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Erest Everett Just. Credit: Wikipedia.
To fully understand how a living thing works, you have to study it under conditions like those in which it lives. And that applies down to the level of individual cells.
That’s one of the lessons learned and taught by Ernest Everett Just, one of the first African-American biologists.
Just was born in South Carolina in 1883. After his father died a few years later, his family moved to an island. There, Just developed a love of the nature around him -- a love that he maintained throughout his career.
Just graduated from South Carolina State College, then graduated with top honors from Dartmouth, and took a teaching job at Howard University. During the summers, he conducted research at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
Just studied the eggs of marine organisms like sand dollars and sea urchins. He was looking at how cells develop into living creatures. At that time, scientists did not fully understand how animals grew, so he studied cells in their natural conditions -- under the same temperature, salinity, and other factors they’d experience in nature.
Just spent a couple of years in Europe at the start of World War II. In fact, he was imprisoned by the Nazis when they captured France, although he was soon released. But by then, he was suffering from cancer, and he died the following year.
Many of his methods continue, though, as biologists study not just organisms themselves, but their relationship to their natural environment.
