movements, if you want to call that a movement, as a conjunction of many different things.  It's not one thing.  It's not just a postdoctoral advisor who was amenable to training women, or the timing or whatever, but it was a conjunction of things that happened to fortuitously happen at the same time.  All of the women at that time, and the men too, had grown up through the entire Sputnik era in the United States, when science was an enormous push, and science was respected, and everybody thought science was terrific.\r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=5100.0,5400.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/19","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"So everybody wanted to do science, and I think -- and you would have to check this, I don't think Susan Gerbi or Mary Lou Pardue ever married.  I know Ginny Walbot, who was also in Joe's lab, is now a professor at Stanford, and I used to see her periodically.  She never married.  So these were women who were totally devoted to science, and you could discuss whether that's good, bad, indifferent, but I think it's a fact, because of the women in that laboratory, many of them, I don't think ever married.  I don't know who else you're going to talk to.  I assume --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:I'll certainly be talking to Mary Clutter, because she's agreed.  Ginny, I'm not sure whether she actually taught at Yale or not.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:She didn't.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:No.  I think she was graduate --\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:And I don't think either Mary Lou or Susan Gerbi taught at Yale.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:No, I don't think they did, so I may not be talking to them.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:But I would ask Mary Clutter, because she probably would remember.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:But that was an enormously productive time for Yale.  Sid Altman was there as a junior faculty member, who later won the Nobel Prize.  There were just some very productive people around.  So everybody was excited about science, so that was the first thing.  Everybody loved science and wanted to do science and was excited.  Secondly, Joe made it easy for women to do science, and the women came into it from the vantage point of the Vietnam War and you know, personal liberation, and so I think it was a conjunction of things.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:And possibly a sense that although you were in a privileged position with somebody like Joe Gall, that actually it wasn't a level playing field, by and large, for women.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:No it wasn't, and I've always -- this is a personal opinion.  I've always thought and said -- now that may not be true for the women now coming up, but that women in my cohort had to be better and smarter and work harder, because that's just the way it was, and you knew that.  So you didn't whine and you didn't ask for anything extra, you just did it.  I've been thinking in the last week, and I don't think it's one factor, but I don't think anything that is a major change comes from one factor.  I think it's a conjunction of factors.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Did you then start to be active?  I mean, you collectively start to be active because you wanted to -- I mean, what was the aim of doing that?  Was it to make it easier for women?  Was it to raise consciousness that women could do these things?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Well I have to tell you, as you read that article, and we talked about this, Mary, Ginny and I.  I really wasn't politically active.  The things that they reminded me I did, I don't remember doing.  I was interested in science, in meeting people.  There were so many smart people at Yale, and I had all these friends in the French Department, and I was dating a guy who was a philosophy assistant professor, who had avoided the war by chopping his big toe off himself, with a hatchet.  Well, I grew up in West Virginia.  I didn't know anybody who even thought about chopping the toe off, but there were these you know, very interesting, weird people around, very smart.  I had a friend, who was Hungarian, who'd come out of Hungary in '56 as a refugee, who was in the Slavic Studies Department.  I mean, there were all these interesting people, and so I was just interested in what I could learn and do.  Mary Clutter and Ginny were the real spearhead people of this, and talking to Mary, you'll hear about it.  She has always been much more politically astute and involved, and I just did what they told me.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:So what sort of things did they get you to do?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:You know, there was a thing at the American Society for Cell Biology, to start a women's group, and I think they told me that I posted the posters for it.  I honestly, I don't remember it.  I remember when it started, and I thought it was a good thing, but I was so busy as a post doc, trying to stay above -- keep my head above water in Joe's lab, because I didn't know any biology.  I came from a chemistry and biochemistry background, and I didn't know about cells or protein.  I just didn't know any biology, so I had to learn all that, and I was working with Susan Friedman, who was a post doc in Gehring's lab, in a collaborating, and I'd never -- as a graduate student, I'd never done that.\r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=5400.0,5700.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/20","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"And so I was just having the best time, and I was also a resident fellow.  Maybe I wasn't resident fellow by then.  I probably wasn't a resident fellow by then, at Timothy Dwight, but Yale was just this whole wide world of people, and I wasn't particularly tuned in politically, and I'm still not.  So Mary is the one who can really tell you what the, the ah, planning and strategy was for that, because she was involved in setting it up, and I just you know, kind of tagged along and followed through.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Do you remember going to any of the early meetings at the American Society for Cell Biology?  I mean, can you remember looking around the room and thinking, ooh, there are not many of me around here?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Mm hmm.  I remember that, and the thing I remember the most.  Graduate student -- here, advisors for graduate students is important, but your postdoctoral advisor will get you your first job.  So you want to get in somebody's lab, who has connections, knows people, people respect, and Joe was perfect.  I remember him, at one of the cell biology meetings, and everybody wanted to work in his lab, and people would -- not just him, but people would follow senior professors around, and he said -- he came out of the men's room at one point and said, you know I was talking to all these women and like, they followed me into the bathroom almost.  So, I mean that's the one recollection I have, that there were few women and there very -- there were even fewer mentors that people wanted to work with, and to me it didn't seem like there were a few women, because the laboratory I was in had a lot of women.  So I didn't ever feel -- I never had a sense that there were few women or of being deprived, because I wasn't.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:In the trade, as it were, was there -- and I think you may have mentioned earlier, being called one of Gall's gals.  Was that meant in a friendly way or was it in a derogatory way, do you think?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I always thought it was friendly.  I always thought all the other professors were jealous, because he got the best students, and there were -- now in chemistry and biochemistry and physics, most of the students were men, the graduate students, when in cell biology, a lot of them were women, and so Joe got all the really good women.  So Gall's gals, I always saw that as other people saying that, and they were sort of envious or jealous.  But I almost never hear derogatory in statements that I listened, that I hear.  You've got to really hit me over the head before it dons on me.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Would you have said that women in cell biology was, in the beginning at least, a kind of counter culture group or a spinter group, rather than an inside, integral part of cell biology?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Definitely.  Mm hmm.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:So it wasn't generally met in a positive way, the idea that there should be some kind of women's forum?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Yeah.  I don't think anybody thought it was necessary or a particularly good thing, except the women.  There were probably a few men.  I don't think Joe thought about it one way or the other.  I think he thought it was fine.  I didn't -- I don't think it mattered to him.  He was never a particularly active or aggressive politic oriented person, and I think it just never occurred to him.  I think he thought it was fine.  Sure, you can do that.  Do that, that's great.  Of course women should have their say.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Can you recall what was on those early agendas, of women in cell biology?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I have no idea.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:I mean, I have come across one or two of the early newsletters, which were very much about how to get your first job, and I just wondered if that was -- if that meshed with your own recollection.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I don't remember, but that's the critical thing, and that's why your postdoctoral advisor was so important, because especially nowadays, you know there are committees, and they look at gender equity and racial equity, and you have to interview a number of people, and you always have to interview women.\r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=5700.0,6000.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/21","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Well that wasn't the case then.  In those days, people picked up the phone, called a friend and said ooh, I hear you have a job.  I have a great post doc for you.  And that's how you got your job.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:So there was a -- so there was a sort of an old boys network?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Mm.  Definitely.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:And not enough women to create a kind of all girls, all girls network?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:And I'm not sure there still is.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Really?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Mm hmm.  My experience is, Florence Haseltine has done the most to create a women's network.  And in Ob/Gyn it works pretty well, because there's so many more residents, but I can -- I can think of no other major -- maybe it works well in pediatrics, although not that many of the chairs are women, but I think it's -- I think networking is very important and in very few disciplines, not just medicine, but other disciplines.  Is it a particularly good thing?  I, I started to read Helen Thomas', one of her autobiographies, and that sure was her perception of journalism.  She was a star reporter for the Wall Street Journal and now, for the Hearse Corporation.  She must be 90 years old.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:She's the one that was bumped off the front seat wasn't she, in the \r\npress room at the White House?  Yeah, I think I know who she is, and quite possibly not one of the old boys.  So I think what I'm picking up from you Mary, is that you weren't really particularly involved, in a broader kind of political way, with feminism or feminist issues, either at Yale or beyond Yale.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Mm hmm.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:But you were very much concentrating on just kind of getting -- \r\ngetting what needed to be done on your own subject.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Done, mm hmm.  Mary and Ginny were much more politically oriented.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:It will be great to talk to Mary particularly.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:And you'll really enjoy talking to her.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.  So um, you got your -- you finish your graduate work, and you decided to go to medical school, and I remember you saying from last week, that you ah, were interested in medicine because it combined the science with the people.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Mm hmm.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:So I've remembered that correctly, have I?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I liked having coffee at the top of Kline Biology Tower better than doing experiments.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Right.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I thought, well this is a mistake.  I'm not -- this is not a good sign for the future.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:But why did you choose Ob/Gyn?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I went back to medical school because I was dating somebody who was a professor.  He was an associate professor at that point, in dermatology, and eventually, many years later, married him, after we had the first child.  And Joe, who's name is Joe McGuire, was at Yale.  He was on the faculty and so, I did my -- and I met him because I did my thesis in the Department of Dermatology.  I did it in -- I didn't do it in Kline Biology Tower, I did it in the medical school, where biochemistry was based.  Joe Fruton's department was based over at the medical school.  It isn't -- part of it is still, but at that time, the class of biochemistry was there, and so I watched what he did, and that he saw patients, and he did research.  He had a laboratory.  He taught.  I thought, what a great life this is.  He's got the ideal life, so I'll go to medical school.  And we were driving back from skiing, and I thought well, I have him in the car.  I'm going to tell him I'm going to medical school, and so I did.  He thought that was a pretty good idea.  So I interviewed and applied all over, and I got accepted at Yale.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Was Yale your first choice?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:No.  I really wanted to go to Stanford actually.  I'd never been to California, and I really wanted to go to Stanford.  I didn't get accepted, which make it all the sweeter to go back there as chairman of the department.  (laughter)  But I was accepted at I don't know, Wash U and University of Pennsylvania.\r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=6000.0,6300.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/22","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Good medical schools.  I chose to stay at Yale for three reasons.  This is for medical school.  One, Joe was there.  Two, I had a PhD, and Yale required a thesis, and it turned out that because I had already done a PhD thesis, I didn't have to do a medical school thesis.  So I thought there was a conceivable possibility I could graduate in three years, which I eventually did, because I was footing the bill for this myself.  My father had said, you have a little stockpile of money, you want to go to medical school.  Actually, he said you want to go to graduate school, that I had graduate fellowships.  He said, pay the bills, and so I was paying my own bills, and so the idea that I thought I might cut a year off was helpful, and I went to Joe Gall and I said, if I work in the lab, will you continue to pay me something?  And he did.  He paid me $400 a month, which in those days was a lot of money.  So for my first two years in medical school, I had $400 a month coming in, so I just stayed at Yale.  And then, Joe McGuire took a sabbatical and wanted to go to Oxford, and I thought ooh, that's good, and so I went to Oxford for two months in my last year, my third year of medical school.  I loved living in Oxford, just thought it was fabulous.  I would love to have stayed, except you couldn't make a living in England as a physician, and Joe was on the faculty.  So we came back to New Haven, and then I had to start thinking about -- and I graduated in three years.  I was able to do it because the other thing is that the Yale system for medical school is fabulous.  My daughter loves it.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Were there many other women at the medical school at that time?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Mm hmm.  My class had about 10% PhDs in it, which was fine, and 15% women.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Would that have been typical of medical schools at that time, do you think?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I don't know.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:It would be interesting to find out.  I have no idea.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:It would be interesting.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:It would be easy enough to --\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Now it's 55% women.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:It wasn't then.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:But I still have -- Michelle Berry was in my class in medical school.  She sees my son as a patient, she's still at Yale.  I still communicate with some of the women in that group.  Not the men, interestingly enough.  Medical school at Yale was terrific, because there were no grades.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Oh, right.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Yeah.  All you -- you didn't have to pass any tests.  There were no tests.  You had to pass boards, part one and two.  Nowadays, you still have to just pass boards, part one and two, but they have makeup tests, where you write down a number and nobody knows who you are.  So Lindsey takes tests, but you still don't have to -- you know, they don't grade you.  So they didn't have AOA.  They had a second year show that the students, medical students wrote and performed, and it turned out, there were all these talented people, not just scientifically.  They were much more interesting than the graduate students, the medical students were.  I had a great time in medical school.  I learned about confrontation.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:What do you mean?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Graduate school was not competitive.  People helped each other.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Really?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Medical school was quite competitive, because you were going to go shoot for an internship.  You were competing for internships and residencies, and there was a student in my class, on the medicine wards, who presented one of my patients on rounds, to the senior attending, and started talking about the lab reports and everything.  I had no idea what to do and I went home and I said to Joe McGuire, what do I do now?  You know, he upstaged me, and Joe said, well you can't let him get away with that.  You take him aside and you tell him, the next time he does that, you are going to kill him.  That's unacceptable.  You confront him privately, tell him he can't do that.  I said, \"I can't say that to somebody.\"  And he said, \"Oh yes you can, you have to.  You never let anyone get away with that kind of stuff.\"  So I took him aside.  His name was Ken Dobuler, which I appreciate if you didn't use, and I still remember.  I pulled him aside and I said you know, you presented my patient, and I'm going to cut your balls off if you do that to me again.  And he looked at me, and I said, you are never going to do that to me again, because I'm smarter than you, and believe me, I'll fix you if you do that.  And I had no idea what would happen.\r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=6300.0,6600.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/23","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"I mean, I -- Joe said you have to talk to him, and you have to be -- you have to really tell him that you're going to destroy him.  And I didn't know what was going to happen.  It turned out, he turned into my next best friend.  He was so nice to me, and he backed right off, and he was pleasant and friendly and supportive, and it taught me a huge lesson, that is true and has held me in very good stead in many situations.  When somebody dumps on you, what you do is you turn around -- and you don't do this often, and you don't do it without thinking, but you tell them that you're going to cut them off at the knees.  You're going to destroy them if they do that again, because bullies back off and then it's like, it's kind of like dogs, you know barking at each other, and then one of them will roll over and then they're friends.  So it's the most bizarre thing.  Women don't relate like that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:It's very unfemale behavior.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Very unfemale, and I -- and it's not something I like to do, but it taught me that you have to do it, and that it's --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Hang on.  We can't hear you over there.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:OK.  I'm getting a cup of tea.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:OK.  Let me just stop this for a sec then.\r\n[BREAK IN AUDIO]\r\n\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:OK.  We were just talking about how you ah, how you have to tackle people at the knees.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:You have to.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:You have got to overstep.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:If somebody challenges you...  Men are very confrontational, and you can't -- you can't slide off of it, but women don't behave that way and they don't relate to each other that way.  And when I got -- first got to Stanford as chairman of the department, the Chairman of Radiology was a -- I was only 46, I think, and he was about 42.  He was younger than I was, and Ob/Gyn and radiology always fight over who gets to bill for ultrasounds, and the Dean, who was David Korn, said -- and I said, I'm not coming unless I get the ultrasound billing.  I can't run a department without income, and Glazer, Gary Glazer, who was the Chair of Radiology, didn't want to give it up.  So David said to me, I'm going to put you and Gary -- he called me and said, I have an appointment.  Come down here, I want to talk to you at such and such a time.  I got down there and he said, \"Gary's here.\"  He said, \"I'm putting the two of you in my office, and I'm going to see who comes out alive.\"  You guys go fight it out.  I said that's easy, I'm not -- I'm winning this, because if I don't have this, I can't run a department.  You know, this isn't a fight.  So we went in and we argued and argued, and eventually, Ob/Gyn got the ultrasound billing, but I had to take one of his faculty who knew how to do ultrasound, and put him in one day a week, so he could bill for radiology.  So we had a small compromise, but that's how, that's how it works.  You have to be able to do it, and it's not instinctive, and you -- in graduate school, you didn't have to do it.  Everybody worked collaboratively.  In the School of Public Health, everybody worked collaboratively.  That was not what I found in medicine, and so you just do it, and the first time you do it you think, my God, the world is going to fall in on me for saying these things.  And then it turns out, not only does anybody criticize you, but they admire you for doing it.  So you get points for doing it.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Even if you're a woman doing it?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Well, I never had -- yeah, I guess.  I mean, I didn't do it often, but when it was necessary, I thought it was appropriate, I did it.  And the men I came in conflict with always wound up kind of liking me.  Go figure.  I still don't understand it, but I know it works.  So --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:So would you say that that was, that was one of the most formative experiences of --\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:That was a very formative experience for me, of medical school, and I have also found that it holds true.  I have two sons and a daughter, and my daughter mopes, sniffles, sometimes yells, but she gets quiet when she gets upset.  When the boys get upset, they stand in front of you and they stomp their feet and they say, I'm not doing it and you can't make me.  And I've learned that when your son yells at you, you have to take a big deep breath, draw yourself up as tall as you can, and yell back louder, because that's what males understand, and you've got to out yell them and out you know, strong arm them.\r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=6600.0,6900.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/24","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"So it really helped in having boys too.  Now, my mother didn't teach me this.  It took somebody in medical school, who watched, and men are so competitive, and women are competitive too, but they don't -- very few confrontational women, very unusual, and those who do it have learned to do it because they had to.  It's not natural and that's not how women relate.  When I went to Stanford, I said I'm going to build a department, and I'm going to see if I can build it on the basis of relationships that women have, since I'm going to hire a lot of women, and it was a lot nicer place to work.  People liked working there.  You know, people didn't throw instruments at each other, they didn't yell at each other.  You meet an occasional sociopath in academics, and those people you know, sue you and do weird things and bad things, but outside of the sociopaths, it can be done, if you have a predominantly female group.  I didn't mean to get sidetracked on that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:No that -- no.  I think it's interesting for the -- especially now, that as you say, over 50% of people in medical school are women.  It's a changed profession, but that's something we can come to, I think, in a little while.  When did you decide that you wanted to do Ob/Gyn, as opposed for example, doing ophthalmology like your father?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Well, I wanted to stay at Yale because of Joe, and I liked research, and I liked surgery, and I liked healthy people.  So I ticked those off and I said hmm, and most people were interviewing with Ob/Gyn residencies all over the country.  I didn't.  I interviewed at Yale for three residencies; OB, ophthalmology and orthopedics, all of which have healthy people, surgery and research.  Why did I choose Ob/Gyn?  I liked -- I could see even then, that genetic manipulation was going to come through OB departments, because they would have embryos.  Louise Brown was born in, I forget when, '70-something, '74?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah, because she's about 30 years old now.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Mm hmm.  She hadn't been born yet, but it was clear it was going to happen.  So I thought, that's where it's going to come from, because we deal with babies and embryos and we'll have tissue.  And then, as I went around with the interviews, I was interviewed, in the OB Department, by two junior faculty members, sitting on the ninth floor of the -- what was then the private GYN service.  Alan DeCherney and Dick Berkowitz, and I walked in and Alan, who is fabulous, and for whom I worked for years, and you should always work for men who liked women.  Alan liked women.  Alan looked at me and said, \"OK, you're going to interview us.  You come sit behind my desk and you interview us.\"  I thought that was really neat.  So I started interviewing them and then Dick, who is actually here on the faculty of Columbia now, looked puzzled, and he finally looked at me and he said, \"I just want to ask you a question.  I see here that you're interviewing in ophthalmology, obstetrics and orthopedics.  What in the world do they have in common, besides they start with the letter O?\"  And I looked at him and I said, \"Well that's really easy.  They all deal with healthy people, they all have surgery, and they all have interesting research.\"  Makes great sense.  And I think I liked the interview process, and I liked the orthopedists, but -- and there had been women ophthalmology residents, and I really didn't want to do what my father wanted me to do, so that was sort of out.  Orthopedics and Ob/Gyn had never had a woman resident, and Wayne Southwick, who was the head of orthopedics, badly wanted a female resident, and kept saying, \"You should come and do orthopedics.\"  I said, \"I'm not sure I'm strong enough.\"  And he said, \"Trust me, you can saw with the best of them.\"  But I think it was the humor with which the interview was conducted in Ob/Gyn.  I did like the research better, I have to admit.  I never thought about lifestyle.  It never crossed my mind, which was probably stupid and naïve, but it was the research and it turns out, Ob/Gyns and orthopedists are very similar in personality.\r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=6900.0,7200.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/25","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Everybody thinks they're dumb bone cutters or baby catchers.  You know, they don't have any intellect and they do boring things, but you know, they can hoist a beer with the best of them, and their personalities are quite similar.  They're outgoing, they're gregarious.  I liked both groups, and I really did like the orthopedists, because the chief resident, when I was on the orthopedic surgery, did something very unique.  There was a nurses changing room and a doctors changing room, translate into female changing room and male changing room, and the women couldn't go into the doctors changing room, because it was men in there getting undressed.  And I said to him, and he's a practicing orthopedist in New Haven, unless he's retired, that that's not right.  He said you're right, that isn't right.  We can't have our conferences in there, because you can't come in.  So he pull -- this was outside in the OR hall.  He pulled a stretcher up, pushed it against the wall and he said, we will have our conferences on the stretcher in the hallway, where you can be, women can be.  I always thought that was really nice, that he you know, and I wasn't the only woman who said this.  You can't do that.  You can't have your pre-op conferences in the men's locker room, and so he made an accommodation, which I thought was very nice.  So there were people who were very positive.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:But in the end, because of the interview process, you opted for gynecology and obstetrics.  Do you think the interview that you got was the same interview that the fellas who were applying for residencies got?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Yeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Well, the chairman was my gynecologist.  That probably didn't hurt, and he was a colleague of Joe's, and I knew that they needed a resident.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Was this just for the numbers?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Mm hmm, because they had had two the year before who had died.  They were killed in a [boating?] accident.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Oh I see yes, right.  It was nothing to do with feminism or getting the women numbers up or anything like that.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:And they would have taken any warm body that would have you know, stood there and caught babies, so I knew that they needed somebody.  They didn't know -- he didn't know I knew, but I knew.  And I liked the idea.  When he said, come around and interview us I though oh, I like this, you know that he'd be fun to work for.  He's got a sense of humor.  He's not in you know, he's not putting me down, and he never did.  He would get angry and yell, but after I -- and I had three children in that program.  He delivered two of them, and he was my infertility doctor, and it was OK to bring your baby in and breast feed your baby in the office.  You know, it was OK to bring your kids in on Saturday when you interviewed residents.  When I worked for Alan, who was division chief, I would bring Josh in, who is now 28, when he was six or seven, and Alan would say, we're interviewing residents.  Josh, come in and interview these applicants with me.  And the applicants thought he was nuts, but he had and has, a very unusual way of looking at the world, and it was fun.  He also has ADHD and only sleeps about three hours a night, but --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:That probably helps to be a doctor.  (laughs)\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:It does.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:But yet, you said that you were the first female resident that the \r\nprogram had had.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Who got through.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Who got through.  Why -- why did you get through and the others didn't, or was it something that women -- you would think that women would be attracted to because of the subject.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Well, in those days, you would see a woman patient and then she'd look at you and say, and who's going to do my surgery?  It was like I am.  But you're not a real doctor.  Things have changed now.  Two of us -- there were six residents at Yale, and two of us were women, and we used to meet in the bathroom and cry because people had been so nasty to us.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Was this the other residents?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Yeah, the residents, the nurses.  The residents had an on call room that had one bunk bed, and the chief resident always slept on top, and the junior resident slept on the bottom, and when there started to be women residents, you had to sleep in the on call room, and I went home to Joe and I said, I'm going to be sleeping in the on call room but you know, it's not social.  You know, if I get a chance to sleep I will, but the residents would joke about I'm on top you know, it was tacky, and their wives didn't like it.  Joe never -- it didn't seem to bother him, but the other residents' wives didn't like the fact that they were sleeping in the on call rooms with women residents.  \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=7200.0,7500.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/26","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Laura, the other woman resident, dropped out after a year and went into radiology.  I just loved the work.  I loved the surgery, I loved the work, and the sexism that I saw was so overt.  It was you know, take your hands off me or I'll smack you next time.  I didn't you know, it -- and you'd go in the bathroom and cry because you're not going to cry on the floor, and you're so exhausted all the time, but I never...  And there's an old saying in medicine, in surgical programs, that shit flows downhill.  So the junior person always does all the scutwork.  A lot of what I perceived as problems for women was probably not.  It was just being junior.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:I was going to ask you about the kind of hierarchical nature of medicine, and whether that means that the juniors, male or female, had it tough.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Mm.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:And continue to have it tough?  It's a sort of Darwinian universe.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Mm hmm.  Listen.  I had a junior resident at Waterbury Hospital, who rotated there, and the second year resident was the chief there.  It was great, because you didn't have an attending, you had nobody over you, you got to try things out.  He was a first year resident, Greg DeVore, and he was [Mormon?], and the second year cases were complicated forceps rotations, and he went to the OR, to the delivery room with an attending, and he did a [Keelix?] rotation without telling me, and he knew he was supposed to call me, because that was my case.  I heard about it, and I walked up to him and I said, DeVore, I hear you did the [Keelix?] and it was my case.  Well, said he, you weren't around and I didn't know where you were.  I wasn't sure I could get you on the beeper.  I said let me tell you something, you do that again to me, you'll never see the inside of an operating room here.  I will bar you from the operating room and you won't do another case in this hospital.  So he shaped up, but it was A, hierarchical and B, a confrontational surgical program.  And it's -- I don't think it's like that any more, but 95% of the residents are women now.  Laura really didn't like the getting told what to do and doing all the scut and you know, listening to the raw jokes.  It didn't bother me.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Why do you think that nurses gave you a hard time?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Oh, they were jealous.  You had -- they sort of cowtowed to the doctors, and by gosh they wouldn't cowtow to a woman doctor.  And the women doctors who were there, there were women Ob/Gyn attendings.  They were old ladies and unmarried and kind of not what you would want as a role model.  They were very good physicians, but they had terrible personal lives, so you didn't want them.  I mean, I didn't want that.  I wanted to have a family, and I thought maybe a -- I assumed marriage, but I didn't want to end up 70 years old and no children, but I had done 5,000 deliveries.  But I think the nurses, first you had to earn their respect, and they dumped on all the residents, male and female, and if you fought back and turned out to be good, then you were OK, but if you gave up, you know they were just like the men.  Nurses were bossy, they were used to running the labor delivery service, and some of them were -- and they were very good, and they didn't want some stupid resident telling them what to do, especially not a woman stupid resident.  But I never -- you know, people would come up.  You'd be scrubbing at the scrub center and a couple of times, people would come up and put their hands around you and pat your breasts.  That's easy to take care of.  I mean, that's so you know, or bump your bottom or whatever.  That's easy, and it still happens.  I just talked to a junior faculty member, well she's not junior any more, at Stanford, about ten years ago, I said to her -- she was a junior faculty member then.  We were out to lunch with one of my senior faculty and Emmit said, I said you know, women always get patted and pinched, and Emmit said oh, they don't, I'm sure they don't.\r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=7500.0,7800.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/27","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"So I turned to this junior faculty member and I said Lynn, has somebody ever patted or pinched your bottom?  She said, \"Oh of course, it happens a lot.\"  He said, \"It can't be.\"  It is, it does happen.  Hi sweetie.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Hello Frank, hi.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:And it turns out, it still happens, because an attending hit on my daughter.  This is her fourth year.  Last year, when she was a third year student and was on the clinical rotations, and she didn't know what to do.  He was 50 years old and she didn't -- or 45.  Anyway, old enough that she didn't really want this, and he was going to write her recommendation, and she didn't know what to do.  So it still goes on, and that's just -- you just deal with it, just like you deal with men who dump on you, and you learn, over a period of time, how to handle that, and sometimes you make a mistake, but what I've always told the faculty and the residents and my children is, if you're going to get somebody, you'd better get them dead.  You know, you don't go up halfheartedly to do something like that.  You either let it go, or you take him aside and tell them you're going to destroy them, and you have to mean it, because you can't wound somebody in a situation like that.  They'll get you back.  And you would think it would change, now that there are a lot of women around, and maybe it's changed now, but when Lindsey told me the story of this attending who hit on her, I said well that's easy.  You just take him aside and you tell him that this is not appropriate, and if he continues it, you are going to talk to the dean and announce that he's been sexually harassing you, and you'll scare the pants out of him, believe me.  She said, \"Well won't he write a bad recommendation?\"  I said no, because what you're going to do after you tell him that, is you're going to trot yourself off to the dean and you're going to say, here's what happened.  If that recommendation comes in bad, I want you to know it beforehand.  So she did and it was fine, end of story.  Actually, I bet if you ask your daughter, she's had experiences like that too.  I think it's just endemic.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Well it's, I suppose, any hierarchical profession like medicine.  There's bound to be power plays of all sorts going on.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Mm hmm.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:And sexual power plays is part of it.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Yeah.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:They do it because they can.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:They do it because they can, and because you're junior and they know they can get away with it.  And I'm sure it happens in media, I'm sure it happens everywhere.  I don't think it's unique to medicine.  I think there's just a bigger power differential in medicine.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:You know I think actually, and this is something when I get in contact with Florence Haseltine, that she, I think she used to do a lecture or maybe still does a lecture on how to be mentored and not get screwed, or something like that.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Well you ask her about it.  I'm not going to tell her story, but there's a story she has told, and she had the last laugh.  You ask her about that.  I don't know if she'll talk about it, but she has a unique and interesting story.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Well I hope that -- she did an interview, a very long interview, for U Penn, I think it was, for their oral history program, back in '77, just as she got the job at Yale.  So I'm hoping that she'll do one for me that will take up her story from the time that she was at Yale.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Well, I talked to Florence about a week or two ago, and I asked her if you had spoken to her, and she said no.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:No, I haven't actually contacted her yet.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:And then she said well, I wasn't a student there, so maybe that's why.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.  No, it's just because I haven't got around to it yet, and I actually didn't know of her existence until a couple weeks ago, just before I met you, but um, nevertheless, it was only a couple of weeks ago, and I contacted, I think it was U Penn, and they sent me the transcript of the interview.  So I would very much like -- she sounds like a great character.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:She is a great character.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:And she knows DeCherney too.  She worked for DeCherney, and she's had experience at Harvard.  She also has a PhD.  She's had a lot of experience in science, not at Yale, but in science, and then at the NIH, which is yet another hierarchical organization, and you will enjoy her, because she's raucous.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Reading the transcript, I certainly got a very strong impression of her.  I think we've covered all the things that I wanted to ask you about, the medical aspect of it.  There was one thing that actually we didn't talk about, now I wondered about.\r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=7800.0,8100.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/28","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"In most professions, there is usually some sort of tracking system, where juniors are mentored and kept on the right course, if they're good, by more senior people, and I think medicine has it as much as any other profession.  Did you -- were you aware of the possibility that maybe the men were getting more assistance, more mentoring than you were, because you were the only girl, and maybe a little bit on the outside?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:That's an interesting question.  I think it's nowadays, when we took a junior faculty in at Stanford, we had to name a mentor for him or her, and you followed that, but that's recent.  When I started at Yale, there was no formal mentoring system and again, the PhDs were better at it, and the PhDs really took care of me.  When I started the fellowship, the reproductive endocrine fellowship, I got the -- I got a ward to support me, and I was going to do reproductive endocrine research and be the reproductive endocrine fellow, and the chairman at the time, Nate Kase, needed somebody to do half a year of Gyn oncology and half a year of REI, because they didn't have a Gyn formal fellowship, and so he called me and he said, now I just want to tell you, you're going to do a half a year of Gyn on, before you do reproductive endocrine.  And I said, no I'm not.  I have a fellowship.  I have a Jane Coffin Childs Fellowship, and I'm not an Ob/Gyn Onc.  I don't want to do it.  I'm going to do research, and thank you very much, but I'm not doing it.  Nate looked at me and he said, \"Oh yes you will.\"  He said, \"I need somebody to do that.  You don't understand, I need somebody.\"  I said, but I don't want to do that, that wasn't what I signed up for, and he said, \"If you choose not to do the Gyn Onc that's fine, you can not do it, but you will never see an endocrine patient in this hospital.  You can do your research and that will be it.  You will not have a clinical fellowship.\"  It was in his office.  I can still see it, and I thought OK, so I've learned about confrontation in medicine, and now I'm learning about hardball.  And I looked at him, and I thought for about 30 seconds and I said, \"You're absolutely right.  I will do six months of Gyn Oncology for you.\"  I had no choice.  He put me between a rock and  a hard place and I thought, he's got me, he's got me.  He knows he's got me.  He's not stupid.  He knows just exactly what he's doing.  And I did it, and it turned out to be a wonderful experience, but there are a lot of life lessons that you learn in medicine.  And he also, when I went to do my endocrine boards, there's an oral examination for your endocrine boards, your RAI boards, and I had passed my general Ob/Gyn course, which is also an oral exam, easily.  I actually was recruited by one of my examiners, (inaudible) and he offered me job.  I went to take my reproductive endocrine exams and I studied and studied, and DeCherney, Alan DeCherney, whom I enjoyed working with, was the division director, and when he'd taken his boards, Nate had grilled him and talked to him and tutored him and questioned him.  He never did that for me.  By then, Nate was in New York as Chairman of Mount Sinai, and eventually dean.  So I called Nate up and I said Nate, I would like to come down and have you go over questions with me, like you did with Alan.  So, I'm prepared for the boards, and I got on a train and I came down, and he spent two hours talking to me, grilling me, and there was something funny about it.  I said well, do you think I'm ready?  Eehh.  I got on the train and went back, and there was something funny about it.  I flunked those oral boards.  I went to Chicago and I flunked, and it wasn't until afterwards that I realized that I didn't know the -- I hadn't been studying the right things.  Nobody had taken me aside and said, this is not like the regular boards, you do books.  You don't do books.  You do --\r\nM:See you dear.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:OK sweetie, I'll see you later.  You do primary articles.  Well Alan never told me that.  He as my division director.  If anybody should have been mentoring me, he should have been doing it, and in retrospect, I now know that Nate knew.  Hi Delores.  I now know that Nate knew I wasn't going to pass, from just questioning me, because he gave the oral boards.  \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=8100.0,8400.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/29","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"So he knew what I knew and didn't know, and he knew I was going to flunk.  He couldn't say anything, because I -- it was two weeks in front of the exam.  There was nothing I could do about it then, and Alan had spent six months watching me study and never said to me, never said what are you studying, can I help you?\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Would he have done that with any student, male or female?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Yeah, I think he would have.  I don't think it was me.  I think he just was not paying attention, and I think he's not a good mentor.  On the contrary, the PhDs in the apartment, Hal Behrman and Richie [Hotberg?] were terrific.  Hal said to me at one point in my fellowship, you know you're going to be the chairman at Yale.  I said oh come on, give me a break.  You know, I could hardly get through the residency here.  He said, you're not a very good resident, but you're going to be a real good -- you're going to be the chairman at Yale, and he was wrong.  I went to Stanford.  But he and Richie taught me how to write grants, reviewed the first grant I ever wrote that was funded, really worked with me, were really good mentors, whom I called for years afterwards when I had a question.  I've called -- there have been other people who I've worked with that I thought were thoughtful, fair, reasonable, and I picked up the phone and called them.  I don't think that assigning mentors is the way to do it.  I think people, women in particular, but also men, have to choose their own mentors.  You have to go out and look for a mentor, because they can assign you somebody, and I don't think that works very well.  I've tried that, and it didn't work in the department at Stanford, but if you have -- I just got a call from a junior faculty member at Stanford this afternoon, who wanted to ask me a question.  Those kinds of relationships go on for years and years, and when you need some help or an issue comes up, you can pick up the phone and call, but you have to be chosen by the mentee, and then you have to respond, and those relationships work well, but assignments, I don't think work well. And you can't force somebody, because he could -- I passed the endocrine boards the next year because I knew what to -- I was supposed to be doing, but he could have saved me a lot of grief and anger and agony, and a huge amount of time, because I had to go back and do them again in Chicago in December.  I don't think the mentors I've had -- Florence has been a huge mentor for me, but the mentors I've had have been male and female, equally as good, whether they're male or female, but the critical thing is, I went to them and they responded, or they offered and I responded.  It has to be bilateral.  Assignment doesn't work.  And it can be male or female, and you need different mentors for different -- and I've given lectures on this.  You need different mentors for different spheres.  Somebody who has had children can tell you how to get through, you know daycare problems.  Somebody who has been promoted can tell you how to manage the tenure track promotion.  So you need to pick the function you're interested in and find the right person to help you, but I really think it's the responsibility of the mentee.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:So it's not always down to the institution to do these things.  Did you have to proactive?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Oh, I think absolutely.  I mean, I came up at a time when there were no institutional mentorship stuff going on, and I've run a department when we did that.  We were required to do it by the dean's office, and I can tell you, that doesn't work very well.  What works is when you have a burning issue, and you find somebody's who's interested who works with you, but I think you have to be proactive in doing that.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:How did you get your first faculty job in the School of Medicine?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I just stayed at Yale, and they just offered me a job.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:What was it like going onto the faculty?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Well, it's interesting.  We had a business manager then, Gisela, and I thought I was such hot shit, now that I was a faculty member, that I could order people around, and I had a very nice thing.  One of the faculty -- I had an R1, I had a research grant that gave -- and I put in for half a secretary, which nobody thought I'd get but I got it.  So I actually had my own secretary.  They provided 50% of a secretary, and I had funded the other half with my grant.  So I was the only fac -- I mean, I was practically the only one that was self-sufficient with my own secretary, and I thought I could order everybody around there, because I was so smart, and here I was on the faculty.\r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=8400.0,8700.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/30","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"I must have been quite unpleasant, because Gisela walked into my -- she was German, and she walked into my office one day and she said, \"I'm going to tell you something.  You can't behave like that to people.  You're upsetting the secretarial staff, you're upsetting the boarding staff.  You can't behave like that, so stop it.\"  And I looked out and she said, \"Look what you did.\"  Then she gave me a couple of examples and she said, \"You've got to learn to deal with people in a better way.  This is not going to work.\"  She said, \"You're smart but that's not good enough.  You've got to be nice to people.  You've got to make them want to do what you want to do.\"  And I remember thinking about it and thinking oh really, hmm, what an idea, OK.  She was absolutely right.  She nipped it right in the bud.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Well of course she had come from a place, as a resident, where you had to be aggressive.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:You had to be aggressive, and everybody above you was dumping on you, so when you finally bounce through and you finished your residency and your fellowship and you are now on the faculty, boy you thought that you could do anything.  You'd finally reached the top of the pecking order.  And I was not the only one who responded like that.  Somebody who is now a very good professor, who that as well did the same thing, and I took him aside.  He was behind me and I took him aside and I said Roberto, we can't do this.  We're pissing everybody off.  We've got to be nice, be courtly, be Venezuelan.  You know, don't go order people around, ask them politely with that Spanish accent, but you have to -- I mean, you have to watch the transition.  You're right, the transition from trainee to faculty goes to people's heads, and they get imperious and they get dictatorial, and you've got to haul somebody in and say, this is not how we do it here.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:And I suppose it's particularly galling if it's a woman who's being imperious.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Yeah, I think it is.  I think people don't like it.  But I -- that's a pretty frequent thing that happens, that the women, and the men, decide that they are now -- they know it all.  It's their turn to turn around and dump on people below them.  Not good.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:By this time, you had several children?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I had one child when I was running the On program.  I was pregnant with Josh, because I used to hide behind -- I didn't want anybody to know I was pregnant, and I would hide behind somebody who had a lead apron, and I would get out of the ah, I would make somebody else go in and for most of the radiation placements.  He was born in 1979, and Lindsey was born in 1981, and Scott was born in 1986.  I was a fellow for the first two, just a very junior faculty member for Lindsey.  I was -- I think I was an associate professor without tenure when Scott was born, because I finally took six weeks off, after I had my third child.  I didn't take any time off with the first two, but I was far enough up the ladder with him, that I figured it was my last child and I might just as well take six weeks, because by then, I think there were rules that said you could.  But I had had boards and I was doing the night call at the Yale Health Plan, getting paid for it, and so I just couldn't take time off when the other two were born.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Everyone must have thought you were crazy.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:You know it's really interesting.  Joe, we didn't get married until about seven or eight days before Josh was born.  Again, this 60s mentality; I don't need to get married, why would I get married?  I mean, I'd watched him go through a really nasty divorce and I said, I don't want to get married.  I have a job, I have to support this kid.  Screw marriage, who needs marriage.  So we finally got married because we couldn't figure out what to do with him, so we got married.  He was born July 16th, and we got married some time between July 4th and that.  I don't remember exactly when.  And then when I was pregnant with Lindsey, we got divorced.  I did a pro se divorce.  I got the paperwork filed, the $40 fee, and did my own divorce, again because it seemed that that's what women did.  You know, you didn't need.  Nowadays lots of people do it.  At that time...\r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=8700.0,9000.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/31","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"And everybody knew what I was doing.  I was working at the Yale Health Plan and I was on the faculty, and everybody knew I wasn't married, and I just sort of dared them to say anything, and nobody ever did.  Oh, when David Korn recruited me to Stanford, he came out and I had the kids, and I had car seats in the car.  I had three children.  Scott was about two and a half, and I said to him, after he offered me the job, I said, I should tell you something, because you -- I certainly don't want to blindside you, because I think you should never blindside anybody, but I'm not married to him, and two of these children are illegitimate.  You know, they were born after we were divorced, because I didn't want to be married, and so we haven't been married.  David looked at me and he said, \"This is California, who cares?\"  And nobody cared at Yale, I mean absolutely nobody seemed to ever -- it never made any difference, and I think the take home lesson on that one is, if you believe in something you're doing and you go ahead and do it, and you're doing your job, nobody does care in an academic setting.  Now maybe they care in banking or whatever, but they don't care in academics.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:I think I was more thinking about whether people thought you were crazy because you had children and tried to have this high powered career at the same time.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Oh no.  I didn't -- no.  Florence had two children.  She's got -- her daughter Anna was born a month after Joshua, and she's got another daughter who's a little younger than Lindsey.  Joan Steitz had a baby.  Oh no, there were a lot of women having babies and then big careers, and I just assumed that -- I didn't see why you couldn't have it all.  I now think a little differently.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Of course, that was the 70s, and that was the mantra.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:That was it, you could do it all, and so you just assumed you could do it all.  Well in fact, I don't believe that any more.  I think that you can -- there are three things you can have.  You can have a big career, you can have children, or you can have a really good marriage, but I don't think you can have all three simultaneously.  You can do them sequentially, you can have two of the three, but you can't have all three at the same time.  If you're going to do them, all three, you're going to have to do some sequential you know, staging of what you're doing.  I just don't think it's -- there's not enough time in the day to do all three.  So...\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Unless you have a wife to take care of lots of the things that one has to take care of.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Even with a wife.  It's not just time management.  It has to do with focus, and I don't think -- I couldn't do all three.  I guess that's what I'm saying.  I couldn't.  I don't think it's possible to do all three, so I sort of chose to do the children and the career.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:And yet men can do it?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Yeah, but I think they don't really have much involvement with their children.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:You think that's really the critical thing?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Or maybe with their wives and children.  I think that's the critical thing.  If you really are involved with your children and you're doing a career, then you don't have any time for your husband, and he figures that out or he gets jealous.  I've always wondered why [Carli Ferrier's] husband stuck around.  When you look at people, you know you look at oh, the Supreme Court Justice, Sandra Day O'Connor's husband, you look at (inaudible) husband and you say hmm.  Margaret Thatcher's husband, you say really, what unusual men, that they could tolerate this.  Most men can't.  But I never thought it was crazy to have children, and I don't think -- I mean, people would say -- my mother said it's crazy.  I said, what do you know?  Just because you couldn't do it or didn't do it.  Times are different mom.  But everybody was doing it.  It was not at all unusual, and of the women of my cohort, on the faculty at Stanford, some of whom I hired, they all have children and they all came up at a time when it was difficult but possible.  I think it's easier now, but not totally easy, but nobody ever said you're crazy, ever, and I never perceived that, and everybody else was doing it, so I did it.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Maybe it helps not to be sensitive to these matters as well.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Well, and I've said, I, I probably missed 80% of what was going on.  Number one, I was tired, I was busy, I was focused on what I was trying to do, and I'm very -- my mind is very concrete.  \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=9000.0,9300.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/32","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"There's a lot of stuff I miss and I've learned that over the years.  There's a lot of stuff I miss.  I'm just as happy to miss it.  I don't go looking for it.  It distracts you, it makes you unhappy.  Don't go looking for it.  If it's really bad, it will hit you over the head and you'll pick it up, but if it's not, ignore it and don't ever let people point it out to you, because then it will make you unhappy.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Did you get tenure at Yale?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I was about to be tenured at Yale.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Did you want tenure?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Yale has a pyramid system, and I was slotted for tenure, but I got recruited to Stanford, and I got recruited for a tenure slot, and I had never run a department, I'd never run a division, and I was not tenured at Yale when they recruited me to Stanford, which was one of the attractive things, that I would come in tenured.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Now, I'm somewhat aware of how the tenure system works or doesn't work at Yale, or historically worked in the arts, the faculty of arts and sciences.  I'm just wondering, was the tenure system in the medical school a similar thing, in that many are called to Yale \r\nbut few are chosen.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Mm hmm.  There's an overall university committee that assigns tenure slots, called Planning and Priorities, or it used to be called Planning and Priorities, and I knew all this because Joe was a senior tenured professor and sat on Planning and Priorities, and when he rotated off he had friends.  They assigned X number of tenure slots a year, sometimes in the medical school, you know, depending on who needed it.  And in general, the medical school got three maybe four a year, for all departments.  It was just at the beginning of things, where they wanted women, and I had an NIH funded grant.  I didn't get along with the chairman who came in after Nate Kase left, who I always thought was an asshole.  I think that's the best term for Fred.  Also, he told me as a fellow, that he didn't have enough money for my second year of fellowship, after I had given six months of my time to Gyn Oncology, and he tells me that.  I could have killed him, and he is an asshole.  He is a first rate, unpleasant -- there are all kinds of things about him that I don't want to get into, but -- and when I flunked my boards, when I first had taken the boards, I came back, I went in and I said Fred, I flunked my boards.  He looked at me and he said, \"It will make you a better person.\"  And when I told him that as -- when I was a -- well, between being an assistant professor and a fellow, I went in and I said, I want to be a faculty member.  I want to be an assistant professor.  He said, \"You're pregnant with a second child.  If you're assistant professor, the time clock starts.\"  I said duh, I know that, that's what I want.  He said, \"Oh, you can't do that, you're pregnant again.\"  I said, \"Oh yes I can.\"  And he wouldn't offer me a job until I got offered a job at Harvard.  I went and interviewed at Harvard and was offered an associate professorship at Harvard, and then he offered me a job.  So I really dislike him, and I'm so glad you can't publish any of this unless I say so.  Actually I don't care.  I've always disliked him, but it was very attractive to go to Stanford, because the tenure system works quite differently.  If there were three that were given out the year that I would have been tenured, and they wanted a woman, and I had all the tickets, and I would have been tenured at Yale.  They were shunting most people into the clinical line, the clinical track, but I wanted a tenure track position, because everybody coming out of Joe's lab had gotten a tenure track position.  I didn't see why I shouldn't, and when I went to Stanford, they had just started this clinical track, and I came in as a tenured professor, and wouldn't have gone there unless they tenured me.  I don't know how it works now, but Yale was a real pyramid.  Stanford isn't.  If you're hired, you have six -- well, it depends, and if you have children you have a longer time, somewhere between five and eight years, to achieve enough prominence to become tenured.  There are enough tenure slots.  If you're hired, you can get it if you're good enough.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:So basically, you're hired with the presumption that you will get tenure if you do all the --\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:If you do all the things you're supposed to do.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:That is not the case at Yale.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:No, and I think that up until very, very recently, that's been the case, yeah.\r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=9300.0,9600.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/33","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"I certainly heard other people say that the best way to get tenure at Yale is to get an offer elsewhere.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:And offer elsewhere, and it's always true.  It's the best way.  You can get early tenure at Stanford if that happens.  Everybody, you know, it's a terrific retention tool.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:When you were on the faculty, I did find, in the archives, that you'd served on the committee in the status of women at the medical school.  Do you remember that?  I just wondered what -- that was in '85 to '87.  You see how I do this date research, and it comes out you know, I think these people don't remember.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I don't remember it.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:You don't remember?  Because I was just wondering, or maybe in a more general way, if you can cast your mind back.  Did you get a sense of what were the pressing issues in, in the late 80s, about women?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Florence and I, and you should talk to Haseltine about this.  We were paid.  No I've got -- oh good, it's only about 3:30.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yeah, we're all right.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I was an assistant professor and Alan hired Steve Boyers in from someplace else, and he paid him more than he was paying me, and that happens, and I knew that, but I didn't like it.  This is a preface to what I think the major thing I was concerned about, which was salary equity.  So I went to him and I said, \"You can't pay him more, it's that simple.  I've been here longer.  He doesn't have a PhD, he's a clinician, he doesn't do research.  You cannot pay him more than me.\"  And Alan said look you know, I -- and I said, then you just have to raise my salary.  I said, \"I don't care if I make one dollar more than he was, you're going to pay me more.\"  So he paid me one dollar more than him.  That is not -- that is a true story, and the only way I knew about it is -- and Florence will corroborate this.  Florence and I, she was on the faculty when I -- she came on the faculty when I was a resident.  She was a terrific mentor.  She gave me a coffee cup, so I could have coffee with the boys, and our -- I have a great picture of -- I'm trying to think where it is.  It's not here.  Of the two of us pregnant and with scrubs on labor and delivery.  She and I, I don't think I found it with her.  I think she found it.  So one night in the business office, she was reeling around and she found the salary schedule, which was big secret stuff, and she called me and she said, \"Look at this.\"  And so we sat -- I remember going over there after hours, and we sat and we saw everybody's salary and what they were, and the top ones were very far apart, and then they got closer and closer.  So it was like $150 between people at the bottom, and we were so outraged, and that's how I knew Steve Boyers was making more money than I did, because of course nobody would tell me.  And the only thing I really thought was important was salary equity, because that's how the men judge themselves and that's how women judge themselves too.  So, that was a very important piece of information, and I can still see us sitting there, poring over that salary schedule, which we were not supposed to see.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:That's amazing.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:And now you know, I -- I offered, when I got to Stanford.  It had made such an impression on me, that I went to the first faculty meeting and I said you know, I'm happy to publish the salary schedule of this department.  I set the salaries.  I'm happy to put my name up there.  I do not make the most money in this department, and I'm happy to post it every year.  Tell me, do you want to?  Not a single person wanted their salaries published.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Why not?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I think they were all making money, and they were afraid somebody would see how much they were making, and it would be -- I don't know.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Or maybe they weren't making as much --\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Maybe they weren't making -- and they wanted people to think they were making.  I don't know.  I knew what they were making and I said, I'm happy.  You know, just so there's no backbiting and there's no concern, I'm happy to publish all the salaries.  We'll just put it out there.  So nobody wanted it, so we didn't do it.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:So you -- I know that we had a conversation on the phone some weeks ago, and I want to ask you this question.  Looking back on your Yale experience, because you're about to go off to Stanford, looking back on your Yale experience, as a pioneer student and pioneer faculty, there's no two ways about it.  You were definitely a woman pioneer.  Would you describe it as Star Trek, going where no woman has gone before, or would you describe it as Alice in Wonderland, in deciding --\r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=9600.0,9900.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/34","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"MARY LAKE POLAN:Well I think it's much more like Alice in Wonderland, no question.  I just kind of wander around, and as I think back now, I was so naïve and so unaware, that I just kind of wandered around, and if something came up and I thought it would be neat I would say ooh, can I do that, and they would say yes and I would say oh, terrific.  It wasn't -- I had no sense.  I mean, I knew I was the only woman but I just -- it was a day to day living.  I never thought about it.  I just thought it was really lucky to have all this opportunity, and to talk to all these people who were nice and fun, and I keep saying that.  I keep hearing myself saying I liked having a good time, I did.  It had to be -- it was fun, I enjoyed it.  I mean, when you're working 12 or 14 hours a day, you have to be having fun, or you wouldn't do it.  You certainly -- I wasn't making enough money, and the only gripe I ever had was the money.  I really thought it was unfair.  When I got to Stanford, about eight months after or a year after I got there, I got a call from the EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission].  The women at Yale had just instituted a suit over salaries, and the government must have come in and audited them, and went back and looked at salaries.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:This would have been what, '89?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I went to Stanford in '90.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:'90.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:So they must have called me.  I went -- I got there in June of 1990.  It was either the fall of '90 or some time in '91, and they called and they said, this guy from the government said, we're doing -- there's been a lawsuit here, all about salaries, and we're from the EEOC.  We'd like to look at your salary and see whether you were ill treated.  I knew I'd been ill treated, but I was at Stanford now, and I was you know, trying to do a job that I had no idea what it was, and I said to the guy you know, don't call me again.  I don't want to talk about this.  I have no gripe.  I have no interest in what they're doing at Yale.  Don't talk to me about it, and I believe that that's true.  I think -- and I've given that advice to women.  I watched two people in radiology at Stanford, sue -- goodbye.  Sue the department and the medical school because of what they said were salary inequities.  Maybe they were, but they destroyed their careers.  I watched Fran Conley go after the medical school at Stanford and write a book.  She always wanted to be a dean, she never got there.  Operationally, suing the organization you're working for is not a good strategy, and I looked at that and I said, do I want to get involved in a lawsuit, pissing and moaning over Yale?  No.  I really don't want to do that.  I'm not going to talk to them, and I think there were salary inequities at Yale, and I don't know if it was just the department, or if it was in every department, but I'll bet it was in every department.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:The difficulty with taking opposition is, somebody in the end has to kind of decide that they're going to get their head blown off.  Otherwise, things don't change.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:That is true, but I always had a very different attitude, one that I would like my children to have.  Don't get angry, get even.  Don't turn around and be angry and destroy things at your own institution.  Get a better job elsewhere.  And I didn't like what was going on at Yale, and I didn't like my chairman, and I didn't like the fact that he only offered me a promotion when Harvard offered me a job, and I didn't like the way he behaved, and I didn't like what he was doing with other women in the fellowship, and that was one of the reasons I left Yale.  I didn't like what was going on, and it was a question of do you sit here and you know, try and get him.  Well there's no way on earth I can get the chairman without destroying myself in the bargain.  So I looked at that and I said hmm, what is the best thing to do?  Well the best thing is to get a job and go someplace else and be a chairman, and then I don't have to worry about this asshole who's dumping on me and has been for years.  Now, not everybody was like that at Yale.  He was, so it's a highly personalized thing, and if you have a good chairman or a good division director, somebody who's mentoring you well and is fair and honorable, you have a great experience.  \r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=9900.0,10200.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/35","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"If you have somebody who's stealing your data, putting their names on your papers, patting you on the bottom, you know paying you less than you're worth because he says it's too expensive, I can't afford it, well that's bullshit.  Then you get yourself another job someplace, because if you get him, you will kill yourself in the bargain.  It's a very poor strategy.  I don't know about men, but I've seen women destroyed with it, and I think it's a bad way of behaving.  Just get a better job.  And then, when you ask Florence about this, then the worm turns and then something happens, and suddenly you're the one who makes the decisions, which is another reason you shouldn't be nasty to junior people, because you too will get old, and those people will jump you, and they may have something to say about you in the future.  So why would you be gratuitously nasty to people?  It makes no sense to me, and you see it all the time.  A big mistake, because sooner or later, their turn will come.  They'll be on a committee looking at prize presentation, they'll be on a journal, reviewing your paper.  Something will come up.  Their child will be applying to your medical school and you will be a decision maker in the process.  All kinds of things happen.  You never, unless you really -- unless it's a do or die situation, you want to walk away from all that.  You don't want to get involved in that.  It's self-defeating.  And you certainly don't want to dump on junior people just because it makes you feel good, because they'll get you, and I used to see that.  I don't understand why men don't get that, but they don't.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:What did you -- what did you bring to Stanford from Yale?  You've said a little bit about why you left there.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I wanted to try building a department that was based on cooperative, pleasant interactions, and where people made joint decisions and it was a meritocracy, and where things were open, everything was transparent.  I tried to publish the salaries and nobody wanted them.  And you know, we had committees and I hired a lot of women.  We ended up with all female residents.  I had a lot of junior women faculty.  Not all of them worked out, one of whom sued me, which took a long time, a lot of effort.  She is a sociopath and eventually, lost her hospital privileges which, like eight or ten years later, vindicated what I had done.  I tried to pull her hospital privileges and was unsuccessful, because she threatened a lawsuit and everybody got scared and backed off.  And about a year later, she did something really heinous and lost her hospital privileges, and I kept saying see, I told you so.  But it was to try and build a department where people enjoyed going to work, where nobody was afraid, and could you really run the department on that basis and make it financially viable.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:By saying that, are you implying then, that Yale was not like that?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I saw Yale as a power structure, and when I was a resident and a fellow, I didn't have enough power that I made any difference.  It didn't matter.  It wasn't until I got on the faculty that it began to matter, and then I was annoyed that I wasn't being paid what I thought I should be paid.  It was highly personal, with the person who was the head of the department then, didn't like me.  I don't think it was that he didn't like me.  He didn't like much of anybody, and he told me A, he wouldn't continue my fellowship salary, and then he told me that I shouldn't want to be a faculty member because I was pregnant again, and then he announced that he didn't think there was a slot, a tenure slot available.  None of this until I got a job offer at Harvard, and I looked around, I said, I'm not different you know, because Ken Ryan offered me a job.  Joe went up to look at -- was offered the Chair of Dermatology at Boston University, so I went to Boston to look around, and I got offered jobs at Tufts and BU and Harvard.  I'd never gone out and road tested this, and I went up there and interviewed and the next thing I knew, I had three job offers, bingo, and I had an associate professorship at Harvard.\r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=10200.0,10500.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/36","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"And I was just killing myself to get promoted at Yale.  I came back and Fred said oh well hmm, well, maybe we do have an associate professorship here.  Well, that is just total bullshit.  I wasn't any different.  My track record wasn't any different.  I didn't like that, and I -- he was the chairman.  Alan said to me, \"He won't be chairman forever, and when I'm chairman, I'll see that you get a fair deal.\"  He was my division director and even then, I knew that that was bologna.  And I said you know, you could -- first, who knows if you're going to be chairman, and if you are, who knows what you're going to do.  So, I'm not staying here because you say if he goes and I'm chairman, then I'm going to do such and such.  That's stupid.  You know, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.  I just got a job offer, also DeCherney had been interviewing for the same job I got, which probably didn't please him.  I said, I'm going to Stanford, why wouldn't I go to Stanford?  They want me.  I'm having trouble here, and it's a big fight.  I don't need a big fight.  You know, I've got two children.  Actually by then, I had three children.  I don't need this.  I'm going to go someplace where they like me and want me.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:I think it must be the most difficult position to be in, in any institution, if you're the -- if you have to be there.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Oh.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:You know, that if you --\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Ask Mary Clutter about that, as a research associate, when her husband was on the faculty, she had to be there.  Oh, can you -- the frustration?  No, I -- that's a -- that's a terrible bind.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:How did your other half, what did Joe think about you moving off to Stanford?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Well he had said -- when he chose not to go, I said if you go to Boston as a chair, I'll find a job, no problem.  And actually, I had a great series of offers, so when he decided not to take the job, he said yours is the next shot.  So he said sure, you want to go to -- also, the chairman of the search committee that found me for Ob/Gyn was Gene Bauer, who was the Chair of Dermatology, old friend of Joe's, and I think he -- I know.  He took part of my chair package, peeled it off for the Department of Dermatology to hire Joe.  So, he had an ulterior motive.  He probably wouldn't have recruited -- they probably wouldn't have hired me if I hadn't been available and had the credentials, but there was just an extra little $200,000 for his department, because he took it off my package, and I'm sure he went to the dean.  I didn't know this until years later, because I wasn't sophisticated enough, and I hadn't negotiated packages, but I'm sure he went to the dean and said well, I think we can get her if I can get her husband here, and to get her husband, it's going to cost me X, Y or Z.  Well he wasn't my husband and Gene knew we weren't married, but to get her significant other here, and I think that's what happened.  But I really was pleased with what happened in the department at Stanford.  I think you can run a department like that, which doesn't mean you are touchy feely and you let everybody do everything they want, but I think you can run a department that's open, where people talk about their real problems, deal with them when they need to be dealt with, and there's no subterfuge or flimflam.  I think you can do it.  If you set the appropriate financial incentives, people will work.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Did you find -- do you think that setting out with that kind of agenda um, is it more likely to make your life harder in the short term?  The other approach, of course may make your life harder in the long term, because somebody in the end will get you, but to do it that open way from the beginning, does it create difficulties for you, trying to manage that at that point?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I don't think so.  The department at Stanford was so terrible, that when I left, people at Yale said well you know, it's no win situation.  If you do something with it they'll say whoa, nobody ever made a department out there, and if you can't they'll say well, nobody can make a department out there, so you're going to win however.  I don't -- I had to recruit.  I recruited.  It turned out, and I didn't know this, I'm a very good recruiter, and I recruited you know, very good division directors.  I recruited Maury Druzin from Cornell here, to run OB and the maternal-fetal medicine.  I promoted somebody who was there in Gyn oncology.  I promoted somebody into the RAI Division Chief, and I recruited the head of basic research who was fabulous.\r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=10500.0,10800.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/37","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"I just started recruiting and those people were loyal to you, and I had a package that was sufficient.  So I just started recruiting and I said, here's the way we're going to do it.  When you recruit, it's a personal interaction.  It's like talking to you.  If the person you're trying to recruit doesn't trust you and believe in what you're doing, they won't come, and if they do, you've already got them on your side.  So -- and I recruited, I had all these small children at home.  I brought them in.  We had pizza and salad at my house.  I did all the recruiting at home.  I got one assistant professor because her father needed a Medicare bed, and I put the social workers on to it and we found him a Medicare bed.  You've got to listen to people and find out what it is they want, and then you have to provide it, and the strangest things are what they want.  I mean, it's not just what you'd think, like money or whatever.  That helps, but there are other things people want.  They want autonomy.  They want to be left alone.  They want to be able to run their prize program.  You've got to hear what they want and somehow find a way to support that, and then you can recruit.  And if you recruit those people, they are a priore on your side, and then you don't have a problem.  Now if you walk in and everybody's already there, you have a problem, but that wasn't what I got.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Would you say that your management style was, was a female one as opposed to a male one?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Yeah, I think it was.  I went in saying I'm going to do this the way I would do it, is the female way of doing it.  That gets (inaudible) too, and you discover total transparency is difficult.  There are certain things you don't want people to know, but yeah, I think it's a female, it was, and I was sort of an experiment.  Can I do this?  Is it possible to do it this way?  And it is, and I've watched other female chairs who are -- it doesn't mean you have to be patsy, but I've watched other female chairs who base things on relationships and trust, which men don't always do, and I think it runs better.  So I, I mean I enjoyed running the department.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:What -- how did it -- how did it go, looking up the food chain, to the deans and senior members of the administration, the university administration?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Well the dean who recruited me I loved, and I haven't called David recently, but I would use David, even after he left.  He got fired by the president.  The higher up the food chain you go, the more unstable your job is.  The dean who replaced him had been the Chairman of Dermatology, who recruited me, and so I had a relationship with him, that worked.  The next dean who came in, I didn't like, and that didn't work so well, and one of the reasons I left was that we didn't see eye to eye on where we were going.  He didn't -- and I'd run through my package by then and was 15 years into it, 13 years into the tenure.  I had no more package.  He wasn't going to give me any more money, and I couldn't do the things we needed to do.  It became much less fun.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Is that when you decided to --\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:And that's when I decided.  It's a long, rather ugly story, but I learned that -- I was offered a deanship at Galveston and I chose not to take it, because my youngest child was 14, and I didn't think it would be a good thing for him, because I had just separated from my significant other, who was an alcoholic, and life was very complicated for the kids.  And then I looked at other deanships, and decided I really didn't want to do that.  It just wasn't -- it took too much time and this kid, I had to make sure the kids did OK, and that I would just be a professor, and I sit on a lot of boards and I like entrepreneurship, and I would do that.  And then I met Frank and got married and moved here, but it's, it's critically important for me, that you like working for who you work for, and that they -- it doesn't mean you don't fight like cats and dogs, but they like and trust you, and have some kind of respect.  I never felt that with the current dean at Stanford, with whom I had a number of differences, and I made a tactical mistake.  I decided I'd fight him, and remember I just said to you, you shouldn't fight, you should get another job, and I knew that.  I mean, I knew that, but I was at Stanford and I didn't want to move, because I didn't want to upset Scott.  So I felt trapped at Stanford, and I fought him anyway, and that -- you just never win when you do that.  If you're going to --\r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=10800.0,11100.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/38","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"If you're really going to have a knock down, drag out difference of opinion, you should get another job.  And then I decided I didn't want to be chair and run this thing, and he didn't want me to, so we -- he gave me a three year appointment and then said he'd do a search.  Well, that brought me into 15 years of doing this, which is more than enough, and it was no fun.  It's no fun to work for somebody that you can't challenge and have them hear you, and fight back and you know, negotiate it out.  It's no fun when you have somebody who's dismissive, I wouldn't say -- omits information, and he got rid of a good friend of mine, who was the female Chairman of Medicine at Stanford, who loathed him, and she fought him and she wound up -- I mean, it's a big mistake to do that.  It's really fun to do a job like that if you're working with people, both above you and below you, where you can have an honest interaction, and if you have a difference of opinion you say it, everybody knows it, and then you figure out a way out of it that's moderately satisfactory for everybody, but other than it's not -- and it should be fun.  Nobody needs to get up in the morning and hate what they're doing.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:What do you think the biggest change in medicine has been, in the 35 years or so that you've been involved?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I think here are two.  One is having a lot more women around, and they relate differently than men do.  The other thing is all the government regulation, which is not -- I don't like.  That also made it not fun.  You know, it used to be see one, do one, teach one, and you could make up procedures.  We can't do that stuff any more, and that's not so much fun.  Medicine isn't as creative any more.  It used to be very creative.  I don't see it as creative now.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Do you think women will make a difference, now that there's certainly they are a huge presence, especially at the junior end, in the schools and in junior faculty, junior clinicians.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I think they may, but I don't know that it's -- and this may be heresy.  What I find is that people in my cohort worked very hard to get there, under very unpleasant circumstances, and they just buckle down and work.  The junior faculty want things, they feel entitled.  We need daycare, we need -- I need to have time off for my children.  I need this, I need that.  Very different than when I was coming up, and I don't think it's so good, and I don't think they're as good as we were, and I find that disheartening.  I don't see them as aggressive or as innovative or as -- committed isn't the right word.  They want, they want time off for the children and to make super big salaries and to get promoted.  Well you know, that's not how it worked, and it didn't -- it doesn't work that way for men, and there shouldn't -- yes, there should be daycare, it should be for everybody.  Yes, there should be some mentoring and help in how to do these things.  Yes, you should be taught how to write grants, but you shouldn't expect something just because you have children and you're a woman, that everybody else doesn't get.  How's that fair?  And I was disappointed in the sense of entitlement that I saw, that I know wasn't there before, because believe me, nobody entitled you to anything.  And so I, I think the way people work with relationships is better, but I don't like the sense of entitlement, and I definitely don't like the government regulations.  It's dramatically changed.  I was just very lucky to come up at a time when it was fun and exciting, and it was kind of like the wild west.  It's much more regulated now.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:I have heard it said um, by some of the other women that I'm talking to, but also I've read it in various places, in Margaret Rossiter's book on women scientists in the U.S., also makes this statement towards the end of the book that um, that women are getting into the academy now in huge numbers.\r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=11100.0,11400.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/39","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"You could even argue that this has been a certain feminization of the academy, right across the board, certainly in the arts and humanities, and obviously, it's happening in med, and maybe that's less so in the heart, so called heart sciences.  But nevertheless, there's a huge -- there's been a transformation of the gender balance in the academy, and that your opinion seems to be divided that that is either -- is it transforming the academy, or is it just that the women are becoming more like men, or does it mean that because there's so many women in the academy, the academy is being downgraded and sadist?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Well I think in medicine, it's downgraded now there are more women.  It's what happened in Russia when all the women doctors were doctors and nobody cared about being a doctor.  I think it makes a difference.  They pay -- women, across the board, get paid less, so if you start downgrading salaries, is that not downgrading, just because they're women?  I always paid top dollar, but I found at Stanford, that I too was not being -- just as at Yale.  They didn't pay me as much as they paid the men.  I always had to go back in and say wait a minute, you can't do that to me.  I think the attention to relationships and to listening to people is good.  I think a sense of entitlement is bad.  I think that women who rise to high levels of power have the same characteristics as men do.  Nobody gets there without those characteristics.  I don't care if you're pea green or pink polka dotted.  It's kind of like, you know downs children.  They all look more like each other than they do their families.  All deans look more like each other than they do individual family members, and the same for chairmen.  There's a series of descriptors for people who have these job, and I've now seen it in New York as CEOs.  It's exactly the same as CEOs in business.  You have to have certain qualities to get there, and it doesn't matter if you're male or female.  You just have to develop those qualities and those skills.  Most people don't make that level, and the ones who don't sometimes -- I don't know if downgrade is the right word, but have a sense of entitlement.  You know, they didn't get where they wanted to and it was because they weren't women.  I don't think that's true.  It's because they didn't have the skill set, and they didn't want it badly enough.  The most important thing is wanting it more than anything in the world, and if you want it that badly, you will put out whatever it takes to get it.  But I don't --\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:But surely, there has to be some structural change within institutions to at least give everybody an equal shot.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:That's true.  There should be -- it's like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  Nobody guarantees you happiness, but you sure can try.  Everybody gets to try.  That's -- you know, there has to be a fair shot for everybody.  It doesn't guarantee you get there, and I think that we may have hit on what the difference is.  Women, instead of perceiving they get a shot at it, perceive they should get it.  Well that's not true.  Nobody promises it to you.  You get to try for it, and if you put out and you're good enough, you get it, but if you're not, if you don't get it, it's not because, necessarily because you're a woman.  It could be you're just not good enough, and I think that's a hard concept for them to just -- for people to understand.  But I was disappointed in some of the junior women faculty, and how hard they wanted to work and what they were willing to put out.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:What do you think your best achievement was, looking back on your career?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Building a financially viable department that I enjoyed, where people liked working there and felt valued, that you could do it on that basis.  You didn't have to do it with subterfuge.  I think that's the most important thing.  the other thing is raising three children, who I -- the first two are functional and productive, and I think the third one is going to be, and those are the two best things.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:How would you like to be remembered?\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Oh, as somebody who was fun to be around, that people wanted to be around because it was exciting, and there was enthusiasm, and there were new plans and programs and risk taking.\r\n\n","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=11400.0,11700.0"},{"id":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272/transcript/31937/annotation/40","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Which I think makes life really fun, is to be able to take risks, because you almost -- you know, 80% of the time it works out, and I hate to do this, but I'm going to have to put on my exercise clothes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Yes, you are.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I'm going in late.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:You're going to.  Otherwise, you'll be towed off.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:I'd be -- yes, yes.  While you clean up, I'm just going to go put on clothes.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:OK.  Well thank you very much Mary, that was terrific.  I really enjoyed it.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:It really is fun and you know, I love this.  I'm going to edit this and I'm going to give this -- I'm going to leave it in my safe deposit box for my children, which I think is the best, is the best part about this, really.  I just think it's been terrific.\r\n\nINTERVIEWER:Oh, I'm glad to have been able to do it for you.\r\n\nMARY LAKE POLAN:Because otherwise, kids never -- you're never sure your kids know who you are.  Actually, I'm pretty sure mine know who I am.\r\n\r\n[END OF INTERVIEW]","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://yalemssa.aviaryplatform.com/collections/970/collection_resources/48967/file/122272#t=11700.0,11814.97469"}]}]}]}