Celebrating 8 Black Microbiologists Throughout History

Throughout history, in every field and every aspect there are unsung heroes and heroines who shaped the world we live in today. Many had to overcome barriers we can hardly even fathom. But it was their courage, resilience, and determination in the face of racial and gender discrimination that ultimately moved the field of microbiology to where it is today. So, in this post I would like to celebrate, and give recognition to, some amazing black microbiologists your teachers probably forgot to mention in your microbiology class.

Dr James McCune Smith (1813-1865)

Source: https://docsouth.unc.edu/church/payne70/ill6.html

For New Yorker Dr James McCune Smith, getting into medical school was nearly impossible, but not because he wasn’t smart enough. He was the star pupil of the African Free School; he was well-read, studied Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, German, Italian and Hebrew. James studied with ministers, conversed with educated men and even took up an apprenticeship as a blacksmith. Despite all these efforts, Dr. James McCune Smith was denied admission to Columbia and Geneva College, solely because of his race.

He was born into slavery and denied access to education because of the way he looked. Undeterred and surrounded by a great support group, Dr. James McCune Smith was able to raise enough funds to attend the University of Glasgow. In the 1830s, he became the first African American to earn a medical degree.

While this alone is a huge achievement and helped change the landscape of medicine, Dr. James McCune Smith wasn’t finished with changing history. He was also the first African American to contribute to peer-reviewed journals and became a leading abolitionist in America, gaining great praise from Frederick Douglas. He’d write essays and give lectures invalidating popular pseudoscience of the time that believed there was ‘black inferiority’.

George Washington Carter (1864-1943)

Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/robert_trudeau/5078981422

George Washington Carver was not driven by dreams of becoming a medical man. He was not swept away like so many into the world of medical microbiology, but found his passion in plants; in particular, he had a love for peanuts, sweet potatoes and soybeans.

He was born one year before slavery was ‘abolished’ in Missouri, United States. As an infant, he and his family were kidnapped from the Carver Farm and sold to a new person in Kentucky. Moses Carver, the owner of the farm, was able to locate George Carver and traded him for a horse. As such, George Washington Carver never knew his parents, and was primarily raised by Moses Carver and his wife.

He was a frail child and was not much help on the farm, but he had a thirst for knowledge and, from a young age, took an interest in studying natural pesticides, fungicides and other soil amendments. In 1894, Carver became the first Black American to earn a Bachelor’s in Science. He then pursued a Master’s degree in Agriculture where he studied fungal infections of soybeans. After his Master’s degree, Booker T. Washington asked him to help lead the Department of Agriculture at the Tuskegee Institute.

Dr William Augustus Hinton (1883-1959)

Born to two emancipated slaves in Chicago in 1883, I don’t think anyone expected William Augustus Hinton to change history. But when he was the recipient of two major merit-based awards, the Wigglesworth and the Hayden, and graduated from Harvard Medical School in just 3 years, I think it became clear that Dr. William Augustus Hinton would change the world.

Racism severely stunted both Hinton’s career in medicine and becoming a doctor. Unable to get a medical internship, he settled for volunteering at the Pathological Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital where he began researching syphilis. Not only did he literally write the textbook on Syphilis, he also helped develop the Hinton Flocculation test for Syphilis.

Although he was a devoted teacher at Harvard for over 30 years, the school never granted him ‘full professorship’ until he was nearly retired. Hinton also felt the need to hide his identity from many. He turned down prestigious awards from the NAACP and never attended an American Society of Microbiology meeting for fear that if others saw his skin tone they’d discredit his research. He once said, “Race should never get mixed up in the struggle for human welfare.”

Dr Ruth Ella Moore (1903-1994)

Source: Women in Microbiology Illustration Gallery

Dr Ruth Ella Moore was born in the beginning of the 20th century. She was born nearly 20 years before women had the right to vote in America and 50 years before the big American Civil Rights movement. However, she would live through both of these historic moments.

While Dr Harold Amos and Dr James McCune Smith received PhDs and were medical doctors, which are closely tied into the world of microbiology, neither one of them received a degree in microbiology or bacteriology. That honor, of being the first black person to receive a PhD in microbiology/bacteriology, goes to Dr Ruth Ella Moore. She was the first Black American woman to earn a graduate degree in natural science.

She even became the head of the department of bacteriology and had the foresight to change the name to the department of microbiology to include all the diversity of microbes. She joined the American Society of Microbiology and even attended a conference in 1932. At the conference, she was subjected to extreme racism and segregation from the other society members. She was not even allowed to stay in the same hotels or even eat with the other conference attendees!

Her main research focus was on Tuberculosis, caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis, but she also did work on cavities, antibiotics, blood types, and immunology.

Dr Harold Amos (1918-2003)

Source:Courtesy of Springfield College, Archives and Special Collections. https://springfieldcollege.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15370coll2/id/6304/

Everyone has their favorite book growing up, for Dr Harold Amos, it was a book on the great microbiologist Louis Pasteur. Harold Amos hoped to follow in Louis Pasteur's footsteps and become a great man of science.

In 1941, Harold was on his way to achieving this dream when he graduated from Springfield College in Massachusetts in the United States. He majored in biology with a minor in chemistry. But with WWII right around the corner, Harold Amos had to put his dream on hold and go fight for old Uncle Sam. To make up for the time lost in the war, Harold Amos enrolled into Harvard Medical School and received both an MD and PhD.

Then Dr. Harold Amos’s dream came true! In 1946, he was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and got the opportunity to study at the Pasteur Institute in Paris! His research was expansive and included studying how bacterial RNA can synthesize things like insulin. He spent over 50 years at Harvard and, during his time, received a plethora of awards and honors.

Jane Hinton (1919-2003)

Source: Scan from the 1949 Scalpel, yearbook of the Senior Class, School of Veterinary Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jane_Hinton.jpg

If you ever had antibiotic testing done or perhaps have done this test yourself, then Mueller-Hinton Agar may sound familiar to you. The “Hinton '' here is not William Augustus Hinton mentioned above but his daughter Jane Hinton.

Not willing to let her dad be the only famous microbiologist in the family, she became a research assistant to John Howard Mueller at Harvard University. In 1941, this duo came out with the rich media known as Mueller-Hinton agar, which is able to grow a number of microbial pathogens. Furthermore, it's also loose, meaning when you place a disk of antibiotics on it can diffuse or seep in.

Microbiologists use this agar to test for antibiotics susceptibility. To do so, they smear the microbe on the plate and then stamp small round disks that are pre-soaked in antibiotics. They then allow the microbes to grow. The following day, the plate will show growth of the microbe. If the microbe is susceptible to that antibiotic there will be a clear area around that disk. This gives the microbiologists and doctors an idea of which antibiotics will work best to clear an infection.

You can access Mueller and Hinton’s original paper here.

Dr Jessie Isabelle Price (1930-2015)

While Pasteurella anatipestifer is hardly among the pathogens you learn about in clinical microbiology, but at one point, was quite the Quacktastrophy!

In 1950s America, this pathogen killed 10-30% of ducklings. Luckily, Jessie Isabelle Price was able to not only isolate the bacteria, but was also able to develop a vaccine. Jessie Isabelle Price studied other avian ailments as well, including avian cholera and avian tuberculosis. Dr. Jessie Isabelle Price worked at Cornell’s Duck Research Laboratory for over 18 years before becoming a microbiologist at the National Wildlife Health Center of the National Biological Service in Madison, Wisconsin.

She was also an advocate for women and minorities in science, serving on the Predoctoral Minority Fellowship Ad Hoc Review Committee of the American Society of Microbiology (ASM) and on ASM’s Committee on the Status of Minority Microbiologists and Women Microbiologists!

Dr Mae C. Jemison (1956 - )

Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/iip-photo-archive/39545387455

Dr Mae C. Jamison grew up in the height of the American space age! She remembers watching the all male crew of the Apollo missions on TV. But this all white-male crew could not be her role model for space exploration, for this she turned to Nichelle Nichols, the black actress who played Lieutenant Uhura on Star Trek. One day, she would become a real life Lieutenant Uhura.

In 1981, she received her Doctorate in Medicine from Cornell University after completing projects in both a Cambodian refugee camp and in Cuba. In 1983, Jamison joined the Peace Corps where she spent two years as a medical officer in Africa. During this time she also worked with CDC researching various vaccines.

Upon returning to the states, she worked as a general practitioner. In 1987 she completed her astronaut training, becoming the first black female astronaut. She became the science mission specialist on STS-47, a mission in collaboration with the U.S. and Japan. And on September 12, 1992, Jamison and the 6 other astronaut crew of Endeavor launched into space! The crew spent 8 days orbiting around the earth and safely returned to our world on September 20, 1992. She even got to appear on an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation!

Some of the images in this blog are from our Women in Microbiology Gallery. If you enjoyed this blog, please also see our blog on 10 Women in Microbiology That You Don’t Know About But Should