Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
We’ll never know how many great African American scientists and inventors were never credited for their contributions. We also will never know how many had their contributions outright stolen. With the spread of the novel coronavirus in the news I thought this would be a good time to look back at how over 100 years ago an African American chemist helped to eliminate a feared disease that had plagued mankind since ancient time.
Alice Augusta Ball was born in Seattle, Washington, in 1894, the child of a middle-class family in which both parents and a grandfather were photographers. At the time, developing and printing photographs was a chemically complex process, and Alice would have seen her family mixing and processing plates throughout her childhood, perhaps sparking her interest in chemistry. At the University of Washington, she graduated with bachelor’s degrees in both pharmaceutical chemistry and pharmacy. She also published her first scientific paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, still one of the premier chemistry journals in the world, as an undergraduate.
Ball had lived in Hawaiʻi briefly with her family, where they’d moved hoping it would help alleviate her grandfather’s arthritis. When applying to master’s programs, she was offered a scholarship to the College (now University) of Hawaiʻi, and returned there to study chemistry. Her thesis on the Kava plant came to the attention of Dr. Harry Hollman, whose work involved chaulmoogra oil, the only treatment available for Hansen’s disease (leprosy) at the time. The oil was applied topically, or injected under the skin, or ingested orally, but all of these delivery methods had side effects that compromised the efficacy of the treatments. Most patients with Hansen's disease were hesitant to take the oil over the long term because it tasted bitter and tended to cause an upset stomach. Hollman asked Ball to work with him on finding a way to make the oil easier to inject, by making it soluble in water.
At the time, a diagnosis of leprosy resulted in ostracism and often death in isolation in a “colony.” The fear of contagion and the stigma of the illness was so great that patients would be hidden from sight—in Hawaiʻi, it was on the island of Molokaʻi. Ball devised a method of chemically modifying the oil that made it water soluble , so it could be injected and absorbed more easily (by isolating the ethyl esters of the fatty acids in the chaulmoogra oil). The success of this method resulted in the first patients ever to be discharged from the hospital and allowed to return to their families—but Alice Ball died in 1916, before she could publish her results.
Another chemist at the University of Hawaii, Arthur L. Dean, continued her work and began producing large quantities of the injectable chaulmoogra extract. In 1918, a Hawaii physician reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association that a total of 78 patients were released from Kalihi Hospital by the board of health examiners after treatment with injections. The isolated ethyl ester remained the preferred treatment for Hansen's disease until sulfonamide drugs were developed in the 1940s.
Credit for the discovery was stolen from Alice Ball, until Hollman reclaimed it in a publication in 1922. Her success was then forgotten again, until archivists and librarians at the University of Hawaiʻi sought out her work in the school’s archives.
Read more here →
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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PBS will premiere a film that gives voice to school-age Black girls, while highlighting the many ways they are criminalized while learning.Color Lines: New Doc Exposes How Schools 'Pushout' Black Girls
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Disciplinary action taken against Black girls in high schools is severely imbalanced compared to White students—they are six times more likely to be suspended than White girls, according to a 2015 report from the African American Policy Forum—and the new documentary, “Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools,” debuting on PBS, brings this disparity to the head of the class.
Produced by Women in the Room Productions and based on social justice scholar Monique W. Morris’ book of the same name, “Pushout” shares stories from five Black teens who overcame harsh treatment in school and garners insight from national social justice, gender equality and educational equity experts who speak to the practices, cultural beliefs and educational policies that make it harder to Black girls to receive an education. The film also includes first-person interviews from girls as young as seven to as old as 19, who describe living in a world that often marginalizes, criminalizes and dismisses them.
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Indeed, many in black political leadership across this nation have failed black people. There is no question about that. Plenty of black people bemoan Barack Obama for a range of reasons and they are pretty justified. But what is troubling is that West’s critique was intellectually dishonest. Sanders can’t get enough black people to support him, so he does what most white folks do when they feel they know what is best for black people, but can’t seem to get those black people to see the errors in their ways: defer to the black friend to talk with said black people.
In corporate America, it is usually the middle manager that the white VP of sales deploys to explain to Tyrone that he needs to adjust his behavior, lest he be downsized for not “fitting the culture of the company.”
I interviewed West in 2017 and it was one of my all-time favorite interviews. Cornel West is my intellectual hero. I’ll never forget him breaking down what neoliberalism was and how all people fall victim to it. He talked, in a very tender way, about Big Mama, that matriarch all black families have, and her reluctance to take a bold step away from the familiar. We talked about why people like Big Mama didn’t support people like Sanders. And he said that while we love Big Mama and her wisdom, “Big Mama gotta grow, too.”
I use those words to this very day.
I wish he would have used that same tenderness in Flint in that gym filled with thousands of white people. Instead, he shamed middle-class black people who mitigate harm by dealing with the neoliberal they know instead of the Democratic Socialist who has to defer his questions about race to his black friend.
That West could not see, in that very moment, why the Big Mamas of Flint did not show up in large numbers to see Sanders reveals how out of touch West was as he stood on that stage.
The black middle class didn’t elect the neo-facist to the White House, Dr. West. White people of all economic backgrounds did. Where is your energy for those white people? Or were you too afraid to offend the white working-class voters that Bernie Sanders is very comfortable talking to and has repeatedly sympathized with for supporting Trump?
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The Florida Senate unanimously voted to create a task force that identifies and preserves Black cemeteries across the state. The move comes after three Black cemeteries were discovered by archeologists in the Tampa Bay area since August.
“Not far from here in Tampa are the graves of African Americans who were lost to time and indifference,” Senator Darryl Rouson said, reported WCTV. “Across the State of Florida, such cemeteries called ‘lost’ are being found. What we have learned as a society is that we cannot continue to run away from our collective history and we can no longer allow others to rewrite that history, or at its worst, force the history off the pages of time.”
Sen. Janet Cruz of Tampa, who sponsored the bill, added that she hopes the task force finally brings dignity to the deceased and their families.
“It’s my hope that Floridians who were not provided dignity, respect and equal protection in their life nor in their death will be honored and memorialized appropriately,” said Cruz, according to WCTV.
The news comes as archeologists in Florida continue to uncover Black cemeteries that were paved over and forgotten about. One such discovery was made earlier this month when nearly four dozen graves believed to be from an African-American cemetery were discovered under a paved parking lot owned by the Clearwater, Florida school district.
MIAMI - JULY 12: Jermel Stuart, 9, holds his grandfather Thomas Cash's saxophone at the grave site of the former leader of the Progressive Coronet Marching Band. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
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The New York Times editorial board member Mara Gay was dragged on Twitter following an #epicfail math demonstration on the air with MSNBC anchor Brian Williams.
The math fiasco prompted a “racist Twitter mob” to take aim at Gay for sharing a botched math equation about Michael Bloomberg’s campaign spending, Fox News reports.
The outcry began last week when a Twitter user claimed that the former New York City mayor “spent $500 million on ads. The U.S. population is 327 million. He could have given each American $1 million and still have money left over, I feel like a $1 million check would be life-changing for people. Yet he wasted it all on ads and STILL LOST.”
Williams called that “an incredible way of putting it.”
Gay agreed, saying: “It’s an incredible way of putting it. It’s true. It’s disturbing. It does suggest what we’re talking about here, which is there’s too much money in politics.”
The duo marveled at the now-hidden post on-air, failing to realize that $500 million divided among all Americans would not give each person $1 million.
On air, Williams corrected the mistake.
“While I have you both and our audience paying attention, turns out Mara and I got the same grades at math. I’m speaking of the tweet we both misinterpreted,” Williams said.
“He could give each American $1. Again, I didn’t have it in high school. I don’t have it tonight. I stand corrected. Sorry about that.”
Gay took the math fiasco in stride, sharing a tongue in cheek joke on Twitter Friday. She was out to buy a calculator.
Mara Gay (Credit: MSNBC screenshot)
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Purveyors of ballot papers, indelible ink and polling booths will do well in Africa this year. No fewer than 18 countries are to hold general elections. Not all will be free and fair, but in many the stakes are high. In Ethiopia the popularity of Abiy Ahmed, a reformist prime minister, will be tested at the polls for the first time. Burkina Faso, which is battling jihadists, will hold only its second poll since Blaise Compaoré, a long-serving dictator, was overthrown in 2014. And in Ghana President Nana Akufo-Addo faces a tight race for a second term.
Given the stakes, one might expect voters to turn out in droves. Yet in Africa fewer tend to vote than elsewhere, even if the election is not rigged. More surprisingly it is the young, rich and urban who tend to stay away from the polls. Why?
In the West the rich vote more than the poor. But Kimuli Kasara of Columbia University and Pavithra Suryanarayan of Johns Hopkins University, who surveyed voting patterns in poor countries, many of them in Africa, found that the poorest fifth of citizens tended to vote more assiduously than the richest fifth. One possible reason for rich Africans’ lack of motivation to vote is that no matter who wins, they are unlikely to be taxed more. Rates may rise, but tax collection is ineffective. In sub-Saharan Africa tax revenue averages 17% of gdp compared with 34% in the oecd, a club of mostly rich countries.
Where people live ought to affect whether they vote. Getting to the polling booth can be a slog for people in the sticks—only a third of rural Africans live within two kilometres of a good road. Yet despite this, rural Africans are more likely to vote than city slickers, by 77% to 67%.
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A 15-year-old boy has been arrested in Zambia for allegedly defaming the country’s president in Facebook posts, as critics accuse the administration of turning increasingly authoritarian.
The unnamed teenager, based in the small central town of Kapiri Mposhi, was arrested on Monday and charged with three counts of libel against Edgar Lungu. He will appear in court soon, police said.
“Police have charged and arrested a male juvenile aged 15 years for the offence of defamation of the president,” Esther Katongo, a police spokeswoman, said in a statement. “The suspect is alleged to have created a Facebook page using the name ‘Zoom’ and published defamatory matters against the republican president.”
The boy faces a maximum sentence of five years in jail.
One of his posts read: “Which other name can you name a dog apart from Edgar Lungu.” Another said: “We are better off as a country without Edgar Lungu.”
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