I wonder what lies under the ocean.
I wonder how all the millions and
millions of creatures that
swim and float and
crawl and eat and hunt and spawn,
do what they do?
I learned from the scientists who buried
their heads in microscopes, and get on
the boats, and dive into the water, and
discover the wonders of life on our
world.
They discover how all the creatures are
connected,
how the tiniest microbes are
connected to the great blue whale,
the largest creature on Earth.
Among the first generation to pioneer
this science,
to help us truly understand, even as far
back as 1920,
was Dr. Roger Aliner Young.
She was a scientist.
She was a genius.
Roger Aliner Young
was a black woman in the time before
equal rights for blacks or women existed
in America.
She used her mind to help us dive into
the ocean and gain a greater
understanding of the life that surrounds
us, and oftentimes sustains us.
A place where the only colors that
mattered when the millions of brilliant
hughes and tones that decorated the grand
oceans of our world.
Underneath the great bodies of water,
life is flourishing.
From the largest giants of the sea,
to microscopic creatures, there's much we
still don't know about underwater life.
Much of the work to understand this
undiscovered universe has been done at
the Marine Biological Laboratory
in Woods' Hole, Massachusetts.
For more than one hundred years, they
have led the way revealing these life
forms to those of us who live on solid
ground.
one of the first great scientists at
Woods' Hole was 
Dr. Roger Aliner Young,
the first American woman to become a
doctor of zoology.
Early in her career Roger young showed a
unique ability to delve into scientific
research,
impressing her mentor Ernest E. Just
so much that
he invited her to conduct research at
the Marine Biological Laboratory in
Woods' Hole in 1927.
It is just a huge oceanographic center that
focuses on all aspects of oceanography,
from marine biology to geology to acoustics
to currents, so it's just one of
the biggest centers on the world.
At 35,
Young published her first article
and the distinguished journal "Science."
Her mentor called her "a real genius in
zoology."
"Science" and "Nature" are two magazines that
cover all of science, so the
Bose-Einstein relativity,
geology, chemistry,
physics, and all phases of biology so
that uh...
the odds of getting an article in there
even if it's really good science are
very small. 
Young's grit and perseverance
led to a career of research
and teaching that lasted more than
25 years.
In 2005, the
United States Congress honored 
Roger Aliner Young,
along with other significant
African-American women,
for her groundbreaking contributions to
the world of science and marine biology.
The phenomenal achievement,
when you're talking about the time in which
she's doing it--in which she's studying--
1920s, 1930s, into the 40s.
This is when women are really beginning
to make some significant changes in
their status in the United States of
America
in a broader sense,
but specifically
to have a woman studying science
was something that you didn't quite see
a lot of, but then to have an
African-American woman who is intensely
conducting biological research was
just absolutely
mind-blowing.
Dr. Roger Aliner Young:
one of the pioneers of our understanding
of the undersea world and a
great contributor scientific knowledge.
