Born: 3 March 1924, Austria
Died: 1 September 2016
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Ruth Hoffmann, Ruth Wald
This biography, written by Sara Schechner and staff of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University, is shared with permission.
Ruth Hubbard was born in Vienna, Austria in 1924. Her maiden name was Ruth Hoffmann. Her family emigrated to the United States in 1938 in order to escape Nazism. They settled in the Boston area. Ruth attended Radcliffe College, and married Frank Hubbard in 1942. She completed her bachelor’s degree in biochemical sciences in 1944. After several years of clinical biology research, Hubbard returned to Radcliffe and earned a Ph.D. in biology in 1950.
In 1950, Hubbard became a research fellow at Harvard University, and in 1952, received a Guggenheim fellowship at the Carlsberg Laboratory in Copenhagen, Denmark. She returned to Harvard in 1954 as a research fellow and was the first woman to be awarded a tenured biology professorship at Harvard University. Hubbard’s work in the 1940s and 1950s was in the areas of biochemistry and photochemistry of vertebrates and invertebrates.
She divorced Frank Hubbard in 1951 and married long-time research colleague George Wald in 1958. In 1967, she and Wald received the Paul Karrer Medal for their joint work.
Ruth Hubbard is also known as a strong opponent of sociobiology. The geneticist, Richard Lewontin said of her, “No one has been a more influential critic of the biological theory of women’s inequality than Ruth Hubbard.”
Hubbard is an emeritus professor in Harvard’s Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology.