"School Isn't My Kind of Thing"

By Hannah Bloch

Margie Profet is an unlikely character to be rocking the foundations of reproductive biology. The long-haired, thirtysomething researcher speaks in the breathless, bubbly cadences of someone half her age, sees solutions to scientific problems in her dreams and doesn't even hold the almighty Ph.D. No matter. Like all good scientists, she specializes in challenging dogma and poking holes in foregone conclusions. "I was always interested in asking questions," she says.

Profet, whose father is a physicist and mother an engineer, grew up in Manhattan Beach, California, and studied political philosophy at Harvard. An early resistance to science, she says, came from her religious upbringing. "I couldn't reconcile religion with science," she recalls. "I didn't like biology. You look at an internal organ, and it's just so unaesthetic. How could God make things so asymmetrical?"

But science was the only way to tackle the questions that kept popping into her head. After touring Europe and Africa (where she climbed Mount Kilimanjaro), Profet got a bachelor's degree in physics at Berkeley. She did not pursue a doctorate because the "regimented environment" of academia turned her off. "School isn't my kind of thing," she admits. Still, she took a job as a biology research associate at Berkeley, which gave her the time and freedom to follow wherever her restless mind led.

She has probed the evolution and hidden purposes of biological phenomena that most people take for granted: menstruation, morning sickness and allergic reactions. Profet's ideas about menstruation fit into a general theory that all these natural processes protect against infection and disease. Morning sickness, she believes, prevents pregnant women from eating certain vegetables or spices that might harm a fetus. Allergies give sufferers a defense against plant-borne toxins.

Last June, Profet's unorthodox research earned her a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award of $250,000, which ended years of financial struggle. Now on leave from Berkeley, she is writing a book on preventing birth defects. But her day-to-day life has changed little, she insists: "I just do research and laundry and grocery shopping." Not to mention a little hackle raising in the scientific community.

With reporting by Elaine Lafferty/Los Angeles