Shyamala Gopalan^[a] has been  a biomedical scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory,^[5] whose work in isolating and characterizing the progesterone receptor gene has stimulated advances in breast biology and oncology.^[6] She was the mother of Vice President of the United States Kamala Harris and Maya Harris, a lawyer and political commentator.^[7]

Shyamala was born on December 7, 1938, in Madras, Madras Province, British India (present-day Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India) to P. V. Gopalan, a civil servant, and Rajam, her mother. Her parents were from two villages near the town of Mannargudi in Madras Province.^[8] Gopalan had begun his professional life as a stenographer,^[9] and, as he rose through the ranks of the Imperial Secretariat Service and later Central Secretariat Service,^[10] both parts of the civil service, he moved the family every few years between Madras (now Chennai), New Delhi, Bombay (now Mumbai), and Calcutta (now Kolkata).^[9][8] 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.^[8] A gifted singer of C

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.^[14] 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."^[14] In 1963, they were married without following the convention of introducing Harris to Shyamala's parents beforehand or having the ceremony in her hometown.^[8] 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.^[8] 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.^[8][15]arnatic music, Shyamala won a national competition in it as a teenager.^[8]