Ernest Everett Just

Ernest Everett Just was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on the fourteenth of August 1883. He took his undergraduate degree at Dartmouth College (magna cum laude, 1907) and joined the Howard University biology faculty in 1907 — remaining there for the next thirty-four years. He took his PhD in zoology at the University of Chicago in 1916 — among the earliest African Americans to earn a doctorate in any biological science.

He conducted his principal research at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, between 1909 and 1930 — the leading center of American invertebrate embryology — investigating fertilization and embryonic development in marine eggs. His meticulous experimental methods established him as the leading American researcher in the field. Frank R. Lillie, his graduate adviser and the director of the Marine Biological Laboratory, considered Just the most accomplished cell biologist of his generation.

His 1939 monograph The Biology of the Cell Surface argued — against the prevailing view that the cell nucleus alone directed cellular activity — that the cell surface (the ectoplasm) played a co-equal directive role. His ectoplasm thesis was rejected by the contemporary American biology mainstream and substantially confirmed by molecular-cell-biological research in the 1960s and 1970s after his death.

He was the first recipient of the NAACP's Spingarn Medal in 1915 — the award the NAACP established to recognize outstanding African American achievement, which Just received the year of its founding. He spent much of the 1930s in research positions in Europe (the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, the Stazione Zoologica in Naples) when the American academic establishment refused him a faculty appointment commensurate with his scholarly standing.

He returned to the United States in 1940 and died of pancreatic cancer at Howard University Hospital on the twenty-seventh of October 1941, age fifty-eight.

He is honored here as the embryologist whose 1939 thesis on the cell surface preceded its confirmation by thirty years.