The latest chapter of the “debate” over whether women can compete in science has been playing out recently in print and over airwaves nationwide. But Rita Colwell thinks some of the issues raised today against women in science have already been soundly refuted. “We shouldn’t be reliving those arguments from the 1940s and ’50s,” says Colwell, a former director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) who is now a professor at the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University.