Dr. Lawrence Howland Knox, a noted chemist, was born on September 30, 1906, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, to William Jacob and Estella Knox. Knox was one of five children, two girls and three boys, and remarkably, for that time, all of the boys earned PhDs; the oldest brother, William Jr., also earned a PhD in chemistry, and the younger brother, Clinton, earned a PhD in history.
Knox attended Bates College in Lewiston, Maine for his undergraduate schooling. He majored in chemistry and played on the school football team. He graduated in 1928 and began teaching chemistry at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. After teaching at Morehouse for two years, Knox attended Stanford and, in 1931, attained his Master’s degree. That same year, he married his wife Hazel, and the two had one son. After receiving his Master’s degree, Knox began teaching at the Agriculture and Technical College of North Carolina in Greensboro, and in 1933 he transferred to North Carolina College for Negroes in Durham. In 1936, he took another break from teaching and began working on his doctorate at Harvard. In 1940, he achieved a PhD in organic chemistry and went back to teaching at North Carolina College.
It was at America’s entrance into the Second World War that Knox’s career path changed from teaching to research. In 1944, he left his job at North Carolina College to contribute to the research of quinine (used today to treat malaria) for the Division of War Research. Knox’s work on quinine was meant to be used in the Manhattan Project for field research on the effects of atomic bomb explosions. Knox remained at Columbia University in New York until the end of the war in 1945.
With the end of his time at Columbia University, Knox became a research chemist for Nopco Chemists in Harrison, New Jersey. In his three years there, he was granted at least four patents. In 1948, he became the Resident Director at the Hickrill Chemical Research Foundation in Katonah, New York, and remained in that post until the foundation folded in the late 1950s. It was also at this time that his marriage to Hazel began to fall apart, resulting in divorce. He remarried a white woman, Anne Juren, and moved to Mexico.
Knox took a position with Laboratorios Syntex S.A. out of Mexico City, Mexico, and from 1960 to 1965, he received almost forty patents in the field of steroid chemistry. Knox and his wife stayed in Mexico when the company moved to Palo Alto, California, because of Mexico’s comparatively liberal attitude toward their mixed-race marriage. Their attachment to Mexico grew when the couple adopted a Mexican baby named Naomi. Lawrence Knox’s life came abruptly to an end in 1966 when he died from carbon monoxide poisoning caused by the kerosene heater he had in his home office.
