Celebrating Forgotten Scientists: Marie Daly

Marie Maynard Daly was an inspirational and ambitious chemist best known for her research on sugars, cholesterol, and proteins in relation to the mechanics of the heart and their effects on the arteries. Despite facing both gender and racial bias throughout her career, she persevered and became the first African American woman to obtain a PhD in chemistry in the USA, at a time when only 2% of Black American women had college degrees. Daly dedicated herself to creating programs to increase minority enrollment in medical and graduate science programs. The most notable is her African American Science scholarship fund at Queens College in 1988.

Marie had an avid interest in science, especially chemistry, from a young age. Her parents, especially her father Ivan, actively encouraged their daughter to pursue higher education. After migrating to the US from the Caribbean, Ivan Daly had been forced to drop out of Cornell University before finishing his bachelor’s degree in Chemistry, in order to work and be able to feed his family.

Marie gained her bachelor’s degree in Chemistry at Queens College in New York, graduating top of her class in 1942. She became fascinated with the field following reading ‘the microbe hunters’ by Paul De Kruif. After finishing her degree, she was offered a fellowship in graduate Chemistry, again at Queens College, where she finished her masters in just one year, working part-time alongside as a laboratory assistant in order to fund her studies.

Daly went on to complete her PhD at Columbia University, and upon her graduation in 1947 became the first Black woman in America to hold a PhD in Chemistry.

Following her PhD, she taught at Howard University in Washington DC before going on to work with the American Cancer Society, researching protein organisation and the composition of metabolites in the cell nucleus, particularly histones. She later returned to teach at Columbia, becoming a professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine until her retirement in 1986.