Shyamala Gopalan

Shyamala Gopalan (December 7, 1938 – February 11, 2009) was a biomedical scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, whose work in isolating and characterizing the progesterone receptor gene has stimulated advances in breast biology and oncology. She was the mother of Kamala Harris (former vice president of the United States who also served as attorney general of California and senator,) and Maya Harris, a lawyer and political commentator.
Shyamala was born on December 7, 1938, in Madras, Madras Province, British India (present-day Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India) to Tamil Brahmin Iyer parents, P. V. Gopalan, a civil servant, and Rajam, her mother. Her parents were from two villages near the town of Mannargudi in Madras Province. Gopalan had begun his professional life as a stenographer, and, as he rose through the ranks of the Imperial Secretariat Service and later Central Secretariat Service, he moved the family every few years between Madras (now Chennai), New Delhi, Bombay (now Mumbai), and Calcutta (now Kolkata). He and Rajam had an arranged marriage, but according to Shyamala's brother, Balachandran, their parents were broad-minded in raising the children, all of whom led somewhat unconventional lives. A gifted singer of Carnatic music, Shyamala won a national competition in it as a teenager.
Shyamala went to the MEA school in Delhi and received her Higher Secondary Certificate in 1955. She studied for a Bachelor of Science in Home Science at Lady Irwin College, University of Delhi. Her father thought the subject—which taught skills considered helpful in homemaking—was a mismatch for her abilities; her mother expected the children to seek careers in medicine, engineering, or law. In 1958, aged 19, Shyamala unexpectedly applied to the master's program in nutrition and endocrinology at the University of California, Berkeley, and was accepted. Her parents used some of their retirement savings to pay her tuition and board during the first year. Lacking a phone line at home, they communicated with her by aerogram after she arrived in the U.S. She earned a Ph.D. in nutrition and endocrinology at UC Berkeley in 1964. Shyamala's dissertation, which was supervised by Richard L. Lyman, was titled The isolation and purification of a trypsin inhibitor from whole wheat flour.
Shyamala conducted research in UC Berkeley's Department of Physiology and Cancer Research Lab. She worked as a breast cancer researcher at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and University of Wisconsin. She worked for 16 years at Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research and McGill University Faculty of Medicine. She served as a peer reviewer for the National Institutes of Health and as a site visit team member for the Federal Advisory Committee. She also served on the President's Special Commission on Breast Cancer. She mentored dozens of students in her lab. For her last decade of research, Shyamala worked in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Shyamala's research led to advancements in the knowledge of hormones pertaining to breast cancer. Her work in the isolation and characterization of the progesterone receptor gene in mice changed research on the hormone-responsiveness of breast tissue.
In the fall of 1962, at a meeting of the Afro-American Association—a students' group at Berkeley whose members would go on to give structure to the discipline of Black studies, propose the holiday of Kwanzaa, and help establish the Black Panther Party—Shyamala met a graduate student in economics from Jamaica, Donald J. Harris, who was that day's speaker. According to Donald Harris, who is now an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford University, "We talked then, continued to talk at a subsequent meeting, and at another, and another." In 1963, they were married without following the convention of introducing Harris to Shyamala's parents beforehand or having the ceremony in her hometown. In the later 1960s, Donald and Shyamala took their daughters, Kamala, then four or five years old, and Maya, two years younger, to newly independent Zambia, where Shyamala's father, P. V. Gopalan, was on an advisory assignment. After Shyamala and Donald divorced in the early 1970s, she took her daughters to India several times to visit her parents in Chennai, where they had retired.
The children also visited their father's family in Jamaica during their childhood.
Wanda Kagan, one of Kamala's high school friends in Montreal, described how after she told Kamala her stepfather was molesting her, Shyamala insisted she move in with them for her final year of high school. Kagan said that Shyamala helped her navigate the system to get the support she needed to live independently of her family.
Shyamala died of colon cancer in Oakland on February 11, 2009, at age 70. She requested that donations be made to the organization Breast Cancer Action. Later in 2009, Kamala Harris carried her mother's ashes to Chennai on the southeastern coast of peninsular India and dispersed them in the Indian Ocean waters.