In the late 1990s, medical science professor Lundy Braun read a news story about how a large manufacturer wanted to hold Black ex-workers to a higher standard for testing lung function than white ex-workers when it came to disability compensation claims regarding asbestos exposure. In upholding the double standard, lawyers for the manufacturer cited the fact that it was so widely believed in medicine that Black people had inherently weaker lung function than white people that the disparity was built directly into the spirometer, the machine that measures lung function—with a literal button on the machine to “adjust” for testing Black people.
Yet there was no scientific basis for the adjustment. The idea dated back to antebellum times, when prominent white doctors insisted that enslaved Black people had weaker lungs than whites.
As someone who’d long been interested in how societal assumptions about race shape science and medicine, Braun was fascinated by the story—and began researching the long history of the racially biased spirometer. “Lundy dug and dug and dug until she felt she had followed up every thread,” says her longtime friend, Anne Fausto Sterling, Brown professor emerita of biology. The result was Braun’s 2014 book Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics. Noted in academic circles, the book got greater attention when the police murder of George Floyd in 2020 sparked an interrogation of every aspect of race in society.
The book put Braun squarely at the forefront of the effort to root out the ways longstanding but bogus racial assumptions have driven everything from med-school education to the diagnosis and treatment of various diseases.
Braun, who retired from Brown in 2023 after 42 years on the faculty, died on August 9, 2024, at age 77 after she was run over by a car backing out of her neighbor’s home in Cranston, R.I. She is survived by her husband, John Trimbur, a writing professor at Emerson College, and her daughters Lucia Trimbur, a sociology professor at John Jay College, and Catherine Trimbur, MD, a professor of medicine at Brown. Colleagues and mentees nationwide noted the important role she had played in the study of racial biases and assumptions in medicine.
“She was a trained scientist who got really interested in how race and science interplay,” says Dr. Françoise Hamlin, a professor of Africana studies at Brown who was professionally and personally close with Braun. “She did such great work that was so important to our undergrads who were thinking about going into medicine. Her classes were so popular that she was asked to teach in the Alpert Medical school,” where the idea that race was a construct in science wasn’t previously a part of the curriculum.
Braun was born and raised in Buffalo, N.Y., then majored in French lit at Skidmore. After college, according to Trimbur, she was a progressive political activist and briefly attended law school before becoming interested in pathobiology (the study of disease mechanisms) while working in a lab in Oakland, California. She then earned a PhD in the field at Johns Hopkins. She came to Brown in 1982 as a postdoctoral fellow, was appointed assistant professor of medical science in 1987, and then full professor in 2008. In 2002, she was also given an appointment in Brown’s Africana Studies department, largely because of the work she’d begun doing on the misuse of race in science and healthcare. “She was deeply interested in the question of how scientific knowledge,” such as widely accepted but unfounded ideas about biological differences among races, “gets produced,” says Trimbur. “And she was interested in how the knowledge of non-expert lay people could be incorporated into that production.” Earlier in her career, she worked with the National Breast Cancer Coalition on a project to bring more breast cancer survivors into the field’s research and policy arena.
But, says Trimbur, her focus on racial justice in science and healthcare came out of passions that went back a long way. “She was an old-school New Left antiracist—period,” he says. On regular trips to South Africa, Braun would hold workshops to help communities map residential areas affected by industrial contamination.
At Brown, Braun cofounded the program in science, technology, and society, and at the time of her retirement last year she was coleading the race, medicine, and social justice research cluster at the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. There, she served as a mentor to many younger faculty, including Dr. Taneisha Wilson, now an assistant professor at Alpert. “Once I got immersed in how racism impacts patient care,” says Wilson, “Lundy really helped me refine my thoughts and connected me to other writers on the topic.”
Braun also stood by her, she says, when she started teaching a class at Alpert aiming to get white health providers to look at their own assumptions and implicit bias when caring for patients of color. “I was scared I was going to be run out of town with a pitchfork,” she says, “but Lundy reminded me that someone was always going to have a problem” with such critiques, “and that if I wanted to continue with this work, she would always be there to support me.”
Continued Wilson: “She was one of the warmest and most open people I knew—a dear friend, one of my strongest mentors, a great listener and a warrior who truly believed that racism is the root of all evil in our society. Knowing her was life-changing and life-saving.”
“She was loving, caring, warm and empathetic,” echoed Eric Jones, an Africana Studies PhD candidate whom Braun had invited into her research cluster. “I’m a first-generation college grad. The fact that I even got to this point is a blessing.”
He says that Braun “saw something within me that I didn’t necessarily see myself.” He remembers guest-lecturing in her class about the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which white researchers withheld syphilis treatment from Black male study participants for decades without telling them it was available.
“After,” he recalls, “she said that I was a really good teacher. And she kept giving me that positive reinforcement that opened up the pathway for me to believe in myself.”
