Kamala Harris with her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, in 2007, during a Chinese New Year Parade. — Kamala Harris campaign/AP
ON her first day of work, the young bioengineering major climbed down the basement steps of a cancer laboratory in Berkeley, California, and caught sight of someone beheading a mouse.
The student, Elizabeth Vargis, felt faint. She grasped for a chair. A child of Indian immigrants whose dipping grades had just cost her a scholarship, she reckoned her difficulty staying upright spelled the end of her research career, too.
Her new boss, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, listened a few days later as her student reproached herself for being an inadequate scientist, and then cut in with a question: “Did you eat that day?”
The younger biologist had not.
“You have to eat!”
The reply was not exactly warm – more “are you stupid?” than “I’m so sorry you fainted,” Vargis said. Nor was it as ready-made for a meme as Gopalan Harris’ aphorisms, like the one about the coconut tree that caught the imagination of voters online during her daughter Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign.
But in the professor’s admonition, Vargis heard an echo of her own Indian aunties, and an affirmation that she belonged in a scientific world where neither she nor her professor had ever felt entirely at home.
“She wanted me to be in that room,” said Vargis, who earned her doctorate and now runs a lab at Utah State University, a career that she credits in part to Gopalan Harris. “She wanted to give everybody a chance, an equal chance.”
Gopalan Harris died of cancer in 2009, around six years after that encounter. This autumn, she has become perhaps the most recognisable character in her daughter’s campaign biography. In speeches, Harris has often leaned on the memory of the person she calls her greatest influence: the “brown woman with an accent” who left India at 19 and spurned convention to marry a Jamaican man and settle in the United States.
But the vice president’s telling of the story has tended to elide her mother’s more defiant attitudes toward racism and misogyny in her chosen country, according to interviews with more than 20 people Gopalan Harris worked with, mentored or befriended. That part of her character was evident not only in the fights she joined for Black rights and ending the Vietnam War, but also in the breast cancer laboratory she led, a small corner of a scientific establishment that was white, male and, in her eyes, often inhospitable to people like her.
Shyamala Gopalan’s rebellion started early.
At her high school in India, in the mid-1950s, girls sat on one side of the classroom and boys on the other. Crossing the line could be treacherous: Best to approach the opposite sex in groups.
“That protected you from rumours starting about you romancing someone,” said R. Rajaraman, a classmate.
Gopalan took no such precautions. The oldest daughter of a diplomat from a privileged Tamil Brahmin family, she spoke to boys without shame.
Gopalan Harris attended the Lady Irwin College in New Delhi. — Kamala Harris campaign/©2024 The New York Times Company
At 19, Gopalan told her father that she had been accepted to a graduate programme in nutritional science at the University of California, Berkeley. A US$1,600 (RM7,009) scholarship in hand, she travelled to Berkeley in 1958.
Gopalan was on her own. Her family had no contacts in Berkeley.
“She was lonely, and she said it was hard,” said Judith Turgeon, a longtime friend and collaborator. “But she pushed on.”
In a crucible of radical politics at Berkeley, Gopalan found close friends, many of them Black. She joined a Black intellectual study group, one whose members would eventually help found the Black Panther Party. Despite her upper-caste origins, she was at ease wherever the group gathered, even in Black areas of west Oakland that classmates said tended to rattle other outsiders.
Gopalan had been expected to return to India for an arranged marriage. But in the fall of 1962, she met Donald Harris, a Jamaican seeking a doctorate in economics who had also fallen in with the Black study group at Berkeley. They married the following year.
Original outlier: The US vice president mother was a breast cancer researcher whose egalitarian politics often bucked a patriarchal lab culture. — Kamala Harris campaign/©2024 The New York Times Company
He was climbing the academic hierarchy; she was moving sideways. But Shyamala Gopalan Harris clung to her research, earning her doctorate and working in a physiology lab that was studying how the body processed cholesterol. She was at the lab in 1964 when, pregnant with Kamala, she began having contractions. Before departing, she paused to leave a note on her supervisor’s desk.
“I’m going into labour,” it said, Gopalan Harris later told Yu-Chien Chou, a postdoctoral researcher. At the hospital, she begged in vain to be allowed to return to her experiments while she waited to deliver.
With their toddler, Kamala, in tow, Gopalan Harris followed her husband first to Illinois and then Wisconsin, where he had won a tenure-track position and she a lower-level research job. But they were young, the vice president wrote in her 2019 memoir. The romance was Gopalan Harris’ first. The pair, having “become like oil and water,” her daughter wrote, soon separated.
After her marital split, Gopalan Harris returned in 1969 to the Bay Area. She chose to settle with her girls in the Black neighbourhood of West Berkeley, which had become a haven for Black families a generation removed from the segregated South.
An assistant research biochemist at Berkeley, Gopalan Harris could only afford to rent the top floor of a duplex. Financial stresses piled up. Once again, Black friends from Berkeley came to her aid. One introduced her to an aunt, Regina Shelton, a Black woman from Louisiana who ran a day care centre.
While their mother worked, Kamala and her little sister, Maya, stayed with Shelton. When experiments ran late, they spent the night. On Sunday mornings, Shelton took the girls to the 23rd Avenue Church of God, a Black Baptist church.
Gopalan Harris had tended to her daughters’ Indian identity: She took them to India and invited her parents for visits in West Berkeley, said Carole Porter, a childhood friend of the vice president. But Gopalan Harris wanted to root her daughters in their Black identity, too – and prepare them for attacks on their race that she could see coming.
Gopalan Harris was intent, too, on showing her girls why she was so often away from home. So she took them to the lab and put them to work labelling test tubes. Those visits, she hoped, might help her daughters imagine lives for themselves that centered as much on the work they did as the homes they made.
Gopalan Harris was advancing, inch by inch, toward her goal of deciphering what made breast cancer so deadly. She and collaborators had identified receptors that bound to estrogen, triggering changes to the reproductive system. Later, she helped untangle how those receptors functioned.
But her papers failed to win her more secure academic positions. When her supervisor at Berkeley reneged on a promise to give her a faculty position, instead hiring a white man from Britain, she left Berkeley for a hospital affiliated with McGill University in Montreal, where she was given her own lab space. She wanted to use what she was learning about hormone receptors to build a picture of what went awry when breast cells turned cancerous.
Eager for ever more autonomy and a return to the Bay Area, Gopalan Harris leaned on one of the few non-white women with power in her field: Mina Bissell, a noted breast cancer biologist, who had immigrated from Iran and was overseeing a division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Bissell hired Gopalan Harris, who was turning her focus to lesser-studied progesterone receptors.
Gopalan Harris was a demanding and, at times, abrasive boss, foreshadowing reports about her older daughter’s management difficulties.
But her toughness came with an equal dose of affection. She referred to the students as her “kids.” Struggling to juggle motherhood and a paper deadline, Chou once took her young son to her professor’s apartment, where Chou wrote her manuscript while the professor played with the boy.
Gradually, Gopalan Harris herself grew sicker, first with an autoimmune disease and later colon cancer. Past the point when pain should have kept her from walking, colleagues said, she came to work, even formally retiring to free up salary money for research needs.
“Let us hope that you and I have a less tumultuous New Year,” she wrote in an email to Turgeon in January 2004. “I am too old and wise to talk about happiness!!” — ©2024 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
