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(1924-2017)

MBL Affiliation from 1949 to 2007 as an Investigator, Library Reader, and Corporation Member

As the civil and women’s rights movements gained great momentum in the 1960s, Jewel Plummer Cobb was deeply engaged in cancer research as a biology professor at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Over the decade, Cobb had perfected methods for culturing patient cells in the lab so she could test the effects, both beneficial and harmful, of various agents on the cells. Cobb’s research was laying a strong foundation for understanding skin cancer and for developing chemotherapy for many types of cancers.

Yet Cobb heard the winds of change. In 1969, she accepted an offer to become dean and professor of zoology at Connecticut College. This meant long hours: She spent mornings in the lab continuing her research, and afternoons delving into leadership work at the college. But it also afforded Cobb a chance to nurture a growing mission: Find ways to increase the marginal number of women and minorities in science. “I moved into administration without any regrets,” she said. “At the time I felt I could make more changes and be more influential.”

Cobb went right to work, establishing a Black scholarship at Connecticut College and a post-baccalaureate program to prepare minorities for degree programs in medicine or dentistry. In 1974, Cobb became the first Black woman appointed to the National Science Board, which sets priorities for National Science Foundation (NSF) grants. She also helped form the first iteration of the NSF’s Committee on Women and Minorities in Science. Cobb chaired the first Conference for Minority Women Scientists in 1975, which produced a highly influential report and “blueprint for change” on the reasons for “our small numbers, relative invisibility, and exclusion from mainstream science.”

I’d like to be remembered as a Black woman scientist who cared very much about what happens to young folks, particularly women, going into science.

— Jewel Plummer Cobb

Cobb published her last scientific paper in 1976, the same year she became full-time dean of the women’s division at Rutgers University. Over the next decades, she wrote numerous reports on the underrepresentation of women and minorities in science, and wherever she went she instituted programs to address these inequities. Cobb was appointed president of California State University, Fullerton in 1981, the first Black woman to lead a college west of the Mississippi.

Only the “superior scholar, independent and tenacious, and somewhat hardened by her experience on her way through ‘the system’” survives in science, Cobb wrote in an influential article, “Filters for Women in Science,” in 1979. At the time, only 10 percent of scientists and engineers in the country were women. In illuminating the successive “filters” that females (and not males) encounter that winnow them out of science, some of the reasons for Cobb’s own extraordinary success emerge.

A Promising Beginning

Jewel Plummer was born in 1924 in Chicago. Her father, Frank, was the first Black person to receive an M.D. degree from Cornell University and her mother, Carriebel, a college graduate, was a physical education and dance teacher. From a young age, Jewel’s parents encouraged intellectual exploration, including her father’s scientific library. Thus, Jewel avoided the earliest “filters” that girls of her age encountered: pervasive socialization that they would become mothers and homemakers only; and the idea that math is a “male” subject. “Fundamental to encouraging more women to consider careers in the sciences is eradication of the notion that proficiency in mathematics is a gender-linked characteristic,” Cobb wrote.

Cobb originally planned to pursue physical education but fell in love with biology as a sophomore in high school. “It was the first time I ever used a microscope, and I found that wonderful to be able to see things through it that I could not see ordinarily. That was fascinating,” she said. An excellent student, Cobb gained admission in 1942 to the University of Michigan, a major research university that had more than 200 Black students enrolled, which was unusual diversity at the time.

However, at UMichigan Cobb encountered housing segregated by race and rampant social exclusion; the experience was a “disaster for Black students,” she said. After three semesters she transferred to Talladega College, a historically Black college in Alabama. There, she found important mentors, including bacteriology professor James R. Hayden, thereby passing through another filter.

In contrast to her own experience, Cobb later wrote, college advisors often fail to encourage female students to major in science, partly because they know women will have fewer job opportunities in the profession and will earn less. “The sciences and engineering are considered male territories, and as such do not present congenia