Commentary: Black Scientists, Explorers, and Inventors
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
Coming from a long line of relatives that worked in the medical and science fields, Jewell Plummer Cobb dedicated her life first to the research of cellular biology and then to the teaching of science to people of minority status. As the president of California State University-Fullerton, Cobb made advances in the opportunities to motivate minority students of all ages to study science and engineering and has been honored due to her work by numerous colleges as well as by the National Academy of Science in Washington, D.C.
Jewell Plummer Cobb was born on January 17, 1924, in Chicago, Illinois. She was the only child of Frank V. Plummer, a middle-class doctor, and Carriebel Cole Plummer, a dance instructor who worked closely with the Works Projects Administration in the 1930s. Cobb’s father was one of the main inspirations in the young girl’s life, making it clear to her that the most important thing in life was making life better for those around you. Frank Plummer lived by this rule, setting up his first office on the corner where a streetcar had a transfer point for commuting stockyard workers. This allowed the workers, almost all of who were men and women of color, to use the transfer time to visit his office and receive medical treatment without having to take time off of work and without having to pay out transportation fees to get to a doctor’s office.
Even though Cobb faced the same segregation that all minorities faced in the 1930s and 1940s, she was privy to the advantages of a middle-class upbringing. Her family continued to move into better and better neighborhoods in the city as they became available due to white families moving out of the city and into the suburbs, allowing Cobb to attend better public schools throughout her primary schooling. She learned to read at an early age and she took advantage of her father’s large home library which contained numerous scientific journals and magazines, up to date newspapers, and a thorough collection of books that chronicled the achievements of black Americans. Her parents also owned a cottage in Idlewild, Michigan, where a number of well to do black families vacationed during the summer months.
Most students during this time who came out of school with a Ph.D. in cell physiology went into a medical career, but Cobb opted to work in a biology research lab at the National Cancer Institute instead due to her love of theoretical research over pathological application. She also made sure that the lab she joined focused on cellular biology, which observes the action and interaction of living cells, instead of molecular biology, which observes mainly atoms and molecules that make up cells. At the National Cancer Institute she studied the effects of chemotherapy drugs on human cells infected with cancer, producing research that is still used today in creating new and more effective tools to fight cancer.....Read More
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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On most warm days, Stephanie McWoods catches the California breeze with the bubble wand she keeps on her patio. Sometimes, the bubbles float, then burst midair. Other times, when they don’t pop, it is unclear how many miles they travel. A captivating mystery.
On the surface, it seems mindless. But for the therapist, it is a joy carefully curated to combat the chronic stress of living in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Oakland where life expectancy is on average 15 years lower than the wealthy white areas of the city farther north.
Her 4-year-old daughter sometimes joins the bubble blowing. And Barry, their Cavalier King Charles spaniel, watches along. It’s an added layer of protection against the pressure that McWoods feels contributed to her 69-year-old mother’s death in January from pancreatic cancer.
As her mother battled the disease, McWoods picked up the book Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice by Rupa Marya and Raj Patel.
It wasn’t long after she cracked it open that she had to close the cover, leaving pages unread. In the book, the authors outlined how racism intertwined with the surge in inflammatory diseases like gastrointestinal disorders and asthma. They unpacked how the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the inability to escape racial violence bleed into medical illness. Too close to home, she thought.
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Twaniesha Boose was surprised to get a call from her doctor recently canceling her appointment because her Medicaid was terminated.
The reason surprised her even more. Boose lost her health insurance because she failed to submit paperwork to help the state collect the child support she is owed.
“What’s that got to do with me, the kids’ dad?” she said on a 90-degree June day inside a stuffy, unairconditioned community center in Marvell, where Legal Aid attorneys tried to help people who had recently lost their Medicaid. “If you don’t cooperate, they turn off everything.”
The 23-year-old mother of two is among the 140,000 people who have lost their Medicaid in Arkansas since April, when the state began unwinding a pandemic-era program that allowed more than 1 million Arkansans to keep their health insurance even if they no longer qualified. The Medicaid unwinding process was set in motion by the year-end spending package signed by President Joe Biden in December.
Worries about disenrollments are particularly acute in the Arkansas Delta, one of the most picturesque parts of the state — green in every direction to the horizon, peppered with corn, rice and soybean fields, and crisscrossed by myriad rivers — and also one of the poorest. More than a third of people in Phillips County — where Marvell is — are in poverty, and many rely on Medicaid.
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Is it chemicals? Diet? Stress? Vox: What’s behind Black women’s excessive rate of fibroids?
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Comedian Dulcé Sloan took to Twitter recently with a burning health question: “Soooo EVERY black woman has fibroids,” she wrote, injecting a bit of hyperbole, “and no one knows why?!”
The tweet sparked a flurry of responses theorizing why 80 percent of Black women develop abnormal, noncancerous uterine growths by age 50. Black women also experience fibroids at earlier ages than white women and with more severe symptoms, like pain and heavy bleeding.
The responses ranged from well-researched hypotheses to wild speculations. Some pointed to relaxers and hair care products. Others blamed birth control or childhood trauma. Diet came up frequently, with one person blaming coffee specifically.
Ultimately, the string of comments only reinforced Sloan’s original post: No one knows why.
The lack of scientific consensus on what’s behind Black women’s severe rate of fibroids has led some to posit that it’s a result of “weathering”: the gradual whittling down of Black people’s health due to the chronic stress of racial discrimination. But research on weathering is still developing, as is our knowledge of many of the potential explanations for the racial gap in fibroids.
Limited federal funding to support high-quality fibroid research, and the lack of Black biomedical researchers and clinicians, has left women with few answers. The consequences are great: 25 to 50 percent of women with fibroids get symptoms like anemia, heavy bleeding, and pain, according to the National Institutes of Health. They also may experience infertility and pregnancy complications at higher rates.
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Republican state lawmakers on Tuesday suspended a vote on funding for University of Wisconsin campuses, just hours after a top GOP leader promised to slash the college system’s budget as part of an ongoing fight over diversity and inclusion initiatives.
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, the state’s top Republican, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that he expected the GOP-controlled Legislature’s budget-writing committee to cut all funding that the university system would use for diversity initiatives. He estimated the cuts would total $32 million.
“I hope we have the ability to eliminate that spending. The university should have already chosen to redirect it to something that is more productive and more broadly supported,” Vos said.
That generated a wave of angry reactions from Gov. Tony Evers and other Democrats. After nearly seven hours of closed-door discussions, Republicans who control the finance committee could not come to an agreement and postponed consideration of UW’s budget.
Talk of university budget cuts comes just days after Republicans refused to fund the university’s top building project priority — a new engineering facility on the flagship Madison campus.
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If the Supreme Court decides to end affirmative action, even race-neutral efforts to redress racial inequality could be next. Politico: The Risk of ‘Colorblind Absolutism’
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The 4th U.S. Court of Appeals recently upheld a new admissions process at the prestigious Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, known as “TJ,” a magnet school located in Alexandria, Va. The plan dramatically increased racial and economic diversity in the entering class through race-neutral means, though Asian student representation fell from about 70 percent to 54 percent in the first year (and was at 60 percent in the second year.)
Under the new system, the average GPA of the entering class rose to 3.95, and it was the most diverse class in recent memory. How? The plan enlarged the class size, creating more opportunity for all. It scrapped high-stakes entrance tests. It reserved slots for the most competitive 1.5 percent of students from every eligible middle school. All other students competed for the remaining roughly 100 seats. In a holistic admissions process, every student was evaluated based upon grade point average, a “portrait sheet” describing the applicant’s skills, a problem-solving essay and “Experience Factors” that gave a boost to students that were from low-income families or underrepresented middle schools, were designated English language learners or had special education status. Students were identified only by a number. No names, gender, race or ethnicity were revealed.
The Fairfax County School Board, which governs TJ, did this in the wake of George Floyd’s murder — an attempt to create a more equitable system of admissions where Black, Hispanic, low-income Asian and other disadvantaged students had a fairer shot at access to one of the highest-ranked public high schools in the country. A coalition of Asian parents sued, claiming that the new policy constituted racism against Asians. They argued that the race-neutral admissions criteria were a proxy for a desired racial result, which was fewer Asians.
The TJ case shows what is at stake in the Supreme Court’s pending decision on affirmative action in admissions at Harvard and UNC Chapel Hill, which is expected to be announced by the end of the month. The new conservative majority on the court decided to revisit four decades of settled precedent that held that some race consciousness by universities in building entering classes was constitutionally permissible, though rigid quotas were barred. Many believe the court will now set aside those precedents and end race-based affirmative action.
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The waters of west Africa and the Indian Ocean boast some of the world’s largest, healthiest populations of tropical tuna, and that makes them havens for industrial tuna fishing fleets, owned by countries vastly richer than the nations whose borders form these coastlines.
In order to protect the fish populations of poorer African nations from rapacious overfishing by richer countries, EU tuna vessels are bound by agreements centred on the sustainability and “social empowerment” of third countries.
Last week, however, in an unprecedented action involving 64 vessels and roughly 2,000 crew from Senegal and Ivory Coast, 80% of the EU fleet in the Gulf of Guinea and the Indian Ocean went on strike.
Not only were they protesting over poor pay and working conditions in one of the world’s most dangerous jobs, they also said the agreements from the EU aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. They accused the EU fleet of unsustainable practices, and urged the EU commission to listen to NGOs and investigate.
Some fishers from Senegal and Ivory Coast employed on French and Spanish-owned vessels are paid as little as $219 (£174) a month, or $54 (£42) a week, according to the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), which backed the strike.
Their wages, far less than the monthly minimum of $658 (£522) set by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), contravene longstanding agreements between the EU commission and African countries to promote sustainable fishing and employment, unions said.
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A U.S. Army base in western Louisiana was renamed Tuesday to honor Sgt. William Henry Johnson, a Black hero of World War I who received the Medal of Honor nearly a century later.
Fort Johnson had previously been named after a Confederate commander, Leonidas Polk. The renaming is part of the U.S. military’s efforts to address historic racial injustice — work that included changing the names of nine Army posts that commemorated Confederate officers.
“Sgt. William Henry Johnson embodied the warrior spirit, and we are deeply honored to bear his name,” Brig. Gen. David Garner, the commanding general of the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Johnson, said in a post on Twitter.
While serving on the front lines of France in 1918, Johnson fought off a German night raid near the Argonne Forest, according to the National Museum of the United States Army.
Johnson was wounded 21 times while beating back the attacking forces. He also prevented a wounded Black comrade from being taken prisoner when, after running out of grenades and ammunition, he killed two German soldiers with his knife.
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