He saw that life begins at the cell's surface. America would not give him a laboratory, so he went to Europe for one.
Each summer for some twenty years, Ernest Everett Just took the train to a fishing village on Cape Cod. He collected the eggs of sea urchins, sand dollars and marine worms, and watched what happened in the seconds after a sperm reached one. Most biologists of his day looked to the nucleus for the secrets of development. Just looked at the egg's surface, the thin outer layer that most of them ignored. He argued that it was alive and responsive, and that it organised much of what followed. Cell biology later came to agree with him.
He was born in Charleston six years after Reconstruction ended. He graduated from Dartmouth with high honours, became the first person ever awarded the NAACP's Spingarn Medal, and published more than seventy papers. No major American research university ever offered him a post. He spent his whole career at Howard University, where money was short and teaching took up most of his time. In his last decade he did much of his research in Italy, Germany and France, where colleagues treated him as an equal.
From Charleston to the Channel
The lifeline
1883
Born 14 August in Charleston, South Carolina. His father dies when he is four
1907
Graduates magna cum laude from Dartmouth and joins the Howard faculty that autumn
1915
Becomes the first recipient of the NAACP's Spingarn Medal
1930
Is invited to work at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin-Dahlem
1940
Is briefly interned after Germany invades France, then returns to the US
1941
Dies of pancreatic cancer in Washington, D.C., on 27 October, aged 58
By the numbers
The measure of him
70+
Scientific papers on fertilisation, cell physiology and development
~20
Summers of research at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole
No. 1
The first person awarded the Spingarn Medal, in 1915
10+
Research trips to Europe between 1929 and 1938
What he made of the egg
The work
1912
His first paper came out of his early Woods Hole summers, where he studied fertilisation in the marine worm Nereis. That work later became the basis of his doctorate.
1916
A PhD in zoology from the University of Chicago, under the embryologist Frank R. Lillie, his mentor and collaborator at Woods Hole.
1924
General Cytology, a landmark multi-author textbook of cell science, to which he contributed a chapter on fertilisation.
1939
Basic Methods for Experiments on Eggs of Marine Animals collected his exacting rules for handling living eggs. He insisted that careless technique produced careless biology.
1939
The Biology of the Cell Surface argued that the outer layer of the cell, its ectoplasm, plays a central part in fertilisation, development and evolution.
Shut out, then remembered
Recognition
In his lifetime
No major white research university in the US offered him a post, because of his race
Stayed at Howard for 34 years, with heavy teaching and little research money
Found more respect in Naples, Berlin, Paris and Roscoff than at home
Died at 58, soon after returning from wartime France
Today
Kenneth Manning's 1983 biography Black Apollo of Science was a Pulitzer finalist
Honoured on a US postage stamp in 1996
The American Society for Cell Biology has given awards and a lecture in his name since 1994
The Medical University of South Carolina has held an annual E. E. Just Symposium since 2000
The place that made him
Woods Hole
The Marine Biological Laboratory stands at the south-western tip of Cape Cod. In summer the leading biologists of the day gathered there to work on marine eggs taken from the water around them. Just first came in 1909 as Lillie's research assistant. He was the first African American to study and work there, and he became known as one of its most skilled experimenters with living eggs.
1888
The year the Marine Biological Laboratory was founded
1909
His first summer there, as Lillie's research assistant
1930
He joined the editorial board of the lab's Biological Bulletin
"We feel the beauty of Nature because we are part of Nature and because we know that however much in our separate domains we abstract from the unity of Nature, this unity remains."
— E. E. Just, The Biology of the Cell Surface, 1939
