Marie Maynard Daly

Marie Maynard Daly (April 16, 1921 – October 28, 2003) was an American biochemist.

She was the first African-American to receive a Ph.D. from Columbia University and the first African-American woman in the United States to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry.

Daly made important contributions in four areas of research: the chemistry of histones, protein synthesis, the relationships between cholesterol and hypertension, and creatine's uptake by muscle cells.

Daly attended Hunter College High School, a laboratory high school for girls run by Hunter College faculty, where she was also encouraged to pursue chemistry.

She then enrolled in Queens College, a small, fairly new school in Flushing, New York.

She lived at home to save money and graduated magna cum laude from Queens College with her bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1942.

Upon graduation, she was named a Queens College Scholar, an honor that is awarded to the top 2.5% of the graduating class.

Labor shortages and the need for scientists to support the war effort enabled Daly to garner fellowships to study at New York University and Columbia University for her master's and Ph.D. degrees, respectively.

Daly worked as a laboratory assistant at Queens College while studying at New York University for her master's degree in chemistry, which she completed in 1943.

She became a chemistry tutor at Queens College and enrolled in the doctoral program at Columbia University, where she was supervised by Mary Letitia Caldwell, for a Ph.D. thesis titled, "A Study of the Products Formed By the Action of Pancreatic Amylase on Corn Starch" and received her Ph.D. in chemistry in 1947.

Daly worked as a physical science instructor at Howard University, from 1947 to 1948 while simultaneously conducting research under the direction of Herman Branson.

After being awarded an American Cancer Society grant to support her postdoctoral research, she joined Alfred E. Mirsky's group at the Rockefeller Institute, which studied the cell nucleus and its constituents.

This was the start of a seven-year research program at the Rockefeller Institute of Medicine, where Daly examined how proteins are constructed in the body.

At the time, the structure and function of DNA were not yet understood.

Daly began working in the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University in 1955.

In collaboration with Quentin B. Deming, she studied arterial metabolism.

From 1958 to 1963, she also served as an investigator for the American Heart Association.

During her final years at Albert Einstein College, per Daly's efforts to increase minority enrollment in professional and graduate schools, she helped run the Martin Luther King -Robert F. Kennedy program to help prepare black students for admission.

She continued this work as an assistant professor of biochemistry and of medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University, where she and Deming moved in 1960.

In 1971 she was promoted to associate professor.

In 1975, Daly was one of 30 minority women scientists to attend a conference examining the challenges facing minority women in STEM fields.

The conference was held by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

This resulted in the publication of the report, The Double Bind: The Price of Being a Minority Woman in Science (1976) which made recommendations for recruiting and retaining minority women scientists.

Daly was a member of the board of governors of the New York Academy of Sciences for two years.

She was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Cancer Society.

Daly was designated as a career scientist by the Health Research Council of the City of New York.

Daly retired in 1986 from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and in 1988 established a scholarship for African American chemistry and physics majors at Queens College in memory of her father.

In 1999, she was recognized by the National Technical Association as one of the top 50 women in Science, Engineering and Technology.

Daly was particularly interested in nuclear proteins.

She developed methods for the fractionation of nuclear material and the determination of its composition.

It was essential to separate cellular material into all of its components, without destroying or losing any of them.

She studied histones, proteins found in cell nuclei, and was able to show the amino acid composition of various histone fractions.

Her studies of histones with Mirsky provided evidence for lysine-rich histones, in contrast to the arginine-rich histones described by Albrecht Kossel.

Histones have since been shown to be important in gene expression.

Daly's work on histones is now considered fundamental.

Daly developed methods for separating out the nuclei of tissues and measuring the base composition of purines and pyrimidines in desoxypentose nucleic acids.

She concluded, among other things, that "no bases other than adenine, guanine, thymine, and cytosine were present in appreciable amounts."

She investigated protein synthesis, including the role of cytoplasmic ribonucleoprotein in protein synthesis.

Using radiolabeled amino acid glycine, she was able to measure how protein metabolism changed under feeding and fasting conditions in mice.

This allowed her to monitor the activity of the cytoplasm as the radiolabeled glycine was taken up into the cell nucleus.