For the last entry in our Black History Month series, we’re discussing Emmett Chappelle, the biochemist hired by NASA to develop tests and methods to identify microbial life on the surface of Mars. Of course, life has never been found on the red planet, but like many other innovations originally developed for space, Chappelle’s inventions have found new purpose here on Earth. One of his most notable discoveries was luciferase, the enzyme found in fireflies that glows when it reacts with the protein luciferin in the presence of ATP—the currency of life. Because luciferase only reacts with luciferin when there…
Comments closedMonth: February 2021
Last week, we kicked off Black History Month with a post about the father of the modern blood bank, Charles Drew. This week, we are turning our attention to the woman who programmed the mathematical model that made GPS possible, Gladys West. In 1956, West was hired as a mathematician for the Navy—one of only four Black employees at the Naval Proving Ground in Dahlgren, Virginia—where she worked as a “human computer,” making calculations based on astronomical data. By the mid-1970s, as part of the Seasat project, West was programming the new IBM computer with specialized algorithms to model Earth.…
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For Black History Month, our next series is going to focus on a few of the influential Black scientists that history books tend to overlook. We already introduced Marie Maynard Daly, the Black woman who discovered the health hazards of cholesterol, back in our December series on female scientists. Another 20th-century Black scientist whose discoveries have directly saved lives is Charles R. Drew, the father of the modern blood bank. Drew pioneered the process that allowed blood and plasma to be separated, stored, and transported. During WWII, Drew was instrumental in organizing a massive blood banking effort in America—called Blood…
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