Black History in STEM

He introduced the lowly peanut to big business and changed the course of Southern agriculture. He turned soybeans into plastic and carved his place in history as one of the 20th century's greatest scientists. George Washington Carver was a slave set free with a microscope and a vision: this is his story.

A look at Alice Ball's research that lead to the cure of leprosy

A biography of Percy Lavon Julian, an African-American chemist, self-made millionaire, and humanitarian.

The 2010 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering was presented to Gerhard Sessler and James West for the invention and development of the first practical electret microphone, which can inexpensively be made small enough to fit into cellular phones, digital cameras, and other portable devices.

No Short Climb combines personal memoir with archival footage, still photography, and graphics, to present a first-hand account of the previously unknown story about the contributions of African-American scientists and technicians during the Second World War.

As the United States raced against Russia to put a man in space, NASA found untapped talent in a group of African-American female mathematicians that served as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in U.S. history.

Imagine being black and a slave in the 1700s in the U. S. and becoming a self-taught surveyor who played a pivotal role in planning the layout of our nation’s capital, Washington, DC, and inventing a clock in 1753.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. traces the family trees of Francis Collins, Shirley Ann Jackson, and Harold E.Varmus--three pioneering scientists who’ve made dramatic contributions to our understanding of the world, all the while knowing little about their own ancestry.

Boasting an exceptional cast and production team, and based on Rebecca Skloot’s critically acclaimed 2010 nonfiction best-seller of the same name, this HBO Films drama tells the true story of Henrietta Lacks, an African- American woman whose cells were used to create the first immortal human cell line, known as HeLa. Told primarily through the eyes of Lacks’ daughter Deborah (Oprah Winfrey) and journalist Rebecca Skloot (Rose Byrne), the film chronicles Deborah’s search to learn about the mother she never knew, and to understand how the unauthorized harvesting of Lacks’ cancerous cells in 1951 led to unprecedented medical breakthroughs, from cancer to polio to radiation to AIDS, changing countless lives and the face of medicine forever.