Chemistry and couraging

It’s the second Tuesday in October, so it must be Ada Lovelace Day, when we honor women who’ve made major contributions to the advancement of society via one of the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines.

In the past I’ve brought to your attention the mother of modern computers, Grace Hopper (whose Celebration is taking place in Houston this week); Nobel Laureate (in Physiology/Medicine) Rosalyn Sussman; Hedy Lamarr (if you’re reading this on a mobile device, you can thank her for developing the frequency hopping system on which mobile communications are based); and two engineers who contributed to the Allied victory in World War II: Joan Struthers Curran, whose work on little aluminum bits called “chaff” helped to foil Nazi radar and divert attention from the D-Day landings; and Beatrice Shilling, who solved the problem of British fighter planes cutting out mid-dogfight due to carburetors that weren’t designed to support the kinds of maneuvers necessary to take on the Luftwaffe.

Last year I wrote about a woman who went through two careers—one military and one in private practice—as an occupational therapist, during which she designed and patented various devices to help patients achieve and maintain balance. Eventually, after retiring twice, and in her 90s, Barbara Beskind got to achieve her longstanding dream of being an inventor when she joined Silicon Valley design giant IDEO.

Today, though, we’ll go back to academia and to bench research, and talk about Marie M. Daly, the first African American woman to be granted a Ph.D. in chemistry. If you are concerned about your cholesterol, happy about your cholesterol or know anything at all about your cholesterol, it’s largely because of the work that Daly did.

Born in Queens in 1921, Daly was encouraged to follow her interest in science by her family and her teachers at Hunter College High School (which was all-female, a fact that I cannot believe is insignificant). She pursued studies at Queens College, living at home to keep expenses down, and graduating magna cum laude in 1942 with a degree in chemistry.

She followed with a master’s in a year from New York University, while working part-time as a lab assistant at Queens College (who thought enough of her potential to fund her studies at NYU). Following a year tutoring chemistry students she enrolled in the doctoral program at Columbia University, working under another woman pioneer, Mary L. Caldwell, whose focus was on the digestive enzyme amylase. She was awarded her Ph.D in 1947.

Daly taught for two years at the historically black Howard University in Washington, D.C., then received a grant from the American Cancer Society to support a postdoc at the Rockefeller institute in New York. There she worked on understanding the metabolism of components of the cell nucleus. Her career included teaching at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, and at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Daly was also an investigator for the American Heart Association, researching how hypertension affects the circulatory system. She was also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

In addition to her research and teaching, Daly set up programs and scholarships to increase diversity in the ranks of chemists. Her real passion was expanding knowledge, whether it was as a bench researcher, a teacher or an encourager.

It’s hard to know what kinds of hurdles she faced as a black woman in science in academia. Bias against women and minorities is still rife at all levels of STEM (and elsewhere); rather ironically, this is well-documented in scientific study after scientific study. But she never wavered, not from her first discovery as a child of Paul De Kruff’s book, The Microbe Hunters. She knew at an early age what she wanted to do, and she did it.

All this is an extraordinary tale. But the thing that drew me to Daly’s story is this quote, which is applicable to everyone: “Courage is like—it’s a habitus, a habit, a virtue: you get it by courageous acts. It’s like you learn to swim by swimming. You learn courage by couraging.”

Well, yes you do.