The Black Appollo of Science
 

Founder of Omega Psi Phi & Biologist of international fame...
>Ernest Everett Just, an eminent marine biologist, was born in Charleston,
>South Carolina. Just's father, Charles Frazier Just, and Grandfather,
>Charles
>Just Sr. were dock builders. Seeking a substantial education, he attended
>the
>Industrial School of State College, Orangeburg, South Carolina; Kimball
>Academy at Meriden, New Hampshire; and Dartmouth College, graduated in
>1907.
>Each school he attended was proud to have him because of his kindly
>demeanor
>and his unusual ability as a scholar. Accordingly each school he attended
>honored him.Â
>At Dartmouth he won the Phi Beta Kappa Key, the highest scholastic award to
>be given to a student in an undergraduate college. Just was also on the
>faculty of Howard University Medical School as a professor and head of the
>Department of Physiology.
>In 1915, after displaying unusual brilliancy in research, the National
>Association for the Advancement of Colored People conferred upon him the
>Spingarn Medal, which each year is given to a Negro who has been most
>outstanding in achievement. The following year he obtained the degree of
>Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Chicago.Â
>The honors that have since come to Dr. Just are too numerous to mention in
>our limited space; but we shall list a few of them. He did his work so
>well,
>that he was selected as guest investigator, to engage in research at the
>Kaiser Wilhem Institute fur Biologie. In 1919, he spent six months in
>Biological Research at Naples, Italy. He had also at his disposal the
>private
>laboratories of several of the crowned heads of Europe.Â
>For twenty years at least he did research worked at the Marine Biology
>Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. A gift from the Rosenwald Fund of
>about $80,000.00 a year for several years made it possible for Dr. Just to
>be
>relieved of his undergraduate teaching assignment and devote all his time
>to
>research and the teaching of graduate students.Â
>Aside from this, Dr. Just was selected by leading biologists of Germany as
>the best fitted among world scholars to write a treatise on
>fertilization.Â
>Dr. Just was a member of the National Research Council, editor of the
>international Council, editor of the international Journal, "Protoplasma."
>He
>was a member of the American Society of Zoologists, the American
>Naturalists,
>and a corresponding member of La Societe des Science Naturelles et
>Mathematiques de France. 1936Â
>Dr. Just summarized his ideas that he made through the years in a book,
>"The
>Biology of the Cell Surface", which was published in 1939. The book
>explained
>the special significance of the outer cytoplasm, which Dr. Just called the
>ectoplasm. When Germany and France went to war near the end of 1939, the
>French government ordered all foreign scientists to leave the country.
>Unable
>to escape before Paris fell to the Germans, Dr. Just was captured and held
>briefly in a prisoner-of-war camp before finally being allowed to return to
>the United States in September 1940. Dr. Just went back to Howard, for he
>had
>nowhere else to go. Howard officials ordered him to return to teaching, but
>he was too ill. Dr. Just's increasingly severe digestive troubles proved to
>be due to cancer. Dr. Ernest Everett Just died on October 27, 1941.Â
> As to why Just didn't get the Nobel Prize, there are several answers.
>The
>easiest is that the Nobel Prize is never awarded postumously, and Just's
>contributions were not recognized until after his death. (Thus, neither
>Hilde
>Mangold nor Rosalind Franklin received Nobel Prizes).Â
>The second answer is that just being an excellent scientist is no assurance
>of winning the Nobel Prize. In Just's generation, neither Theodor Boveri
>nor
>E. B. Wilson received the Nobel Prize, and they were much better known than
>Just and their work established chromosome individuality, the existence of
>germinalÂ
>plasm, and the chromosomal basis of heredity and sex determination.Â
>Third, embryologists are severely underrepresented in Nobel Prizes. (If
>Just
>were discriminated against by the Swedish Academy of Science in the 1940s,
>I
>think it more likely to be on the basis of his field than his race). Only
>two
>Nobel Prizes have been awarded for embryological work: the 1935 prize to
>Hans
>Spemann and the 1995 prize to Christianne Nüsslein-Volhard and Eric
>Wieschaus
>. Other embryologists who "should" have won the prize might include Viktor
>Hamburger, Ross Granville Harrison, C.H. Waddington, and Just's ownÂ
>mentor, F. R. Lillie. Embryologists didn't get much respect until recently.
>The award is for Medicine and Physiology, and embryology was considered low
>status among the physiologists.
>
>Detail info on Late Great Dr. Just
>http://library.scsu.edu/Just.htm
>http://www.princeton.edu/~mcbrown/display/just.html
>http://inventorsmuseum.com/ErnestJust.htm