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A theory put forward in the 1930s by E. E. Just, embryologist and African American shares surprising connections with our emerging understanding of development.
Despite the strides that have been made in recent decades to increase minorities' involvement in science, African Americans are still significantly under-represented in scientific disciplines. A 2010 survey, for instance, showed that blacks make up only 5 percent of the science and engineering workforce, even though they make up 13 percent of the US population. Yet diversity is important not only for fairness in representation; it is also critical for enhancing creativity in scientific discovery.
In his 1989 book Discovering, physiologist and author Robert RootBernstein identifies four "inputs" into the discovery process: cultural context, the established body of science, "science in the making," and the scientist himself or herself. The individual scientist, he notes, "will represent a unique mix of hereditary proclivities and environmental experiences."
The importance of cultural context in discovery is demonstrated by the contributions of Ernest Everett Just, an internationally recognized embryologist of the early 20th century who was African American. A graduate of Dartmouth College (1907) and the University of Chicago (PhD, 1916), Just was a professor at Howard University in Washington, DC. He performed research in the first part of his career at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole and later in Europe. He authored more than 70 scientific papers as well as two books, both published in 1939. One book was his magnum opus, The Biology of the Cell Surface. Known for his study of the structural changes that occur at the egg cell surface during fertilization, Just also was the first to discover that the adhesiveness of the cells of the early embryo are exquisitely dependent on cell surface properties.
In the 1930s Just put forth a bold hypothesis involving nuclear-cytoplasmic interaction to explain how the cells of the early-stage embryo participate in the developmental process. His hypothesis, which he called the "theory of genetic restriction," clashed with the gene theory that was then becoming dominant. I believe that Just's theory-his model of the developing cell-represents a microcosm of his vision of the perfect society, which, in tum, was strongly influenced by sociological concepts circulating within the African American intellectual community at...