Photo: Queens College Silhouette Yearbook, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Who She Was
Marie Maynard Daly was an American biochemist who, in 1947, became the first Black woman to earn a PhD in chemistry in the United States. She completed her doctorate at Columbia University at a time when both her race and her gender created significant barriers to entry into scientific research. Born in New York in 1921, she grew up in a household where her father had been forced to leave City College of New York for financial reasons before completing his own chemistry degree, and her determination to finish what he had started shaped her entire career. Her research focused on the chemistry of histones, the proteins that organize DNA in the cell nucleus, and on the relationship between cholesterol, diet, and heart disease. Her work that laid important groundwork for understanding how cardiovascular disease develops at the molecular level. She spent much of her career at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where she also worked to increase the number of minority students entering medical and scientific fields. She established a scholarship in her father's name at Queens College to support Black students pursuing careers in science.
Why She Matters
Marie Maynard Daly's research helped establish the biochemical foundations that laboratory scientists rely on today to analyze cholesterol, lipids, and cardiovascular risk markers in patient samples. Her work connecting diet, cholesterol, and heart disease was conducted decades before these connections became mainstream medical knowledge, and the laboratory tests now used to assess cardiovascular risk trace a direct line back to the kind of molecular research she pioneered. She also demonstrated, at a moment when the scientific establishment gave her very little reason to believe it, that a Black woman from Queens could do world-class biochemistry, and she spent the rest of her life working to make sure others had an easier path to the same opportunity.
