Chemist Becomes Historian
Jeannette Brown, a retired organic medicinal chemist, was one of the
many authors of the short biographies that have been selected for
publication in the new series of books
African American National Biography,
recently published by Oxford University Press.
African American National Biography is a joint project of the W.
E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research
at Harvard University and Oxford University Press. It covers a
broad range of African American lives than ever before depicted.
It documents the lives of 4,100 individuals both the famous and ordinary
people[1]. It is edited by Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Evelyn
Brooks Higginbotham of Harvard University.
(More information can be found here:
ref 1,
ref 2,
ref 3,
and
ref 4.)
The eight volume set of books published in
February 2008 contains biographies of only nineteen
chemists and chemical engineers, twelve female and seven male. Ms
Brown contributed the biographies of six women chemists and chemical
engineers, including Dr. Marie Daly, the first African American
woman to receive a PhD in chemistry and Jennie Patrick, the first
African American woman to receive a PhD in chemical engineering.
Dr. Daly was Ms Brown's inspiration for becoming a historian of
African American women chemists. Ms Brown met Dr. Daly at a local
American Chemical Society meeting and realized that she was talking
to a person whose story needed to be told. Dr. Daly was on the
research team of Alfrey and Mirsky at Rockefeller Institute (now
University) and worked on discovering the amino acid precursors to
the discovery of DNA. The work of this research team was mentioned
by Dr. James Watson in his Nobel Prize lecture. Dr. Jennie Patrick
had to overcome racial prejudice in order to prove to the world that
she deserved to become the first African American woman to receive
a PhD in chemical engineering. During her career in corporate
America she was the first to design a pilot plant for supercritical
fuel extraction and became a research manger of the first fundamental
research engineering group of another corporation.
The editors of African American National Biography (AANB) indexed
all scientists and engineers under the heading of technology. Ms
Brown extracted the list of chemists and chemical engineers from
this list and created an index for use by other chemists
(see below).
Ms Brown is one of the chemists whose biographies appear in AANB.
Ms Brown's contribution to AANB is her first publication her project
of documenting the history of African American women chemists. She
has given numerous lectures and talks about her research and she
is in the process of writing a book about these remarkable women.
Her book will become a reference book which will put the lives of
these women in one volume for use by students of the history of
science, African American history and womens history.
Ms Brown has also taken on a new task by becoming the historian of
the American Chemical Society's Women Chemist Committee.
Chemists & Chemical Engineers featured in
African American National Biography
| Name | Field | Vol # Page # | Gender | Author | Note |
|---|
| Abron, Lilia Ann | Chem E | v.1 pp.21-22 | Female | Sherri J. Norris | |
| Anderson, Gloria Long | Chemist | v.1 pp.125-126 | Female | Jeannette Brown | |
| Brady, St. Elmo | Chemist | v.1 pp.531-532 | Male | Audra J. Wolfe | 1st PhD |
| Brown, Jeannette | Chemist | v.1 pp.617-619 | Female | Margaret E. M. Tolbert | |
| Daly, Marie Maynard | Chemist | v.2 pp.535-536 | Female | Jeannette Brown | 1st PhD |
| Ferguson, Lloyd Noel | Chemist | v.3 pp.251-252 | Male | Robert Fikes, Jr. | |
| Hawkins, Walter Lincoln | Chem E | v.4 pp.128-129 | Male | Robert Johnson, Jr. | |
| Hill, Henry Aaron | Chemist | v.4 pp.234-235 | Male | Kenneth R. Manning | |
| Hill, Mary Elliott | Chemist | v.4 pp.236-237 | Female | Billy Scott | |
| Hopkins, Esther | Chemist | v.4 pp.307-308 | Female | Jeannette Brown | |
| Jemison, Mae | Chem E | v.4 pp.521-522 | Female | Martha Ackmann | |
| Julian, Percy Lavon | Chemist | v.5 pp.30-31 | Male | Charles W. Carey, Jr. | |
| King, Reatha Clark | Chemist | v.5 pp.107-108 | Female | Jeannette Brown | |
| Massie, Samuel Proctor, Jr. | Chemist | v.5 pp.431-433 | Male | Debra A. Varnado | |
| McBay, Henry Cecil Ransom | Chemist | v.5 pp.460-461 | Male | Rosalyn Mitchell Patterson | |
| McBay, Shirley Mathis | Chemist | v.5 pp.461-463 | Female | Olivia A. Scriven | |
| Patrick, Jennie R. | Chem E | v.6 pp.263-264 | Female | Jeannette Brown | 1st PhD |
| Robeson, Eslanda Cardozo Goode | Chemist | v.6 pp.632-633 | Female | Ann Zeidman-Karpinski | |
| Tolbert, Margaret Ellen Mayo | Chemist | v.7 pp.613-614 | Female | Jeannette Brown | |
