Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Marie Maynard Daly (April 16, 1921 – October 28, 2003) was an American biochemist. She was the first African American woman in the United States to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry (awarded by Columbia University in 1947).
In 1947 Marie Maynard Daly became the first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. in the field of chemistry. She then built a career in research and teaching at such prestigious academic institutions as the Rockefeller Institute, Columbia University, and Yeshiva University. Daly's research focused on protein structure and human metabolism. Among other things, she contributed greatly to an understanding of the causes of heart attacks and lung disease.
Marie Maynard Daly was born on April 16, 1921, in Corona, Queens, New York. She was the oldest child and only daughter of Helen Page Daly and Ivan C. Daly. Her two younger brothers were fraternal twins. Her mother was a homemaker who grew up in New York, although her family was from the Washington, D.C., area. Her father, Ivan, was a postal worker who was born in the British West Indies and moved to the United States as a young man.
(con't.)
Ivan Daly aspired to be a chemist and received a scholarship to study at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. However, neither he nor his parents were able to pay for his room and board, so Ivan Daly had to stop attending school after only one semester. As Marie Daly told Contemporary Black Biography (CBB), "My father wanted to become a scientist but there weren't opportunities for him as a black man at that time." However, Ivan Daly's interest in science spread to his family. His daughter recalled that she had always been interested in science. "My parents didn't discourage me because I was a woman," Daly proudly declared in an interview with CBB. Her parents encouraged her to pursue her education, and her mother regularly helped her with homework. Daly also enjoyed reading as a child. One of her favorite books was Paul DeKruip's Microbe Hunters, a very popular book at the time that chronicled the lives and accomplishments of the early microbiologists such as Antony van Leeuwenhoek, Louis Pasteur, and Robert Koch. The book was published in 1926 when Daly was just a child.
Daly's supportive environment extended to her schools as well. She recalled to CBB that her teachers encouraged her scientific interests. She attended Hunter College High School, which at that time was an all-girls school with an all-female faculty run by Hunter College in Manhattan. Daly went on to attend college at Queens College in Flushing, New York, so that she could remain close to home. This was a fairly new college with a small student body and a beautiful campus. Daly told CBB that her education at Queens College was memorable because of the small classes and the high quality instruction. Daly decided to study chemistry, like her father, even though she was not really aware at that time of the various career options in the field. Daly earned a bachelor of science degree, magna cum laude, in 1942. She was also named a Queens College Scholar for her academic achievements and was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi honor societies.
Daly's first job was as an instructor in physical science at Howard University from 1947 to 1948. She also worked on research projects with Dr. Herman R. Branson, a physicist and chemist who studied protein structure. Daly then went to the Rockefeller Institute of Medicine, now Rockefeller University, in New York City, where she was the only black scientist. She told CBB that this was the highlight of her career because of the interesting work she was doing at that time and because of the distinguished faculty with whom she worked. These notable scholars included Francis Peyton Rous, who won the Nobel Prize in 1966 for his discovery of a virus that caused sarcoma in chickens, and Leonor Michaelis, the co-inventor of a famous equation for studying the kinetics of enzymatic reactions. Daly worked at the Rockefeller Institute for seven years. She received a grant from the American Cancer Society and worked as a research assistant for Dr. Alfred Ezra Mirsky, a well-known biochemist and physiologist who is credited for being one of the first scientists to isolate messenger RNA in mammals. Mirsky and Daly studied how proteins are constructed within cells of the body. For example, Daly altered the protein metabolism in mice to study variations in the activity of cytoplasm, which plays an important part in the creation of proteins.
From 1955 to 1959 Daly was employed as a biochemist associate at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University, working primarily with Dr. Quentin B. Deming, who was studying the causes of heart attacks. According to Louise S. Grinstein, et al., in Women in Chemistry and Physics, "At Columbia University and at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine [at Yeshiva University in New York], Daly studied the metabolism of arterial walls with particular reference to changes that take place with aging, hypertension, and atherosclerosis," which is the build-up of fats in the arteries. In particular, Daly experimented with hypertensive rats in order to show the relationship between high cholesterol levels and heart attacks. Later Daly studied the correlation between smoking and lung disease. She also did research on how the kidneys affect human metabolism. She was appointed as assistant professor of biochemistry at Columbia University from 1960 to 1961. In addition to her teaching position, Daly also worked as an investigator for the American Heart Association from 1958 until 1963.
In 1960 Daly continued her groundbreaking research with Dr. Quentin Deming, who was now at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University. Daly was an assistant professor of biochemistry and medicine at Yeshiva until she was promoted to associate professor in 1971. In addition to her research, Daly enjoyed teaching biochemistry courses to medical students. She was also active in recruiting minority students to study medicine and science....Read More
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Preachers Prepare to Get Souls to the Polls. The Root: Voting Rights and Black Churches.
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"Our duty today," said Barbara Arnwine, executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, before a crowd of African-American clergy members, "is to remember that the Bible tell us: 'For lack of knowledge, the people perish.' "
With this guiding mantra, the Congressional Black Caucus and the Conference of National Black Churches joined forces on Wednesday for their inaugural Faith Leaders Summit on Voting Rights. The Washington, D.C., forum, attended by members of Congress and about 200 leaders from black churches across the country, was designed to inform attendees about restrictive state-level voting laws passed around the country and to empower them to share with their home congregations information about surmounting subsequent voting obstacles.
The event's first panel summarized various laws that have passed around the nation from 2010 to 2012.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
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We must remain vigilent because they'll never stop. ColorLines: Yet Another Effort to Racialize the Attack on Women’s Health.
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[Update: PRENDA (H.B. 3541) failed in a 246-168 vote. Under House suspension rules, the bill would have required a 2/3 majority to pass. Twenty Democrats were among those in favor, The Hill reports.]
I have to thank my friends Terrell and Dhalimu—two sexy beasts of Harlem style and shade—for giving me a perfect way to describe the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act (PRENDA)* up for a House vote today:
PRENDA is a wear-out.
When Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) introduced this wear-out of a bill last November he was calling it the Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act. By naming it after two of the most powerful and profound equal rights activists in modern history, Franks created a false equivalency between the liberation of enslaved Africans, voting rights for women, and the contemporary right-wing fetishization of zygotes.
This tactic is no surprise since Rep. Franks is, himself, a wear-out. Note that in 2010, he accused health reform proponents of “robbing the American citizens of power and putting it in the hands of left-wing liberal bureaucrats and elitists who think they know more about running people’s lives than the people themselves do.” (Because nothing says “freedom” like exorbitant health insurance premiums, uninsured masses and very sick people being dropped from their plans.) Franks opposed the repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” claiming that “those who give it all for us” should be able to “deal with this in their own way.” He’s also poo-pooed placing women in military combat on grounds that they might cripple their “already small units” by becoming pregnant and “suddenly [disappearing] for a year at a time.”
As I recount Rep. Franks’s ridiculousness, I feel myself becoming a wear-out. But to understand the intent of PRENDA, I think we have to understand its author.
If, by chance, this highly partisan bill becomes federal law, it will:
•Punish doctors who perform an abortion based on the sex of the fetus. (Apparently the race of the fetus is no longer at issue.)
•Punish those who transport a woman across state lines for a sex-selective abortion with five years in prison and/or fines.
•Force physicians, physician’s assistants, nurses, counselors and other medical and mental health professionals to report a patient to the police if they suspect that she wants an abortion because of the sex of her fetus. The penalty for practicing doctor-patient confidentiality would be a year in prison and/or a fine.
•Allow women who have opted for an abortion in the past, and the fathers and maternal grandparents of fetuses to sue a doctor for punitive (read, financial) damages if they claim that sex was the deciding factor in a woman ending a pregnancy.
Because the most recent version of PRENDA centers on the sketchy premise that a disproportionate number of Asian-American women are aborting their female fetuses to maintain the “son-preference” of their ancestral homes, reproductive justice advocates are crying foul.
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Justice at last. BBC: Liberia's ex-President Charles Taylor has been sentenced to 50 years in jail by a UN-backed war crimes court.
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Last month Taylor was found guilty of aiding and abetting rebels in Sierra Leone during the 1991-2002 civil war. Special Court for Sierra Leone judges said the sentence reflected his status as head of state at the time and his betrayal of public trust.
Taylor, 64, insists he is innocent and his lawyer has told the BBC he will appeal against the sentence.
In Sierra Leone, where victims of the war gathered in silence to watch the hearing on a large screen in a courtroom in the capital, Freetown, the sentence was welcomed.
The chairman of the country's Amputees' Association, Edward Conteh, told the BBC's Focus on Africa programme it came as a "relief" as Taylor was likely to spend the rest of his life in jail.
"It is a step forward as justice has been done, though the magnitude of the sentence is not commensurate with the atrocities committed," AP news agency quotes Deputy Information Minister Sheku Tarawali as saying.
Taylor, wearing a suit and yellow tie, showed no emotion during the hearing.
"The accused has been found responsible for aiding and abetting some of the most heinous crimes in human history," Judge Richard Lussick said.
Sentencing the 64-year-old former president to 50 years means in effect that Charles Taylor will spend the rest of his life locked up in jail. His defence team were hoping judges would take into account the fact that Taylor has a family: he is a father of 14 children and an educated man. But the judges decided his role in aiding and abetting the RUF rebels in Sierra Leone was serious enough to warrant 50 years.
It is a sentence that human rights groups say will set a precedent and send a message out to other world leaders - that if they commit crimes against humanity they will be forced to face the consequences, regardless of how powerful they are.
The crimes - which took place over five years - included cutting off the limbs of their victims and cutting open pregnant women to settle bets over the sex of their unborn children, he said.
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Centurion Symbio-City, near Johannesburg, poised to become world's 14th-tallest freestanding structure. The Guardian: Africa's tallest building could catapult continent into skyscraper big league.
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Visitors to the "Top of Africa" have been known to feel a little let down. The observation deck, 50 floors up, at the top of the continent's tallest building, the Carlton Centre in Johannesburg, South Africa, is somewhat threadbare, with a quaint tuckshop and old photos on the wall.
But plans have been announced for a tower that by 2018 could catapult Africa into the world's skyscraper big league.
The structure, part of a development known as Centurion Symbio-City, will soar to 447 metres, or 110 storeys, more than double the Carlton Centre – and higher than the Empire State Building. It would become the 14th-tallest freestanding structure on the planet.
Located in Centurion – between South Africa's administrative capital, Pretoria, and its commercial capital, Johannesburg – the development will have one residential and two office towers. It will include hotels, shops and a convention centre and span 10 hectares of land and lake. Perhaps most strikingly, the preliminary design shows a vertical column of wind turbines embedded in the tallest tower, which includes a rooftop garden with trees and swimming pool. It will be flanked by two others of 80 and 60 floors each.
An illustration of Centurion Symbio-City, which will soar to 447 metres – higher than the Empire State Building
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The Ginned Up Race War of 2012. ColorLines: Here We Go Again.
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“The secret of Republican political success since the rise of the right is not, as many liberals believe, that they play no-rules hardball. Instead, it’s their skill at projection—at accusing Democrats of doing what they are doing themselves, or are planning to do, or have done.”
—Michael Tomasky, Daily Beast
Nothing stirs up white racial anxiety in an election year like a black-against-white race war. Never mind the fact that there isn’t one. When has that ever stopped the inventive right wing?
Those of us living in the world of objective facts and reality might be mistaken for thinking that the United States remains an at best well-intentioned, but nonetheless deeply hostile nation toward its communities of color. In New York City, reports have shown that in 2011, police conducted 685,724 street stop and frisks (up from 97,000 in 2002). Young black and Latino men between the ages of 14 and 24 accounted for 41.6 percent of those stopped—although they are only 4.7 percent of the city’s population. In Missouri, a black man named George Allen has been in prison for almost 30 years for allegedly murdering a white woman, a crime that mounting evidence suggests Allen did not commit. Last month, a black woman named Marissa Alexander was sentenced to 20 years in prison for firing a single warning shot into the kitchen ceiling of her home to warn off her abusive husband and protect her three children.
But according to conservative media, exactly the opposite is occurring. Conservatives allege there is a growing but underreported black-versus-white race war in America.
There’s no data, of course, just some strung together anecdotes—namely, one about two white newspaper reporters who, while driving through Norfolk, Va., were attacked by a group of young black kids. The media didn’t pounce on the story—even the reporters’ own newspaper, the Virginian-Pilot, only mentioned the incident in an opinion piece two weeks later. Conservatives, who actually love to talk about race and racism when they can do so with their fingers pointing at people of color and liberals, pounced on the story as evidence of media bias. The lamestream media was all over the Travyon Martin story but ignored the beating of whites by black kids. That, conservatives screamed, is racial bias.
Mind you, the two reporters in the Virginia incident weren’t hospitalized for their injuries, let alone killed. Local police moved quickly to investigate and three days after the incident was first reported by the paper, police arrested one teen, charging him with throwing a rock at the reporters’ car (a felony) as well as related misdemeanors. By comparison, George Zimmerman wasn’t arrested until almost two months after he shot Trayvon Martin, and only then as a result of community pressure. Only those desperate to distract from productive conversations about racial bias and injustice and return American attention to reinforcing racial stereotypes and hierarchies could manage to find anything comparable between the Trayvon Martin case and the Virginia incident.
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Another victory by ColorOfChange. ColorLines: Walmart Backs Away From ALEC’s Quest to Suppress Black Voters.
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Walmart Stores Inc., announced late Wednesday it’s suspending its membership with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the right-wing policy group that has worked to suppress the black vote and promoted “Kill at Will” gun laws.
“We feel that the divide between these activities and our purpose as a business has become too wide. To that end, we are suspending our membership in ALEC,” Wal-Mart vice president of public affairs and government relations, Maggie Sans, told Reuters. Sans is stepping down as secretary of ALEC’s corporate board.
“The ColorOfChange community welcomes Wal-Mart’s decision to cut ties with ALEC, the right-wing policy group that has worked to suppress the Black vote. With this move, the company acknowledges that it has heard the voices of everyday people who believe in transparency in government and who see the particular impact ALEC’s model laws have had on Black communities nationwide,” ColorOfChange.org Executive Director Rashad Robinson said in a statement.
ColorOfChange.org launched a campaign in December 2011 to educate corporations about ALEC’s role pushing voter suppression laws nationwide.
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Jarrett L. Carter writes that many of the HCBU's urgently need to make some simple adjustments. Black Voices: What HBCUs Must Do to Survive
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HBCUs must keep up the same academic rigor and heartfelt investment between faculty and student. This is not only the most endearing way to learn, but a proven system of developing high-achieving and remedial students alike on the same path to academic success. A new part must be added to this system; a challenge for each student to develop his own business as part of his academic journey.
Every HBCU freshman orientation should offer history of the university and development of a personal business plan. Students would be instructed on what they are, who they are, where they are from and how these things build a personal and professional brand. They would required to change and amend that plan, with an exit interview of how their plan developed over the course of four-to-six years at the institution.
It doesn't even need them to pick a major, just a commitment to objectively describing what they want their life to amount to and how education, family, spirituality and society influence the personal business plan.
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The stamps were designed by artist-illustrator Kadir Nelson of Los Angeles and are based on historic photographs. The Root: Black Baseball Greats Immortalized on Stamps
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"We've heard from Indians, Pirates, Red Sox and Yankees fans, and we're stepping up to the plate to immortalize their revered players individually," said U.S. Postal Service Stamp Services Manager Stephen Kearney. "We have a limited quantity of individual-player stamp sheets ready to fill all preorders now for shipment on July 21 -- with these orders getting top priority," he added.
Black-history and black-sports buffs will likely buy up the sheets featuring Larry Doby, the first African American to play in the American League, and Willie Stargell, who powered the 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates to a World Series title.
U.S. Postal Service
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Young, Depressed, and Of Color. ColorLines: Why Schools and Doctors Get It Wrong.
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Earlier this month, news surfaced of a Louisiana school psychologist who posted racially charged messages on Twitter. Mark Traina, who later resigned, worked as a psychologist at an alternative school in Jefferson Parish Public School System, a district that’s been under intense scrutiny in recent months. According to a court complaint filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Jefferson County has been sending a disproportionate number of black and special education kids to “languish for months” in the district’s alternative schools.
Traina had already taken to Twitter to post his support of George Zimmerman, the former neighborhood watch captain charged with murdering Trayvon Martin. But back in January, Traina went on a rant against “young black thugs.” Traina, a self-proclaimed ‘American Civil Rights Activist who unlike Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton presents all Americas”, tweeted that “Young black thugs who won’t follow the law need to be put down not incarcerated. Put down like the Dogs they are!”
While black children aren’t often ceremoniously “put down like dogs”, they do face harsh school punishment at much higher rates than their white counterparts. Jefferson Parish’s problems are symptomatic of a disease that’s already been diagnosed nationally: the tendency to dole out harsher than average treatment for people of color. From the classroom to the clinician’s office, there’s a long and troubling relationship between racism and the mental health field.
Research has also shown the black students are disciplined more severely than white students, even when they commit offenses that are less serious. The National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado reported (PDF) that more than 30 percent of black students caught using, or in possession of, a cell phone for the first time were suspended. The rate for white students who committed the same infraction was just 17 percent.
The disparity lead Education Secretary Arne Duncan to lament that “the everyday educational experience for too many students of color violates the principle of equity at the heart of the American promise.”
Data released this year by the U.S. Department of education showed that black students are three times more likely to be suspended than their white classmates. Even though black students make up just 18 percent of students nationally, they comprise 35 percent of suspensions and 39 percent of expulsions. Additionally, as Liz Dywer points out at GOOD, 70 percent of students arrested or referred to police are black or Latino.
credit: photos from istockphoto
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The Front Porch is now open!
Grab a seat and get a plate! If you are new-introduce yourself and join in.
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