This month, we’re starting a new series delving into snapshots of science history and their lasting impact on the modern world. In honor of Juneteenth, we’ll start with the Tuskegee Syphilis Study—a clinical study that contributed greatly to the erosion of trust between the healthcare industry and the Black community. This broken trust has had a lasting negative effect on the health of Black people and on the diversity of clinical trials. Diverse clinical trials are crucial to ensuring that new treatments are effective and safe for all the populations they are used in. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Black people…
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In the early 1900s, scientists were just beginning to understand the diversity and importance of steroids—a group of molecules made in the body that includes the sex hormones (progesterone, estrogens, and testosterone) and the hormones involved in promoting inflammation (cortisol). In addition to natural hormones, steroids can also be used as therapeutic drugs. But at the time, steroids had to be isolated from animal sources to be used as drugs, which was an expensive and low-yield process. During his career as a chemist, Percy Julian discovered a method for synthesizing these unique molecules from abundant plant sources, like soybeans, enabling…
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In 1951, two years before the double-helical structure of DNA was discovered, Barbara McClintock gave a lecture on her newest research into maize genetics, which revealed something truly surprising—certain genes were able to jump from one region of the genome to another. These jumping genes appeared to have a pronounced effect on the regions where they landed, disrupting and inactivating nearby genes. In maize (i.e., corn), these effects were easily visualized as changes in the color pattern of kernels over generations. Despite compelling evidence, McClintock’s lecture was met with confusion and open hostility from the scientific community because it conflicted…
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During the American Prohibition, moonshine was responsible for over 750 deaths and more than a hundred thousand cases of blindness or paralysis in New York City alone. Over eighty years later, in early 2019, several outbreaks of toxic alcohol poisoning lead to hundreds of deaths and injuries in northeast India. The culprit in both of these cases was methanol contamination. Chemically, the only real difference between methanol and ethanol is the number of carbons (two in ethanol and one in methanol). Methanol and ethanol taste about the same and produce about the same initial intoxicating effect. The only difference is…
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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…
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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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As we finally exit the long slog that was 2020 and enter the new year, the topic on everyone’s mind right now is vaccination. With the recent FDA approval of both the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines, many of our long-standing questions and concerns about vaccination have come to the forefront of public consciousness—especially since these new vaccines are pioneering a relatively novel method of vaccination. Vaccination itself may seem like a relatively recent endeavor, a product of 20th-century science and public health initiatives. And while the first laboratory-concocted vaccine wasn’t created until 1879, the legacy of vaccines and inoculation against…
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Rounding out our trio of influential women in science is astronomer Vera Rubin, whose observations and calculations provided the first empirical evidence of a mysterious unseen entity lurking throughout the universe. In the 1970s, while observing the nearby Andromeda Galaxy, Rubin and her collaborator Kent Ford noticed that the stars in this spiral galaxy appeared to defy the fundamental laws of physics. The entire galaxy, it seemed, was spinning at the same speed—despite most of the mass being concentrated in the center. In fact, the outer stars were moving so fast that they should have been hurled out of the…
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Up next in our series on women who reshaped science is Marie Maynard Daly—the first Black woman in America to earn a PhD in Chemistry. At a time when scientists were only just discovering the function of DNA as hereditary material, Daly made many foundational discoveries about the chemical structure of nucleic acids and histones—the proteins that DNA wraps around. Perhaps even more influential though are Daly’s studies investigating the health impacts of cholesterol and sugar. Daly was one of the first scientists to discover the link between cholesterol and hypertension, which can lead to heart attacks. Her work as…
Continue readingThe Ghosts of Science Past: Part 2—Marie Maynard Daly and the Dangers of Cholesterol
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