Community News
A venture into the unknown world of African scientists
BY SIMONE J. SMITH
This article was spawned from an article I wrote called, “BrainTech RoboticsSTEM Learning identifies a large gap in African student’s education.” In this article (located in the current edition, definitely check it out), I was quizzed on famous African’s in tech (STEM), and I failed the quiz miserably.
Not wanting to remain in my ignorance, I went on a quest. I was not only going to learn about some famous African scientists, I was also going to prepare my community so that they would be prepared for this type of question in the future.
Interestingly enough, finding Africans who focused on STEM was not very difficult. It made me think, “Why are these people not highlighted more in our education system?” As a community paper, it is our responsibility to share pertinent news stories with the people, but we also have to educate at the same time. Toronto Caribbean Newspaper would like to present to you, “A venture into the unknown world of African scientists.”
African scientists have assisted in launching us into space, discovered new disease treatments and developed world-changing technologies. For some reason or another, many of their achievements and contributions in the science, technology, and engineering and mathematics fields are forgotten or go largely unrecognized. Some say that this is a result of systemic racism. In this article we are going to present African men and women who have pioneered in the technology and science world. We must pay homage to these people, and provide role models for our young people outside of the musicians and athletes that they look up to.
Dr. Charles Drew
Dr Charles Drew is responsible for creating the first blood bank. Born in 1904 in Washington, D.C., Drew attended Amherst College in Massachusetts and then McGill University of Medicine in Montreal, and graduated in 1933. (https://www.cdrewu.edu/)
During a time when Harvard would only accept a handful of African applicants a year, he received a deferred acceptance. He attended McGill University and earned the J. Francis Williams Fellowship, an award given to the top five students in the graduating class.
He practiced medicine in Canada in 1935, and continued to advance his education. He began work in the pathology department at Howard University, and was eventually promoted becoming the Chief Surgical Resident at Freedman’s Hospital. He pursued his doctorate at Columbia University in 1938, and not long after was sent to work with John Scudder, who had been given a grant to start the first blood bank.
His legacy was defined in 1940, when he became the director of the “Blood for Britain” project. The project shipped blood and plasma to help treat civilians and soldiers who were fighting during World War II.
Drew is the person responsible for standardizing the protocols for collecting and storing blood, and many innovations that are now mainstays of blood collections, such as mobile blood banks, are a result of his work (https://www.nlm.nih.gov/).
Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler
Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler was the first African American woman to earn a medical degree. She is also the author of the America’s early medical textbooks, a guide for women and children entitled the “Book of Medical Discourses.”
She was born in Delaware, but she spent much of her early years in Pennsylvania. She began practicing as a nurse in 1852 in Charlestown, Massachusetts. This was before the profession required a specific training course. In 1860, she graduated from the New England Female Medical College (https://www.nlm.nih.gov/).
She moved to Richmond, Virginia where she served a community of 30,000 people, many of who were freed slaves who otherwise had no access to medical care. After retiring from the practice of medicine, she wrote her medical text in 1883. It was based on notes she had taken during her years as a doctor. Rebecca died in 1895.
Marie M. Daly
Marie M. Daly became the first African American woman to earn a doctoral degree in chemistry when she graduated from Columbia University in 1947 (https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en.html).
She studied how compounds produced by organs such as the pancreas contribute to digestion. Daly went on to teach at Howard University for two years and then pursued her postdoctoral research at the Rockefeller Institute in New York.
She joined the research and teaching staffs of Queens College, City University of New York, Howard University, and Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. After joining the departments of biochemistry and medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1960, she studied how cholesterol relates to hypertension (high blood pressure) and how muscle cells utilize creatine, an amino acid that plays an important role in energy consumption in muscles.
She continued her work to increase the enrolment of racial minorities in graduate science programs and medical school, and established a scholarship fund for African American science students at Queens College in her father’s name.
Christine Darden
Born in 1942 in North Carolina, Christine was a skilled mathematician, data analyst and aeronautical engineer. After working at NASA for over 40 years, she became one of the world’s experts on sonic boom prediction, sonic boom minimization and supersonic wing design (https://www.nasa.gov/).
She earned a Bachelor’s degree in mathematics and a teaching certificate, before working as a teacher in Portsmouth, Virginia and at a Virginia State College. So, this is one of the names that I should have gotten and didn’t when I was quizzed by Patrick Monize. Her life was chronicled in the book “Hidden Figures,” became a “human computer” for NASA’s Langley Research Centre.
Recognizing an unhealthy balance in her work environment, she approached her supervisor and asked why men with the same level of education as she had were hired as engineers while she wasn’t. Shortly after, she was transferred to the engineering section, where her first assignment was to write a computer program for sonic boom (https://www.nasa.gov/). She spent the next 25 years working on sonic boom minimization. In 1989 she became the technical leader of NASA’s Sonic Boom Group of the Vehicle Integration Branch of the High Speed Research Program.
Throughout her career, she also served as a technical consultant on government and private projects and authored more than 50 papers in high-lift wing design.
She continues to encourage people, including her children, her grandchildren and her great grandchildren to always be curious.
Gladys West
For all my directional challenged individuals, it is imperative that you give a silent clap for Gladys West. She is the person responsible for developing the GPS technology that allows satellites to locate you anywhere on earth.
Born as Gladys Mae Brown in 1930 in Sutherland, Virginia, she was not eager to work in the tobacco fields or factories where her family worked, Instead, Gladys devoted herself to her education. She graduated as valedictorian from her high school, and won a full-ride scholarship to Virginia State College. Here she earned both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in mathematics by 1955.
Gladys was the second black female ever hired at a military base in Dahlgren, Virginia known as the Naval Proving Ground (now called the Naval Surface Warfare Centre). She was one of just four black employees.
She had the ability to solve complex equations longhand, and became a programmer on some of the earliest supercomputers. In the 1960s, Gladys participated in award-winning research that proved the regularity of Pluto’s orbit relative to Neptune. I now know that for every two orbits that Pluto makes around the sun, Neptune makes three.
Beginning in the 1970s, she programmed an IBM computer to precisely model the irregular shape of Earth. The data generated by West’s complex algorithms ultimately became the basis for the Global Positioning System (GPS).
Dr. Charles Drew, Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler, Marie M. Daly, Christine Darden, Gladys West; I now have five very strong reference points that I can intelligently speak about when referring to Africans in STEM. What a relief!
References
American Chemical Society
https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en.html
Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science
https://www.cdrewu.edu/
National Library of Medicine
https://www.nlm.nih.gov/