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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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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