Ernest Everett Just

Early life

Ernest Everett Just was born on 14 August 1883 in Charleston, South Carolina. His father died in 1887. His mother, Mary Just, moved the family to James Island, where she ran a school and became a community leader. BlackPast notes that the settlement there was renamed Maryville in her honor.

Just studied at the Colored Normal Industrial, Agricultural and Mechanical College in Orangeburg, then went north to Kimball Union Academy in New Hampshire, where he was the only Black student. He finished its course in three years and entered Dartmouth College. Although he felt isolated there, he graduated magna cum laude in 1907 and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Dartmouth counts him among its earliest African American graduates.

Howard and Woods Hole

In 1907 Just joined Howard University in Washington, D.C., first teaching English and rhetoric. He moved into biology in 1910, became a professor in 1912, and later headed the new Department of Zoology. In 1911 he helped found Omega Psi Phi fraternity at Howard.

From 1909 he spent summers at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, working under the embryologist Frank R. Lillie. He took courses through the University of Chicago and earned a Ph.D. in experimental embryology there in 1916. In 1915 the NAACP made him the first recipient of its Spingarn Medal.

Research

Just's experiments focused on fertilization in marine invertebrates, including sand dollars. He paid close attention to the outer layer of the egg, which he called the ectoplasm, and argued that the cytoplasm and cell surface, not only the nucleus, shape how an organism develops. He also challenged Jacques Loeb's work on artificial parthenogenesis. He published about fifty papers. Dartmouth credits him as the first to show that the stickiness of early embryonic cells depends on properties of the cell surface.

Europe

Funding was hard to win, and white American universities would not hire him. From 1929 Just worked increasingly in Europe: at the Stazione Zoologica in Naples, and from 1930 at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. BlackPast describes him as the first American invited to research there. After the Nazis took power he worked in Paris and at the Station Biologique in Roscoff, France. In 1939 he published The Biology of the Cell Surface and a methods book on experiments with marine eggs.

When Germany invaded France in 1940, Just was briefly held in a prisoner-of-war camp before returning to the United States. Already ill, he died of pancreatic cancer in Washington, D.C., on 27 October 1941.

Legacy

The U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp in his honor in 1996. In 2015 an American Scientist article, highlighted by Dartmouth, called him "the forgotten father of epigenetics," reflecting renewed interest in his view that more than the nucleus governs development. That label is a modern retrospective judgment rather than a term Just himself used. Dartmouth's E.E. Just Program supports minority and first-generation students in the sciences.