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Science in the Blood 

Marie Maynard Daly

Marie Maynard Daly - Wikimedia Commons

Remembering groundbreaking chemist Marie Maynard Daly on International Women’s Day

If, after a chat with your doctor, you’re minding your LDL and HDL, tip your hat to Marie Maynard Daly (1921–2003), the first Black woman to earn a chemistry doctorate in the United States and a researcher who helped uncover cholesterol’s links to cardiovascular disease and hypertension, which can spur heart attacks.

International Women’s Day, March 8, will celebrate high-achieving women, some of them scientists like Daly.

Daly was born in Queens, New York, and became fascinated with Microbe Hunters, Paul De Kruif’s 1926 book about scientists. Her parents encouraged her love of science; her father, Ivan Daly, was an immigrant from the British West Indies who studied chemistry at Cornell University, but lacked the funds to finish his program.

Daly studied at Hunter College High School, an all-women’s academy; she said this experience encouraged her to consider a science career seriously. She’d go on to earn a degree at Queens College in Flushing, New York, in 1942, graduating among the top 2.5% of her class. She stayed at the school after graduation, working part time in the college’s chemistry lab and then as a chemistry tutor. In 1988, honoring her father, Daly would create a scholarship for Black science students to enroll at Queens College.

As the Science History Institute reports, Daly combined money from her Queens College work and scholarships to earn a master’s degree at New York University (graduated 1943). She earned a fellowship and then a doctorate at Columbia University (graduated 1947). At Columbia, she worked with nutrition researcher Mary Letitia Caldwell, then the school’s only female senior faculty member and full professor.

Daly was the first Black person to earn a Columbia University doctorate, and the first Black woman in America to earn a chemistry doctorate. She earned her degrees when just 2% of Black women held college degrees.

With Caldwell, Daly studied how bodily compounds aided digestion and how cholesterol, sugars, and other nutrients affected the heart. With her doctorate in hand, she taught physical sciences for two years at Howard University, which Vice President Kamala Harris, novelist Toni Morrison, actor Taraji P. Henson, and singer and pianist Roberta Flack would later attend. The next year, backed by an American Cancer Society grant, Daly joined biochemist and physiologist Alfred E. Mirsky’s team at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research.

Her work on nucleic acids and proteins, particularly histones, that bind to DNA and dictate chromosomes’ shapes, made history. The American Chemical Society said James Watson’s Nobel Prize lecture about DNA, RNA, and protein synthesis cited Daly’s 1953 Rockefeller study (with Mirsky and Vincent Allfrey) that showed protein production requires RNA. (Watson and Francis Crick would win the 1962 Nobel Prize for identifying DNA’s double-helix structure, relying on potentially stolen X-ray diffraction data Rosalind Franklin generated at King’s College London.)

Later, with medical doctor and heart disease researcher Quentin B. Deming, Daly researched how diet and cholesterol affected arteries in lab rats. Daly and Deming’s research helped identify the link between high cholesterol and cardiovascular disease. Today, hundreds of thousands of people are more informed and able to lead healthier lives thanks to her work and research. As we benefit from her accomplishments, let’s remember all that Daly—and countless other overlooked, unrecognized, and underrepresented women—contributed to our collective scientific understanding.

Woman-owned Nova Arc Content Co. specializes in writing, editing, and proofreading the technical and detailed work that’s moving science forward. If you’re publishing a study, applying for a research grant, or sharing complex technical findings with a general audience, we’re ready to be your partner.

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