Ernest Everett Just, PhD (1883-1941) was more than a scientist. He was a pioneer in exploring the intersection of water and life itself. We founded our company on his birthday, August 14th 2020.

An aquamarine biologist, he pioneered many areas on the role of hydration, cell division, dehydration in living cells.

Just’s legacy of accomplishments has guided aquamarine scientists across the world for generations since his death in 1941. His example also inspired our founder. In 1994, MIT Professor Frank S. Jones, holder of the Ford Family Endowed Chair, gave our co-founder Roger Conley Wood, the definitive biography of E.E. Just, The Life of Ernest Everett Just, by Kenneth Manning.

Professor Manning was the first protégé of Frank S. Jones at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and would eventually receive the 1983 Pfizer Award for the book, which was also a finalist for the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Wood was his last protégé, before Jones retired from MIT. He became the youngest product manager in the history of Motorola at 25 years. The mobile system Wood helped design, Nextel, is still operational today.

Ernest Everett Just was a pioneer during his day, a biological scientist dedicated to the role of water in cellular biology. A child prodigy, he had the good fortune of a mother dedicated to his intellectual development. In spite of her own lack of education, she sent young Ernest by himself on an impossibly dangerous journey from South Carolina, to New England, where he attended boarding school at Kimball Union Academy. His mother, confined to the fields of post-Civil War sharecropping system, died working to send pennies to her talented son Earnest at Kimball Union. Although an impoverished, socially, isolated ethnic minority, Just finished first in his class. Young Earnest Everett was denied the honor of addressing his fellow students, due to concerns that the image of a Black American student valedictorian at the podium might upset parents at the school.

After Kimball Union, E.E. Just enrolled in Dartmouth College. Again, young Everett finished at the top of his class, earning nearly every scientific honor the school had to offer. Logically, he was a candidate to address his class at graduation, but it was "decided it would be a faux pas to allow the only black in the graduating class to address the crowd of parents, alumni, and benefactors. It would have made too glaring the fact, that Just had won just about every prize imaginable," according to minutes from faculty meetings from 1907 discovered in the Dartmouth College archives during research for Manning’s biography.

After his core scientific training at Dartmouth, E.E. Just went on to earn a Master of Science and PhD from the University of Chicago, in 1916. He began his groundbreaking career in water and cellular development under the guidance of Frank Lillie, Dean of Biological Sciences at University of Chicago and other sympathetic scientists at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

Prohibited from entering most buildings or conducting research in many labs in America due to segregation laws, he was forced to continue his research in Germany, where he could gain entry to buildings and use scientific instruments without violating the law. His German wife helped minimize the impact of his modest German language abilities, and E.E. Just published his most important work, The Biology of the Cell Surface, in 1939, as well as his most influential scientific papers, while in Berlin at predecessor to the Max Planck Institute. Just was at the apex of his career in aquamarine biology, before World War II cut his career and life short in 1941.