Category Archives: Ada Lovelace Day 2022

ALD22: Professor Marie Maynard Daly, Biochemist

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Marie Maynard Daly

Professor Marie Maynard Daly

Prof Marie Maynard Daly was a biochemist who co-discovered the link between high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and the clogged arteries that can cause heart disease and strokes.

Marie Maynard Daly was born in 1921, in New York City. Her interest in science was spurred in part from her father’s thwarted ambition to become a chemist and from reading about scientists in her grandfather’s library – in particular, the book Microbe Hunters by Paul de Kruif.

In 1942, she graduated magna cum laude from Queens College with a bachelor’s in chemistry. She finished in the top 2.5 percent of her class and earnt the honour Queens College Scholar. She got her master’s from New York University and, in 1947, her doctorate from Columbia University. She was the first African American woman to earn a PhD in chemistry in the United States, as well as being the first African American to earn a PhD in any subject from Columbia University. Daly’s doctoral research explored how the enzyme amylase acts during digestion.

She worked at Howard University for two years before moving to the Rockefeller Institute, where she spent seven years studying the composition of the cell nucleus and how proteins are made. She discovered direct experimental evidence that RNA is required for protein synthesis. The importance of her work was noted by James Watson and Francis Crick in their 1962 Nobel Prize speech.

In 1955, she went back to Columbia University where she studied the causes of heart attacks with Quentin Deming, before the pair moved to continue their work at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. Together, they discovered the link between high cholesterol and clogged arteries, or atherosclerosis, which can result in heart attack or stroke. Daly’s groundbreaking rat studies, where she measured their cholesterol levels, blood pressure and how damaged or clogged their arteries were, indicated a strong correlation between high blood pressure and high cholesterol. Her work has served as a foundation for research into atherosclerosis and related diseases.

Daly investigated the damage that cigarettes have on the heart and lung circulatory systems and collaborated on a study that found lesions in the lungs of dogs that were exposed to chronic cigarette smoke. She also studied histones, a type of protein that plays a key part in gene expression, controlling whether a gene is turned on, or “expressed”, carefully cataloguing histones’ properties and composition.

Outside her work, Daly was interested in supporting African American and other minority students in pursuing STEM careers. She started a scholarship at her alma mater, Queens College, to support minority students interested in physics or chemistry, in honour of her father.

She also assisted with the Martin Luther King Robert F Kennedy program run at Albert Einstein College, which provided advice and guidance on admission for minority students. Daly spoke about her experiences as a minority woman in science to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, culminating in the report, The Double Bind: The Price of Being a Minority Woman in Science.

Daly was included as one of the National Technical Association’s top 50 women in Science, Engineering and Technology in 1999. She died in 2003, aged 83.

Further Reading

ALD22: Professor Jewel Plummer Cobb, Cell Biologist and Cancer Researcher

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Jewel Plummer Cobb

Professor Jewel Plummer Cobb

Jewel Plummer Cobb was a biologist who discovered how skin cells produce melanin and how they become cancerous. She also discovered that methotrexate was an effective treatment for some skin and lung cancers and childhood leukaemia.

Born in 1924 in Chicago, Cobb graduated from Talladega College in Alabama with a degree in biology in 1944, earning her master’s and then her doctorate in cell physiology from New York University. Her research focused on understanding how skin cells produce melanin and how those cells become cancerous. Her doctoral thesis, Mechanisms of Pigment Formation, examined the enzyme tyrosinase, which is required for skin cells to produce melanin, which is what causes colour in human skin.

After finishing her PhD, she spent two years at the Harlem Hospital Cancer Research Center where she developed a deep understanding of how to culture human tissue directly from a sample taken from a person. Few people understood these techniques in the 1950s. She became skilled at culturing cancer cells taken from patient biopsies and used these cultures to study the effect of various chemotherapy drugs on the cells’ morphology, migration and growth.

In 1952, she started her own laboratory which was the first tissue culture-based lab at the University of Illinois Medical School. She combined her early research on skin pigmentation and melanin with her newer work on cancer.

Two years later, she moved her lab back to Harlem, and began working with Jane Wright to study the effect that chemotherapy drugs had on melanoma, a type of skin cancer. Wright worked with the patients, and Cobb worked with cells cultured from the patients’ samples. They realised that Cobb’s results could help predict which treatments would work for each patient and type of cancer. Cobb used non-cancerous tissue samples as controls, something which wasn’t common practice at the time because it was so hard to culture non-cancerous cells.

In the early 1960s, Cobb and Wright showed that methotrexate was effective for treating several cancers, including skin and lung cancer, and childhood leukaemia. Cobb also worked with mice that had been bred to be more susceptible to skin cancer, and discovered that cells with more melanin were protected from damage caused by exposure to radium and X-rays. This was the first evidence that melanin protects cells from UVA/UVB light.

In 1969, Cobb became the first black dean at Connecticut College, where she began programs to encourage women and people of colour to study STEM and explore STEM careers. She later became the first black woman to be appointed to the National Science Board, which supervises the National Science Foundation.

Cobb died in 2017, aged 92.

Further Reading

ALD22 Books: Carbon Queen, Maia Weinstock

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Carbon Queen: The Remarkable Life of Nanoscience Pioneer, Maia Weinstock

As a girl in New York City in the 1940s, Mildred “Millie” Dresselhaus was taught that there were only three career options open to women: secretary, nurse, or teacher. But sneaking into museums, purchasing three-cent copies of National Geographic, and devouring books on the history of science ignited in Dresselhaus a passion for inquiry. In Carbon Queen, science writer Maia Weinstock describes how, with curiosity and drive, Dresselhaus defied expectations and forged a career as a pioneering scientist and engineer. Dresselhaus made highly influential discoveries about the properties of carbon and other materials and helped reshape our world in countless ways — from electronics to aviation to medicine to energy. She was also a trailblazer for women in STEM and a beloved educator, mentor, and colleague.

Her path wasn’t easy. Dresselhaus’s Bronx childhood was impoverished. Her graduate adviser felt educating women was a waste of time. But Dresselhaus persisted, finding mentors in Nobel Prize-winning physicists Rosalyn Yalow and Enrico Fermi. Eventually, Dresselhaus became one of the first female professors at MIT, where she would spend nearly six decades. Weinstock explores the basics of Dresselhaus’s work in carbon nanoscience accessibly and engagingly, describing how she identified key properties of carbon forms, including graphite, buckyballs, nanotubes, and graphene, leading to applications that range from lighter, stronger aircraft to more energy-efficient and flexible electronics.

Order the book on Bookshop.org.uk here and your purchase will support a local independent bookshop of your choice!

About the Author

Maia Weinstock is an editor, writer, and producer of science, academic, and children’s media. She is a lecturer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology on the history of women in STEM and Deputy Editorial Director at MIT News. Previously,  she was the editorial director at BrainPOP and staff member at Discover, SPACE.com, Aviation Week & Space Technology, and Scholastic’s Science World.

Maia is a strong advocate for girls and women. She writes often on the history of women in STEM and on diversity in STEM media, including for Scientific American, Discover and Science World. Internationally, she is known for her custom LEGO projects including Women of NASA, a LEGO Ideas-winning and Amazon best-selling toy; Women of Computing, a LEGO Ideas finalist; and the Legal Justice League, a set featuring the first four women of the US Supreme Court.

You can follow her work here:

Twitter: @20tauri
Instagram: @20tauri
Website: maiaw.com

ALD22: Professor Nadine Caron, General and Endocrine Surgeon

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Nadine Caron

Professor Nadine Caron

Nadine Caron, born in British Columbia in 1970, is a General and Endocrine surgeon in Canada of First Nations descent (Ojibway). She currently works at Prince George Regional Hospital and also as an Associate Professor in the Department of Surgery at University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC). She is Co-Director of UBC’s Centre for Excellence in Indigenous Health, which she helped to establish.

Caron obtained a BSc in Kinesiology at Simon Fraser University, where she was the top undergraduate student, winning the Shrum Gold Medal. She went on to complete her MD at the University of British Columbia Faculty of Medicine, the first woman of First Nations descent to graduate there, and was also ranked as the top student. Additionally, Caron completed an MA in Public Health at Harvard and a postgraduate fellowship on endocrine surgical oncology at the University of California. She is also the recipient a Doctorate of Laws and an honorary degree.

She is an advocate for improving quality healthcare available to First Nations communities, and leads the Northern Biobank Project, which investigates genetic factors in diseases from tissue samples from rural and remote people in this community. She was also appointed as the First Nations Health Authority Chair (FNHA) in Cancer and Wellness to ensure that Indigenous people have better outcomes from cancer treatment.

Caron has been recognised with several awards for her work in diversity and inclusion, including the Canadian Cancer Society’s Inclusive Excellence Prize and the Dr Thomas Dignan Indigenous Health Award.

Further Reading

ALD22: Mary Golda Ross, Aerospace Engineer

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Mary Golda Ross

Mary Golda Ross

Mary Golda Ross (1908-2008) was the first female engineer to work at the Lockheed Corporation, as well as the first female Native American engineer.

As a child, she lived with her grandparents so she could go to school, after which she attended Northeastern State Teachers’ College where she earned a degree in Maths. A decade later, she attended Colorado State Teachers College to complete her Masters degree in maths, where she additionally took several astronomy modules. During the Great Depression, she worked in schools as a maths and science teacher before applying to the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), to work as a statistical clerk. She then became an advisor to girls at Santa Fe Indian School.

During World War II, her father advised Golda Ross to find work in California, where she was hired by Lockheed to work as a mathematician. She started working on some design problems with the P-38 Lightning fighter plane, to ensure that it could withstand its high speed. Lockheed were pleased with her work and sent her to UCLA so she could attain professional engineering qualifications for aeronautics and missiles. Despite many companies letting go of their female staff once the war had finished, Golda Ross was kept on at Lockheed, and was invited to join a top-secret project, Skunk Works, the only female mathematician to take part.

In Skunk Works, she worked on space travel designs and operational designs, including the Agena-B spacecraft, which later was used for the Apollo missions. Additionally, she worked ideas on potential flights to Mars and Venus, and wrote the NASA Planetary Flight Handbook III. Much of this work is still classified. Towards the end of her career, she worked on the Polaris re-entry vehicle, and the missiles, Poseidon and Trident.

Golda Ross was a strong supporter of young women and Native Americans in engineering, including American Indians in Science and Engineering Society and the Council of Energy Resource Tribes, and was also a member of the Society of Women Engineers. She participated in a parade of Native Americans at the National Museum of the American Indian, wearing a traditional Cherokee dress, and bequeathed $400,000 to the museum in her will. She died in 2008 and in 2022 was honoured with a statue in celebration of International Day of Women and Girls in Science.

Further Reading