The Rebellious Scientist Who Made Kamala Harris

On her first day of work, the young bioengineering major climbed down the basement steps of a cancer laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., and caught sight of someone summarily 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, took a different view. A slight woman of 5 feet with a siren of a laugh, Dr. 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,” Ms. Vargis said. Nor was it as ready-made for a meme as Dr. Gopalan Harris’s aphorisms, like the one about the coconut tree, that caught the imagination of voters online during her daughter Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.

But in the professor’s admonition, Ms. 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 Ms. Vargis, who earned her doctorate and now runs a lab at Utah State University, a career that she credits in part to Dr. Gopalan Harris. “She wanted to give everybody a chance, an equal chance.”