We can be a heedless species. We daily expose ourselves to wear and tear both from the environment and our own actions that take their steady toll while shoveling into ourselves a vast cornucopia of molecules only some of which we know the impact of, and many of which are doing their level best to bring about our demise as quickly and efficiently as possible. For many years, we could plead ignorance of the consequences of our choices as an excuse for having selected them, but when Ellen Swallow Richards came around in the late 19th and early 20th century with her studies of nutrition, water and air quality, and the science of domestic materials, we were all compelled to, often very reluctantly, take our first step in Thinking About what we do and why we do it.
Richards died in 1911, and for a while it seemed like she would not get a worthy successor. And certainly, while in the realm of ecology it would be some decades before a generation arose that understood the true impact of what she was trying to do, in the realm of food science and education, and domestic materials chemical research, the decade was not out before Richards’s heir arrived on the scene. Pauline Gracia Beery (1891-1974) was during the middle decades of the 20th century the powerhouse behind some of the United States’s most advanced policies in determining the chemical structures and resiliencies of the materials with which we interact on a daily basis, educating the public about them, and encouraging greater chemical literacy in the population at large, and in 1940 her importance as the Next Richards was solidified when she was appointed the first director of MIT’s new Ellen Richards research institute.
Beery’s career as one of the nation’s preeminent materials researchers was anything but a linear one, however. She was born in Norborne, Missouri in 1891. A small town of some 1,005 souls at the time of her birth, it had at that point only existed as a community for some 23 years. Today it calls itself the Soybean Capital of the World, a rather large claim for a community of 634 people which hearkens back to the role that its most famous native, Pauline Beery, played in first evaluating the unique nutritive profile of the soybean. Of her youth in this plucky rural town we know essentially nothing, and she first emerges into the historical record when she began attending Missouri State University, where she graduated with a major in chemistry and minor in biology in 1913.
Employment options were, as we have seen, limited for a woman of her very particular training in that part of the country, and so she opted for the career path of so many scientifically gifted women before her, that of high school teacher, a profession she followed for the next six years spread across three different institutions. Meanwhile, she was furthering her own education, and received her Master’s degree from Columbia in 1919 which she then parlayed into a faculty position at Pennsylvania State College, where she taught freshman chemistry and domestic chemistry to home economics and liberal arts students, teaching some 12,000 students over the course of her three decade career.
Pauline Beery became Pauline Mack upon marrying fellow science instructor Warren Mack in 1923, and whether as a result of herself having two children in the ensuing years or of her realization in dealing with wave after wave of varyingly scientifically literate freshmen, she realized the need for better chemistry education at an early age and, putting her effort where her mouth was, took the step of launching Chemistry Leaflet in 1927, an engaging and popular science magazine meant to be comprehensible to younger readers which she served as the editor of, and which she would later offer to chemistry teachers as something that high school extra-curricular chemistry clubs could use to guide their own investigations into the Stuff of the World.
Making chemistry accessible to young people, and pushing for it as a worthwhile leisure activity, was already a tremendous service to her nation, but she was not nearly done, for Mack’s research career almost beggars belief in the breadth and depth of its investigations. A relative constant throughout that career was her research into the factors impacting bone density. Her PhD thesis treated of the impact that radiation had on bone density, while in later life she investigated how different diets and levels of activity impacted the growth of bone, and developed new techniques to effectively measure an individual’s bone density non-invasively. When NASA became concerned about the impact of space travel on human bones, it was to Mack that they turned, and she was one of the co-designers of the first space measurements of bone loss, during the Gemini IV mission.
Continuing on the legacy of Ellen Swallow Richards, Mack spent a significant portion of her career investigating the nutritive properties of different foods, and the biological impact of different diets, and then published that information in a way that was accessible to regular families to help them guide their decisions at the grocery store. She was the director of the Pennsylvania Mass Studies in Human Nutrition from 1935 to 1952, which undertook studies among rural and urban families that outlined how financial realities impacted food decisions, which in turn affected the health and strength of the very bones of the individuals involved. During World War II, she put together what she had learned about nutrition in Family Nutrition, a book that was made available for free so that the nutrition information inside could be accessed by everybody.
After the war, she continued her nutrition studies, correlating different ratios of legume and meat consumption to their respective health impacts, including studies of thyroid activity, red blood cell count, and bone health, during the course of which she carried out the soybean studies that paved the way for Norborne, Missouri’s current wildly optimistic town motto (Brazil is at present the world’s leading soybean producer, in case you were curious, and even in the US, Illinois is far and away the #1 soybean state, with Missouri languishing down at #7, sooooo…..)
My favorite region of Mack’s research, however, is not her bone density work or her sprawling nutritional studies which benefited so many families, but her studies of fabrics. After World War I, most dry cleaners began the shift to chlorinated solvents as their chemical choice. This was good news all around, because previously dry-cleaning relied on petroleum-based solvents which meant that the clothes so treated had a propensity to Catch On Fire at inopportune moments, which most customers reasonably considered a drawback. Meanwhile, in 1934, the first laundromat in the US opened (in Fort Worth, Texas, for trivia buffs in the audience), which introduced a whole new source of wear to the nation’s clothing supply. Between the introduction of new fabrics (modal rayon was rolled out in the 1950s as a version of the fabric that lacked the original’s weakness to moisture), new chemicals with which to clean them, and new machines with which to wash them, the mid-century represented a wholly new world for the domestic consumer wondering which fabrics to buy for their families to provide the best value, and how to preserve them. Mack threw herself into the newly arising questions of the chemistry of fabric damage, investigating the different factors that contribute to fading, how different laundering methods damage different types of fabric, which fabrics are the most amenable to stain removal and under which conditions, and what molecules serve best to improve different fabric attributes (her studies, for example, underscored the usefulness of aluminum hydroxide as a flame retardant, and investigated several other compounds that are currently being investigated for their nanofiber properties, such as cobalt (II) hydroxide and manganese (II) oxide).
Her exhaustive study of the properties of thousands of different fabric types and evaluations of how they stood up to different cleaning treatments was a real and tangible societal good which guided an entire nation’s consumers on how best to allocate their limited clothing budget. Unfortunately, because it focused on a part of the economy traditionally associated with women, i.e. the buying of fabrics and clothing, it has tended to get shoved to the corners of the historical record. However, because of the sheer vastness of Mack’s work across so many fields, she did receive a number of signal honors during her life, my favorite of which is that she was the first woman to receive a Silver Snoopy award.
The Silver Snoopy is an award given by the astronauts of NASA to a figure who they feel has contributed significantly to the improvement of safety in spaceflight. Recipients are given a silver medallion that has been carried into space during a NASA mission and which features the figure of Snoopy (Charles Schulz drew the original image and allowed NASA to use the likeness for free as an extension of his love of space exploration). Mack’s work charting bone loss during space travel, and outlining exercise methods to prevent muscular atrophy during a mission, earned her a Snoopy in 1970, just two years after the creation of the award.
In 1952, she was awarded the Garvan Medal by the American Chemical Society in recognition of her work on calcium uptake and loss in bones under different circumstances, and numerous universities gave her honorary degrees, but the true tale of Mack’s impact on the world lies in the subtle ways in which she nudged a billion daily choices in a more educated direction through the rigor of her chemical analyses. Today, if we so choose, we can eat better, exercise better, and make our domestic dollars stretch further, because Mack decided that giving us those options was worth devoting her life to, so the next time you get through a whole day without having your clothes suddenly ignite, or feel that extra spring in your step from a handful of edamame soybeans, take a pause, close your eyes, and give a little thanks to Dr. Pauline Gracia Beery Mack.
