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CCB Spotlight: William Knox, A.B. '23 & Lawrence Knox, Ph.D. '40

February 25, 2022
William Knox
William Knox

This article is a part of "CCB Spotlight," a new ongoing series of articles that will report on achievements in research, education, career development, and community development among students, alumni, faculty, staff, groups and wider members of the chemistry and chemical biology community at Harvard. To nominate an individual and or a group to be spotlighted, please complete this short form or reach out to Communications Manager Yahya Chaudhry.

In honor of Black History Month, this article profiles alumni William Knox, A.B. '23 & Lawrence Knox, Ph.D. '40 -- path-breaking African American chemists who worked on the Manhattan Project. 

Early Life:

William Jacob Knox, Jr was born on January 5, 1904 and his younger brother Lawrence H Knox was born on September 30, 1906. The grandsons of slave, the Knox brothers were instilled with a deep admiration and reverence for education as a force of social mobility. Their father, Willam Jacob, had become a middle class postal worker after recieving the highest score on the New Bedford civil-service exam in 1903. William and Lawrence had two sisters and a younger brother, Clinton E. Knox, who would earn a PhD in history from Harvard and become a diplomat. While their sisters were steered towards vocational jobs early in their lives, the brothers were always encouraged to go to college and earn advanced degrees as a way to ensure steady incomes.

Education/At Harvard:

In 1921, William was one of five African American students to be admitted to the freshman class at Harvard College. He along with two other African American students applied to live in the dormitories, but only William was given a room assignment. William's arrival on campus to take a course in a chemistry laboratory precipitated the Harvard Dormitories Crisis of 1921: "This was the beginning of all the trouble. He was 'spotted' at once, being brown in complexion...found to have been assigned to a room in the exclusive dormitories, and by an artful method was made to give it up." William recieved a telegram from the Dean that said there had been a mistake in the room assignments; the exclusive room he had originally been assigned to was meant for another student. William was reassigned to room in Weld Hall. This ill-treatment led to a dispute between students, alumni, and faculty who sought to either preserve or reform the segregated dormitories. William studied organic chemistry and graduated four years later. In 1928, after three years of teaching at Johnson C. Smith University in North Carolina, William came back to Cambridge to study chemical engineering at MIT. In 1929 he earned an MS degree, working on vapor-phase esterification of acids. After another bout of teaching, this time at Howard University,  William returned to MIT for his PhD and successfully defended his dissertation, "The Absorption of Light by Nitrogen Tetroxide." His work at MIT resulted in two publications and unpublished contributions toward the solution of a difficult experimental problem: the 2NO2/N2O4 equilibrium, which was still under investigation 25 years after his graduation. Until WWII, William taught chemistry at HBCUs.

William Knox
William Knox

Lawrence earned his bachelor's degree in 1928 from Bates College, a small college in Lewiston, Maine with a maximum quota of 3% for minorities, which included African Americans and Jews. Despite the quota, Lawrence enjoyed his time at Bates, majoring in chemistry, playing football and joining science clubs. The 1928 Bates yearbook described Lawrence as “The ‘Lord,’ a mighty man is he, and full well versed in chemistry. Lawrence wrote a senior honors thesis investigating the Friedel-Crafts reaction between acid chlorides and aromatics, and graduated cum laude in 1928.  Upon graduating, Lawrence taught chemistry at Morehouse College in Atlanta, before he continued his studies at Stanford, earning a Masters of Science in 1931. In 1936, after teaching at the North Carolina College for Negroes for three years, he began his doctoral studies in physical chemistry at Harvard, with the same Rockefeller-funded fellowship that had enabled Robert Percy Barnes to study at Harvard. Larry studied under Professor Paul D. Bartlett, a leader in the new field of physical organic chemistry. Bartlett praised Lawrence's work, calling him “one of the most productive” of his 15 lab workers. Larry "studied the mechanism of nucleophilic substitution in aliphatic compounds, a ubiquitous chemical and biochemical process. He had synthesized a compound that was incapable of reacting by either of the two then recently proposed reaction pathways. It proved inert even under strenuous conditions, lending strong support to the hypothesis that those were the only two pathways for nucleophilic substitution under ordinary conditions. The resulting paper was quickly recognized as a classic in physical organic chemistry and is still cited in current textbooks". Bartlett described Lawrence's research as the “neatest and prettiest job of any research student.” Upon earning his PhD in 1940, Lawrence returned to teaching at North Carolina College for Negroes.

Lawrence Knox
Lawrence Knox

WWII/Manhattan Project: 

Upon America’s entry into World War II, William contacted Columbia Professor Willard Libby, who would later go on to recieve the Nobel Prize for his development of radiocarbon dating. At the time, Libby was attempting to isolate pure U235, which can sustain the nuclear chain reaction needed for the atom bomb William joined the unit in 1943 and spent two-and-a-half years working on corrosion problems. Libby later appointed William head of the all-white section, making himthe only African American supervisor for the Manhattan Project..

Lawrence also contributed to the war effort, working with William Doering for the Division of War Research at Columbia University where he studied quinine. Lawrence's work on anti-malarial quinine was used in field research on the effects of atomic bomb explosions.

Postwar Careers:

Thanks to Willard Libby’s personal recommendation, the Eastman Kodak Company offered William a position as a research associate in 1945, becoming the second African American PhD chemist hired by Kodak. William worked on developing wetting agents (surfactants) that would maximize the bonding power of film emulsions for improved manufacturing and clearer photographic images; during his 25 years at Kodak he coauthored 3 journal articles and was granted 21 patents.

In 1948 Lawrence received an invitation from Doering to become the resident director at the Hickrill Chemical Research Foundation in Katonah, New York. As a private venture created by philanthropists Sylvan and Ruth Alice Weil on their estate, the foundation specialized in long-term and speculative research. One question that had baffled chemists since the 19th century was why benzene (C6H6) and related ring compounds (so-called “aromatic” substances) were unusually stable and unreactive (a fact that did have many practical consequences).

In 1933 German theoretician Walter Hückel proposed a general theory based on the number of electrons in the ring compounds. Doering and Knox decided to test the theory experimentally by preparing C7H7+. Conventional thinking held that charged organic compounds, like the tropylium ion, would be reactive and difficult to isolate; Hückel’s theory predicted the opposite. Doering and Knox provided experimental support for Hückel’s theory, which explained a focal point of organic chemistry. Their work also pushed reluctant organic chemists toward greater reliance on theory.

After foundation closed In the late 1950s William, took a position with Laboratorios Syntex S.A. working on the isolation of a sapogenin that could be readily transformed into progesterone. This discovery dropped the price of progesterone precipitously and led to the development of one of the first birth-control drugs. The 1950s and early 1960s were the “Golden Age” of steroid chemistry, and Syntex was a major player in the race to publish and patent new reactions, processes, and compounds. From 1960 to 1965 Larry coauthored 10 papers and was awarded over 40 patents related to steroid chemistry. 

Legacy

Lawarence Knox died on January 6, 1966 and is remembered for his path-breaking scientific brilliance. A notice of his death in the Bates Alumnus carried the following excerpt from a eulogy delivered at Syntex: “His contribution to science is fundamental . . . his recent discoveries so important . . . that his name will remain forever in scientific literature. . . . He leaves us a unique example of dynamism and enthusiasm. . . . He will remain an example of courage and modesty.”

William Knox died on July 9, 1995 leaving behind a legacy of scientific excellence and civil rights. After experiencing discrimination, William fought against housing injustices, becoming the first president of the Rochester Urban League, president of Baden Street Settlement, a board member of the Genesee Valley Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, and president of the Legal Aid Society of Rochester. Knox was a member of a number of civil rights and housing related groups including, New York Advisory Council to the Federal Civil Rights Commission, State Commission on Human Rights, Rochester Council of the New York State Commission Against Discrimination, and Rochester Housing Authority. 

 

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See also: Alumni, CCB Spotlight, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DIEB)