Marie Maynard Daly: an Illuminating Chemist and a Path-Paving Activist

There was a time when simply being a woman created barriers to following a scientific curiosity. It was twice as challenging to be a woman of color interested in science.

But that didn’t matter to Marie Maynard Daly in 1947, when she became the first black woman to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry in the United States. Her research about the effects of cholesterol on the mechanics of the heart shaped what we know about heart attacks.

She was born in 1921 in Queens, New York, to parents that fostered her love for science. Her father, Ivan, wanted to be a chemist, but was forced to drop out of his program at Cornell University because of economic hardships. Instead, he took up a career as a postal worker. Her mother, Helen, read endlessly to her from books about chemistry and biology.

Daly was educated at Hunter College High School, an all-female school that nurtured her love for science. In 1942, she graduated magna cum laude from Queen’s College with a bachelors degree in chemistry.

Economic hardship was not unique to her father’s experience at school – Daly herself had to work extremely hard to support her studies. While she was pursuing a masters degree in chemistry at NYU, she worked as a laboratory assistant and chemistry tutor at Queens College.

She obtained funding from Columbia University so she could be a full-time student while studying for her doctorate. She researched alongside Mary L. Caldwell, an empowering female professor at Columbia who encouraged the careers of many young women as chemists. Caldwell is best known for her work with the digestive enzyme, amylase.

In 1947, after three years of intense effort, Daly graduated with her Ph.D. in chemistry and made history.

She spent the rest of her life researching, teaching, and greatly expanding our knowledge about the human body. She studied how sugars effect the arteries and the circulatory system’s wear and tear with age. She also studied how proteins are produced and organized in the cell.

But perhaps most importantly, she was an activist for young people of color that wanted to pursue science. She experienced firsthand the challenges in place for people of color to establish themselves in science. In 1988, she established a scholarship fund for African-American students at Queens College, in honor of her father.