SCIENTIST AND DJ Dr Mark Richards credits ancient Egyptian Imhotep as his inspiration for taking his physics career to the next level. Physician, musician, and astronomer Imhotep, who lived in Nubia, southern Egypt, over 4,500 years ago, invented the first step pyramids.

Dr Richards insists Imhotep, who served under pharaoh Djoser as his high priest, is proof that Black people made huge strides in science “from the very start”.

These historical achievements stand in stark contrast to the present day, in which there are officially no Black chemistry or physics professors in the UK.

Dr Richards, physics lecturer at Imperial College London, is on a mission to change this and has helped drive forward a Royal Society fellowship scheme to take Black postgraduates to the next level.

“I read about Imhotep when I was doing my PhD and when I read about this guy doing all these things, even though it was from 4,500 years ago, it’s quite clear that we’ve been involved in science from the very beginning[1]ning”, Dr Richards told The Voice.

Founder of The Blackett Lab Family, a network of Black scientists, Dr Richards also DJs under the name DJ Kemist.

“I was an undergraduate chemist, but for a long time people just assumed I was a ‘street chemist’”, he laughs. “But no, I’m actually a chemist!”

He added: “We are natural scientists in many ways. Even on the music side, I’ve done workshops around how sound system innovation has worked its way into modern PA systems now.

“It was sound system culture that innovated it. Even sound effects in music, like the foghorns and the sirens.

“In Hip Hop culture there’s also been lots of technical innovation, like the crossfader on a mixer to mix from one disk to another, which was developed by Grandmaster Flash, and he did electronics at high school. Now every mixer has a crossfader.

“The slip-mat is the same sort of thing, to reduce friction so you can scratch and mix records etcetera; that was developed again by Grandmaster Flash.

“His mum was a seamstress, and he got the right type of material and put starch on it to make it more slippery… but what we’re not so good at is saying ‘ah this is a novel idea, let me get this patented so that when everyone else adopts it we make the money from it.’ As a community, we do innovate, we do create; we just don’t seem to own much of what we create.”

In 2021, the Royal Society released a study of Black academics in STEM subjects over a ten-year period, which found that White students were twice as likely as Black students to graduate with First class honours. Black students were also three times more likely than White students to pick up a third-class degree.

The degree results contrast with the fact these Black students had got similar grades as their White counterparts to study the courses in the first place.

Experiment

Dr Richards, who was on the Royal Society working group that led the study, commented: “As a scientist, if you’re expecting one result and you’re always getting another result which is consistently below what you’re expecting, then you know that there’s some kind of systemic bias in the system. They’d call it a systemic bias if it was an experiment.

“That bias is not there because Black students are genetically disposed to under-performing, so it must be something.

“There is higher attrition rate as you go through the pipeline; the more you go into these elite spaces, the less likely you are to see yourselves in those spaces.”

According to the Higher Education Statistics Authority there are no Black chemistry or physics professors in Britain, however Dr Richards says there are a couple. However, the figures are rounded down to zero when numbers are less than five to avoid people being identified.

The Royal Society initiative aims to tackle these disparities by offering five fellowships per year worth £680,000 per recipient, which will allow them to establish their own research teams.

Dr Richards paid homage to African American professor James ‘Jim’ Sylvester Gates, an expert in string theory physics — the study of subatomic string particles holding the universe together — for using west African Adinkra symbols in his work, to ensure the footprint of historical African advances lives on.

Conversation

He added: “It was Marcus Garvey who said nearly a hundred years ago: ‘To parents, you must teach the higher developments of science in your homes, for with science and religion is our only hope of withstanding the evil designs of modern materialism.’

“Now if you look at where we are today, if we think about the role that science and technology plays increasingly in pretty much every aspect of our lives, if we are not part of that conversation, then we’ll just end up becoming consumers or slaves to technology, and that’s it.

“It’s almost like another form of slavery, technological slavery, with things imposed on us and we have no real idea of what it’s really doing. “But if we are part of that conversation, we can at least stand a chance of doing what’s good for us.”