Lillie asked him to contribute to the section on fertilization in the textbook General Cytology, by E. V. Cowdry. “The Relation of the First Cleavage Plane to the Entrance Point of the Sperm.” Biological Bulletin 22 (1912): 239–252.

Similar research interests and Loeb’s stand on social equality made the two embryologists fast, but not longstanding friends. From 1919 onward, in published papers and at scientific conferences, Just mounted a sustained attack on Loeb’s rival hypothesis as well as on his work on experimental parthenogenesis. He theorized that the outer part of the cell (the cortical cytoplasm) was more significant in vital life processes than had been previously recognized. Basic Methods for Experiments on Eggs of Marine Animals and

However, the accumulation of his work is important to the field of marine biology. Member: American Society of Naturalists, American Society of Zoologists, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Ecological Society, Societe nationale des sciences naturelles et mathematiques de Cherbourg. This discovery and his work with marine invertebrate embryos gained him much respect in the scientific community, after his death.

Then, stepping down from the podium, he announced, as quoted by Manning, “I have received more in the way of fraternity and assistance in my one year at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut than in all my other years at Woods Hole put together.” When Just left, he never returned to Woods Hole, conducting the rest of his research in Europe. Born in 1883, he grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, and attended an all-black public elementary school. All of this was done in addition to maintaining a full-time teaching position at Howard. What time period did Garrett Morgan live in? Eventually teaching more advanced English courses, his starting salary in 1907 was $400 per year. Just returned to the United States for a short time in 1930 to attend the celebration of Frank Lillie’s 60th birthday at Woods Hole. While there, Just met and became friends with such eminent German embryologists as Max Hartmann (who had invited Just), Otto Mangold, and Richard Goldschmidt. The friendship that Just and Loeb had forged together at Woods Hole quickly vanished. Finally, the book was also somewhat of a philosophical treatise, endeavoring to answer the question "what is life?". One of his most important discoveries was that the surface of an egg (or cell membrane) changes once a sperm’s nucleus enters the egg—thus preventing additional entries into the egg. In one instance, Just was asked not to attend a social gathering celebrating a new clubhouse for the MBL Club. preformationist theory. Ten Things Your Child Should Know (Pre-K - 5th). called for collaboration among scientists from different disciplines—chemists, biologists, and physicists—to solve the dilemma of “how life begins, how it is continued, and how transmitted.” It was his last full-length paper, and in it he justified his life’s work, writing that in the final analysis, chemistry and physics were dependent on biology “to establish, beyond question, criteria of normality, the range of normal processes, and the extent of… normal variability.”. He was educated by his mother until the age of 13, when he entered the Colored Normal, Industrial, Agricultural and Mechanical College. In The Biology of the Cell Surface, Just also continued his attack on the role of genes in development. Based on Loeb’s observations of experimental parthenogenesis (see below), the hypothesis proposed that a cytolytic factor (lysin) in the sperm activates the egg, thereby initiating development. Best known for his discovery of the “wave of negativity” that sweeps over the surface of the marine invertebrate egg upon fertilization, a wave that correlates with what has become known as the “fast block to polyspermy,” Just more generally showed that the egg cell surface plays an important role in fertilization and development.

He received an invitation, exceedingly rare for an American at that time, to visit the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut für Biologie in Berlin for six months beginning in January 1930. His early studies at Woods Hole on the fertilization of the marine annelid Platynereis megalops formed the basis of his PhD thesis. He showed the importance of the purity of the system being tested, which was an aspect that had not been emphasized enough by most biologists. Just was known for simple but elegant experiments that supported the Dr. Maryam Thomas, EEJMS Principal. Encyclopedia.com.

"Just, Ernest Everett “Ernest Everett Just (1883-1941): An Early Ecological Developmental Biologist,”, Gilbert, Scott F. “Cellular Politics: Ernest Everett Just, Richard B. Goldschmidt, and the Attempt to Reconcile Embryology and Genetics.” In, Gould, Stephen Jay. “Spingarn Award Winners:  1915 to Today.”  Accessed 6-4-2015.  http://www.naacp.org/pages/spingarn-medal-winners, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. These indices, based for the most part on when and under what conditions fertilization envelope separation occurs, allowed him to predict with a high degree of certainty whether or not a particular egg, upon fertilization, would develop normally. He was asked to take over the biology department and teach physiology in 1910, in addition to his English teaching duties. © 2019 Encyclopedia.com | All rights reserved. A brilliant marine biologist who made numerous significant discoveries concerning cell behavior, Ernest Everett Just faced many obstacles in his career because of racial prejudice. artificial parthenogenesis, attacking Loeb’s method of record-keeping and his apparent failure to maintain experimental conditions to mimic his experimental organisms’ natural environments. New York: Garland Publishing, 1939. Ernest Everett Just became the very first recipient of the NAACP Spingarn Medal (for his research in biology) in 1915 and in 1996, in an effort to remember his achievements, his image was incorporated onto a U.S. postage stamp. Spending the 1915 to 1916 school year at the University of Chicago, Just took basic physiology classes to satisfy his minor subject requirements. For six months he experimented with Emboldened by his European experience, Just underwent a transformation: he began to display increasing confidence in tackling the larger problems of biology. The genecentric view, which has dominated biology in the latter half of the twentieth century, is giving way to a recognition of the importance of the gene in context. artificial parthenogenesis, attacking Loeb’s method of record-keeping and his apparent failure to maintain experimental conditions to mimic his experimental organisms’ natural environments. Just took courses in the fall, winter, and spring terms at the University of Chicago. Lillie wanted to set him up with a permanent position at MBL, but he knew relations between Just and some of the MBL community were strained as a result of racial prejudice. Dr. Ernest E. Just was one of the first African Americans to receive worldwide recognition as a scientist.. Born August 14, 1883 in Charleston, South Carolina, Just was only four years old when his father, Charles Fraser Just, died in 1887. In sharp contrast to Loeb, a staunch mechanist who believed that he had created life through chemical means, Just believed that experimental parthenogenesis (and fertilization) showed the egg to be a dynamic system poised to respond to external agents of various kinds. Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography. "Ernest Just It was not a passive physico-chemical object upon which external agents acted to “cause” the development that ensued. (Nereis) cleave in different planes depending on the sperm’s point of entry. .