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Ele Willoughby, PhD

Happy birthday to trailblazing American Marie Maynard Daly (1921-2003), 1st Black woman to earn a PhD in in the US! She made important research contributions to our understanding of the biochemisty of the cell nucleus & cardiovascular issues & our knowledge of the chemistry of histones & 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 & cardiovascular health. She was the first to show how cholesterol could clog arteries & that hypertension lead to atherosclerosis; …

these were invaluable discoveries in our understanding of heart attacks & work to lower the risk. She also did early work linking smoking & hypertension. Later she made studies of the uptake of creatine by muscle cells, which is important to understanding the recycling systems of muscles.⁠

She was also a cancer scientist with the Health Research Council of New York from 1962 - 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 & the NAACP & 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 for Black students in physics & chemistry, in honour of her father. She served on the Commision for Science & Technology for New York City for three years, before …

moving with her husband Vincent Clark to their East Hampton summer home & 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 & 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.