Cellular-Surface Biology

One of the twentieth century's outstanding African-American biologists, Ernest Everett Just '07, was a Choate scholar and a member of Phi Beta Kappa who graduated magna cum laude. Despite the acknowledgment of his peers that he was a first-rate scientist he went through the graduate program at the University of Chicago in absentia all the top universities adhered to the harsh racial code of the era and refused to offer him a position. Brown University found him "quite ideal except for his race." Howard University offered him a teaching post but would not support his research. For 20 years Just conducted his experiments during summers at Wood's Hole, Massachusetts.

Race alone did not set Just apart from his colleagues. He also challenged his era's prevailing theories. He began intensive studies of the surface of cells, in the belief that what the}- let in or out was crucial to their functioning; this was at a time when nearly every other cellular biologist was focused on the nucleus in the search for DNA. Just's theories did not become scientifically popular until the 1970s, when cancer researchers began exploring the walls of cells. Dartmouth did not formally recognize his achievements until 1982, when it established a faculty chair in his name.

Because Just had been denied a university post, he had no graduate students to carry on his work after his death in 1941. And so he did not launch a new sub-branch of science. He was simply and tragically ahead of his time.

If Just had been a white man, science would have had a new field.