Celebrating black biomedical scientists throughout history

At the Blackpool Teaching Hospitals’ Pathology Department, the laboratory consists of over 200 hundred members of staff from a wide variety of backgrounds, working together to serve a diverse local population.

Jane Eyre, Divisional Personal Assistant for Clinical Support Services, comments on the department’s motivations:

"We are really keen to embrace inclusion, and as such, wanted to learn more about Black History Month and its relevance to our biomedical science profession. When I first began this journey, I planned to showcase one famous medical scientist to celebrate the event. However, upon researching possible options, I was fascinated to discover the vast number of unfortunately less-talked-about black medical scientists that have made major contributions to biomedical science and to improving public health and wellbeing."

William Augustus Hinton (1883 – 1959) & Jane Hinton (1919 - 2003)*  

One father and daughter team that the Blackpool Hospital Pathology Department focused on, for their own Black History Month campaign, were William Augustus and Jane Hinton.

William Augustus Hinton was an African American bacteriologist and pathologist. He was also an expert in the diagnosis and treatment of syphilis – a chronic bacterial infection that burdened those with the disease with a social stigma in the 1900s as well.

Taking on a similar research field to her father, Jane Hinton was a pioneer in the study of bacterial antibiotic resistance and went on to co-develop the Mueller-Hinton agar, a culture medium that has become essential to testing of antibiotic susceptibility in pathogens.  

Louis Tompkins Wright (1891 – 1952) & Jane Cooke-Wright (1919 – 2013)*

Another father and daughter team that made vital contributions to biomedical science were Louis Tompkins and Jane Cooke-Wright. Dr Wright worked at Harlem Hospital, New York, where he became the first African American appointed to the hospital’s surgical staff.

He raised the facility’s patient care standards and even established the hospital’s medical library in the 1930s, as well as founded its cancer research centre. He also headed the team that first used chlortetracycline on humans – a type of antibiotic. 

Following in her father’s footsteps, Jane Cooke Wright was also a pioneering cancer researcher and developed the technique of using human tissue culture instead of laboratory mice to test the effects of new drugs on cancer cells. She was additionally one of the first to use the drug ‘Methotrexate’ to treat both breast and skin cancers.   

Professor Jewell Plummer Cobb (1924 – 2017)* 

Professor Cobb grew up in a family dedicated to the medical field – her grandfather was a pharmacist, and her father was a doctor specialising in dermatology. Professor Cobb herself became a leading cancer researcher in the US, where her work included researching the effects of chemotherapy drugs on human cells with cancer. She also led the way in understanding how our skin cells produce melanin and how they could become cancerous.

Alice Ball (1892 – 1961)*

Alice Ball, a pharmaceutical chemist from Seattle, US, is best known for having developed the ‘Ball Method’ to treat leprosy – involving the use of an injectable oil extract.

She attended the University of Hawaii and was the university’s first African American chemistry professor.  Sadly, she died at the young age of 24, the cause of her death being unknown. 

Percy Lavon Julian (1899 – 1975)*

 Another prominent black chemist from history was Percy Lavon Julian, a native of Alabama, US. Julian was a trailblazer in the chemical synthesis of medical drugs from planets.

He developed an inexpensive process to create cortisone, used in the treatment of arthritis, and also created steroids and birth control pills. 

Alma Levant Hayden (1927 - 1967)**

Another unsung scientific leader is Alma Levant Hayden, who played a key role in advancing the FDA’s drug analysis capabilities in the 1950s-60s. She helped to modernize the agency’s scientific techniques.

In later years, she led the analysis of a notorious fraudulent cancer drug, ‘Krebiozen’, which her team discovered to only contain creatine monohydrate dissolved in mineral oil, and in some case just mineral oil with no active ingredients.  The drug was therefore disproved as a cancer treatment. 

The number of black medical scientists that have made invaluable contributions to our field is endless, and as Eyre comments, “we haven’t even touched the surface with those listed in this article”. Public healthcare today owes a great deal to the work of these black innovators and scientific leaders, who overcame significant racial and gender barriers to achieve their goals.  The IBMS thanks the Pathology Department at Blackpool Teaching Hospitals for helping to shine a light on these key figures from history. 

*all public domain images

** photo credit: Office of National Institutes of Health (NIH)