Biochemist Marie Maynard Daly

Marie Maynard Daly, linocut 9.25" x 12.5" by Ele Willoughby, 2021

 

This is a hand-carved and hand-printed linocut portrait of trailblazing American biochemist Marie Maynard Daly (1921-2003). Daly, the first Black woman to earn a doctorate in chemistry in the US, made important research contributions to our understanding of the biochemistry of the cell nucleus and cardiovascular issues. Her interest in the nuclear proteins within cells lead to important contributions to our knowledge of the chemistry of histones and protein synthesis. She published original research establishing that  "no bases other than adenine, guanine, thymine, and cytosine were present in appreciable amounts" in DNA - research which was cited when Watson and Crick accepted the Nobel Prize for the structure of DNA. She did some of the earliest work on the relationship between diet and cardiovascular health. She was the first to show how cholesterol could clog arteries and that hypertension lead to atherosclerosis; these were invaluable discoveries in our understanding of heart attacks and work to lower the risk of heart attacks. She also did early work linking smoking and hypertension. Later she made studies of the uptake of creatine by muscle cells, which is important to understanding the recycling systems of muscles. She did this at a time when there where tremendous barriers due to race and gender discrimination in fields of research where women and minorities are still underrepresented.

Born April 16, 1921, in Queens, NY, she was the eldest of three and had twin younger brothers. Her father Ivan Daly was an immigrant from the British West Indies who had come to the US on a scholarship to Cornell to pursue his own dream of a career in chemistry, but when he and his family were unable to cover the tuition and board, he had to drop out of school. He supported his family as a postal worker, and passed on his love of science to his children. Her mother Helen Page Daly was a homemaker, avid reader and fellow lover of science, who also fostered her children's education. Marie's grandparents had a library with many biographies of scientists. Marie recalled being fascinated as a child by Paul DeKruip’s Microbe Hunters, with its stories of scientists like van Leeuwenhoek, Pasteur and Koch and being encouraged in her interests by parents and teachers alike. After attending an all-girls high school in Manhattan, she won a scholarship to Queens College.  She could remain close to home, and save money living at home. She graduated magna cum laude with a BSc in chemistry in 1942, in the top 2.5% of students, a Queens College Scholar and inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi honor societies.

She got lab and teaching assistant jobs at Queens College to support herself as she continued on, studying for her Master's at New York University, and afterwards. As WWII raged, and employment opportunities for a Black woman in chemistry were uncertain, she decided her best bet was to continue her education, and she began doctoral studies in biochemistry at Columbia under Dr. Mary Letitia Caldwell, Columbia's first female chemistry professor, a well-known expert in enzymes and nutritional chemistry. She graduated only three years after enrolling, in 1947, with her thesis "A Study of the Products Formed by the Action of Pancreatic Amylase on Corn Starch," unaware that she had become the first Black woman to earn a chemistry PhD, at a time when only 2% of Black women had college degrees. She was the first Black person to earn a doctorate from Columbia.

She wanted to work with biochemist Dr. Alfred Ezra Mirsky (one of the first to isolate mammal messenger RNA) but he told her she would need to provide her own funding. So she worked as a physical science instructor at Howard University for a year and began studying protein structure, until able to secure funding for a seven-year post-doctoral fellowship from the American Cancer Society. She moved to the Rockefeller Institute of Medicine in New York City, for the next seven years,  where she worked with distinguished scientists and was the only Black scientist there. With Mirsky, she worked on protein synthesis and the metabolism of cellular nuclei, critical and foundational research for developing ideas on the structure of DNA. 

She became  a biochemist associate for the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia, and at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in1955. There, she taught and continued her research on cancer and nucleic acids while she collaborated with Dr. Quentin Deming at Goldwater Memorial Hospital, on the causes of heart attacks. Her research about arterial walls looked at the effects of aging, hypertension, atherosclerosis (or the build up of fat in arteries), sugar and cholesterol. They showed that hypertension was a precursor to atherosclerosis and were the first to link cholesterol and clogged arteries. In studies of hypertensive rats, she showed the link between  high cholesterol and heart attacks. This was the foundation of work to prevent heart attacks. She studied the link between smoking and lung disease and how kidneys affect metabolism. She was a researcher for the American Heart Association from 1958 to 1963, working particularly on stroke research. Columbia made her an assistant professor of biochemistry from 1960-1961. She married Vincent Clark in 1961 (and retained her name professionally).

She and Deming both moved to Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University where she became an assistant professor of biochemistry and medicine (then associate professor from 1971). While there, she started and helped run the Martin Luther King Jr. - Robert F. Kennedy program to help prepare Black students for admission and worked to recruit Black and Puerto Rican students. She also did important work on understanding the uptake of creatine in muscles, including the temperature and ion conditions at which it could be best absorbed. She was a dedicated mentor. She participated in a conference with 30 other minority women in STEM, hosted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science which resulted in in a report called The Double Bind: The Price of Being a Minority Woman in Science (Malcom, Hall, & Brown, 1976).

She was also a cancer scientist with the Heath Research Council of New York from 1962 through 1972. She served on the board of governors of the New York Academy of Science. She was also active in student recruitment and in professional societies and the NAACP and National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women. She was a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

After retirement in 1986, she donated money to Queens College to create scolarships from Black students in physics and chemistry, in honour of her father. She served on the Commision for Science and Technology for New York City for three years, before moving with her husband Vincent Clark to their East Hampton summer home and then to Sarasota, Florida. In 1999, the National Technical Association recognized Daly as one of the top 50 women in STEM. She was devoted to playing the flute, gardening and her dogs; when her cancer made flute playing difficult, she learned the guitar. She died in 2003, at the age of 82, in New York City.

References

Daly, Marie Maynard. Encyclopedia.com, accessed April, 2021. 

Galen Scott, Black History Month - Marie Daly, The Researchers Gateway, March 7 2019

Marie M. Daly PhD Memorial Celebration, Einstein University, 2021

Victoria Corless, Pioneers in Science: Marie Daly, Advanced Science News, August 27, 2020 

Marie Maynard Daly, Wikipedia, accessed April, 2021.

Jalen Borne, Hidden Figures Beyond: The First Black PhD in Chemistry, Marie Maynard Daly, Charged Magazine, April 3, 2020

Dale DeBlakcsy, Marie Maynard Daly (1921-2003), America's First Black Woman Chemist, Women You Should Know, February 28, 2018

Daniel Tyrell, #BlackCardioInHistory: Dr. Marie Maynard Daly, blackincardio.com, October 20, 2020.

Marie Maynard Daly, Science History Institute, November 9, 2018

Roopati Chaudhary, Marie Maynard Daly, Sci-illustrate, July 14, 2020.

Chemist Alice Ball, chaulmoogra and the first effective method for treating leprosy

Alice Ball, 11" x 14", linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2018, shows the chemist, branches of the chaulmoogra tree and
how she formed the ethyl ester of chaulmoogric acid (the acid plus alcohol produces the ethyl ester with water)

Leprosy is a disfiguring disease which has afflicted people for millenia. Though her work was stolen and she died tragically young, we now recognize Alice Ball, the young black woman chemist, for her discovery of the first effective treatment for leprosy just over a century ago. Today we know that leprosy (or Hansen's disease) is a long-term infection of bacterium Mycobacterium leprae or Mycobacterium lepromatosis, which can usually be treated with a mix of modern antibiotics. It's likely however that leprosy is as old as human history and descriptions of the symptoms of the disease appear in ancient texts, including Hippocrates (460 BCE) and the Hindu scripture the Atharva Veda from 2,000 BCE. Signs of the disease have been found in skeletal remains from 2,000 BCE. Those infected may not show symptoms for as many as 5 to 20 years, which hindered our understanding of how it was transmitted. Sufferers develop inflammation of the nerves, respiratory track, skin and eyes, as well as skin lesions and can loose the sensation of pain in those areas. This puts them in danger of loosing extremities as repeated injuries, wounds and infection can go unnoticed. People wrongly feared that leprosy was highly contagious, and quarantined the infected in "leper colonies," a practice which persists in some developing countries. There has been significant social stigma associated with the disease, which disproportionately afflicts those living in poverty and and the term "leper" for a person affected with leprosy. Jack London in The Cruise of the Snark described a Hawaiian leper colony as ‘the pit of hell, the most cursed place on Earth’.

In the West, the traditional treatment for leprosy, like syphilis, was mercury, which is of course poisonous. In traditional Indian and Chinese medicine, the oil from the seeds of the chaulmoogra tree (Hydnocarpus wightianus) was used as a treatment. While the oil did indeed combat the disease, it could not be effectively applied. As early as the 1300s, people tried applying chaulmoogra oil topically but it was too sticky. The acrid oil usually lead to vomiting when taken orally. Since it is viscous and can't dissolve in water (or blood), when injected it merely clumped under the skin and the patients were left with rows of oily blisters, with skin resembling bubble wrap. The painful injections were described as "burning like fire through the skin." This partial and flawed, disfiguring treatment for a disfiguring disease was adopted in Western medicine in the 19th century and there were no better options until a 23 year old chemist, Alice Ball was recruited to study chaulmoogra oil in 1915.

Alice Augusta Ball (July 24, 1892 - December 31, 1916) was one of four children in a middle to upper-middle class, black family in Seattle. Her father was a newspaper editor, photographer, and a lawyer, her mother was a photographer and her grandfather was a famous photographer. As such, she grew up around chemicals and the magic of chemistry. The family moved to Honolulu while she was a girl, because they hoped it would help with her grandfather's arthritis, but he died shortly thereafter and they returned to Seattle. Ball studied chemistry at the University of Washington, earning a bachelor's degree in pharmaceutical chemistry and a second degree in pharmacy two years later. She published "Benzoylations in Ether Solution," in the prestigious Journal of the American Chemical Society with her pharmacy instructor, at a time when it was quite an unusual accomplishment for any woman, let alone a woman of colour, to publish in the peer review literature. She was offered various scholarships and opted to return to Hawaii to pursue her master's in chemistry, investigating the active principle of Piper methysticum (a medicinal plant known as kava  or ʻawa). She was both the first woman and the first African American to graduate with a master's degree from the University of Hawai'i. She also became the first Black chemistry professor at the school.

Island of Molokai where people diagnosed with leprosy were held
was once known as the "Land of Living Death."
Albert Pierce Taylor (1922) Under Hawaiian Skies: A Narrative of the Romance,
Adventure and History of the Hawaiian Islands, Board of Education of the
Hawaiian Kingdom, Page 348, Public Domain, Link

From 1866 to 1942, people diagnosed with leprosy in Hawai'i were arrested and quarantined on the Island of Molokai. Physician Dr. Harry T. Hollmann of the Kalihi Hospital in Hawai'i and acting director of the Kalihi leprosy clinic, was unsatisfied with using chaulmoogra oil in its natural form to treat leprosy patients and wanted to isolate the active ingredients. He recruited the graduate student Ball to help. Within a year, she was able to do what chemists and pharmacologists had been unable to do for centuries. She not only isolated the active ingredients but convert them to a form which could be circulated in the body. By taking the fatty acids present in the oil and exposing them to an alcohol and a catalyst, she produce ethyl esters which are soluble in water, and hence could effectively be injected. My print shows how she formed the ethyl ester of chaulmoogric acid (the acid plus alcohol produces the ethyl ester with water). This breakthrough was so significant, she was offered an instructor position in chemistry at the university. By 1922, her method was widely used to prepare chaulmoogra oil, and patients would might have been subjected to exile, a life of regular painful injections and being trapped in quarantine were instead being effectively cured and discharged!

Tragically, Ball did not live to see the affects of her research. She became ill during her research and returned to Seattle for treatment. She may have been exposed to chlorine gas while demonstrating the use of a gas mask in case of attack (as WWI was raging), but the cause of her death is unknown. Her death certificate was altered and lists tuberculosis as the cause of death, at age 24. She had yet to publish her results when she met her untimely death.

The chemist and president of the University of Hawaii, Arthur L. Dean completed and published her study - but he did not give Ball credit for her work, calling it the "Dean Method"! Dr. Hollmann objected and published an article documenting how the technique should in fact be known as the "Ball Method". The Ball Method relieved the thousands of patients removed from the homes in Hawai'i, forcing their families to hold funerals before their exile. Ball's Method was the preferred treatment for Hansen's disease until the advent of antibiotics in the 1940s. Despite Hollmann's efforts to defend her legacy, Ball's achievements did not receive much recognition until historians learned of and highlighted her work in the 1970s. Almost 90 years after her discovery, the University of Hawai'i finally recognized her work with a plaque on the school's lone chaulmoogra tree in 2000, and the Lieutenant Governor  declared February 29 "Alice Ball Day," now celebrated every four years.


Sources:
Esther Inglis-Arkell, "We Had A Cure For Leprosy For Centuries, But Couldn't Get It To Work", io9, 5/08/15 1:40pm 
"Ball, Alice Augusta," ScholarSpace at University of Hawaii at Manoa, accessed February 7, 2018
"Alice Ball", "Hydnocarpus wightianus", and "Leprosy," Wikipedia, accessed February 7, 2018
"Meet Alice Ball - The pharmaceutical Chemist who developed the first effective treatment for Leprosy," Women Rock Science http://womenrockscience.tumblr.com, December 3, 2013 
"Alice Ball and the Fight against Leprosy," blue stocking, Posted on February 29, 2016 by Mona
"UWSOP alumni legend Alice Ball, class of 1914, solved leprosy therapy riddle," University of Washington School of Pharmacy,
February 13, 2017
Ignotofsky, Rachel (2016). "Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World" Ten Speed Press: pp.45