The Rebellious Scientist Who Made Kamala Harris

The presidential candidate’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, was a breast cancer researcher whose egalitarian politics often bucked a patriarchal lab culture.

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.