Marie Maynard Daly

Marie Maynard Daly was born on the sixteenth of April 1921 at the Corona neighbourhood of Queens, New York, the eldest of three children of Ivan Daly — a postal clerk who had been forced by financial circumstances to leave Cornell University in his second year of chemistry studies — and Helen Page Daly, who worked as a Hampton Institute alumna and a homemaker. Her father's curtailed chemistry training was the formative influence of her career; she completed her father's interrupted vocation at her parents' insistence.

She was educated at Hunter College High School in Manhattan, took the bachelor's in chemistry at Queens College in 1942 magna cum laude, and the master's at New York University in 1943. She entered the chemistry doctoral programme at Columbia in 1944 under the supervision of Mary Letitia Caldwell — the only female full professor of chemistry at Columbia. Her dissertation — A Study of the Products Formed by the Action of Pancreatic Amylase on Corn Starch — was defended in May 1947. The award of the Columbia Ph.D. in 1948 made her the first African American woman ever to receive a doctorate in chemistry in the United States.

She joined the Rockefeller Institute in New York under Alfred E. Mirsky in 1948 — the first of three positions at major American biomedical research institutions across her career — and conducted there across the following seven years the foundational work on the chemistry of cell nuclei and on histone composition that established the conceptual framework of post-war molecular biology. She moved in 1955 to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University under Quentin B. Deming; the Daly-Deming partnership across the following five years produced the first sustained body of experimental evidence linking high serum cholesterol to atherosclerosis and the early study of hypertension and its dietary determinants.

She joined the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1960 and remained there for the rest of her career, retiring as associate professor of biochemistry in 1986. She established at Einstein a comprehensive scholarship programme for African American medical students and herself supported through the programme more than thirty Einstein graduates of African American descent.

She died at New York on the twenty-eighth of October 2003, at eighty-two.

She is honored here as the first African American woman doctor of chemistry.