BLACK APOLLO OF SCIENCE: The Life of Ernest Everett Just

by Kenneth R. Manning ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1983

Ernest Everett Just. Hardly a household name. Yet an exceptional figure, fully meriting the conscientious scholarship that MIT historian of science Manning has put into this fine biography. From the opening pages describing Just's Charleston boyhood a century ago (1983 marks the centennial of his birth), to his death from cancer in Washington in 1942, Manning uses the close focus on Just's life to mirror the social patterns of academic life in America, the rise of philanthropic foundations, the role of the black bourgeoisie, the Harlem Renaissance, and the meaning of the European experience to black intellectuals 50 years ago. Just was a research scientist at a time when no positions were open to blacks in white universities. Life was a schizophrenic journey between Howard University, where he chaired the zoology department, and Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, where he spent summers as the protÉgÉ of director Frank Lillie. For years, he was the respected teacher whom younger Woods Hole scientists approached to learn the painstaking techniques--of collecting and microscopy--that he brought to the descriptive embryology of marine invertebrates. Yet he was not accepted by the community as a whole, and his attempt to bring his wife and family for the summer was a disaster that further estranged his wife from him. In the end, Just found a new life in Europe, welcomed by colleagues first in Naples and then in Berlin and Paris. He fell in love with two exceptional white intellectuals--Margret Boveri, of the Brown-Boveri engineering empire, and later her friend Hedwig Schnetzler, whom he married. lust's entire career was shadowed by anxiety to raise funds for his research and academic infighting at Howard. All this--along with lust's own ego problems and personality needs, his vacillations between passivity and grandiosity--Manning presents with sympathy and insight. Not to be overlooked either are the facts of lust's scientific career: though he was essentially a descriptive embryologist at a time when geneticists and embryologists were at loggerheads, he did come to see the need for an integrated approach to the study of genetics, fertilization, and subsequent cell differentiation. Manning has an admirable grasp of the life and those mean times.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1983

ISBN: 0195034988

Page Count: -

Publisher: Oxford Univ. Press

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1983

Categories: NONFICTION