PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: biology
British naturalist
Charles Darwin was an English naturalist whose scientific theory of evolution by natural selection became the foundation of modern evolutionary studies. An affable country gentleman, Darwin at first shocked...
British biologist
Thomas Henry Huxley was an English biologist, educator, and advocate of agnosticism (he coined the word). Huxley’s vigorous public support of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary naturalism earned him the nickname...
French chemist and microbiologist
Louis Pasteur was a French chemist and microbiologist who was one of the most important founders of medical microbiology. Pasteur’s contributions to science, technology, and medicine are nearly without...
British naturalist
Alfred Russel Wallace was a British humanist, naturalist, geographer, and social critic. He became a public figure in England during the second half of the 19th century, known for his courageous views...
British biologist
Ian Wilmut was a British developmental biologist who was the first to use nuclear transfer of differentiated adult cells to generate a mammalian clone, a Finn Dorset sheep named Dolly, born in 1996. Wilmut...
French biologist
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was a pioneering French biologist who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern genetics and...
American biologist
E.O. Wilson was an American biologist recognized as the world’s leading authority on ants. He was also the foremost proponent of sociobiology, the study of the genetic basis of the social behaviour of...
French naturalist
Georges-Louis Leclerc, count de Buffon was a French naturalist, remembered for his comprehensive work on natural history, Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (begun in 1749). He was created a...
Italian scientist
Marcello Malpighi was an Italian physician and biologist who, in developing experimental methods to study living things, founded the science of microscopic anatomy. After Malpighi’s researches, microscopic...
English scientist
Lancelot Thomas Hogben was an English zoologist, geneticist, medical statistician, and linguist, known especially for his many contributions to the study of social biology. Hogben’s birth was premature...
Dutch scientist
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was a Dutch microscopist who was the first to observe bacteria and protozoa. His researches on lower animals refuted the doctrine of spontaneous generation, and his observations...
English biologist
Charles Elton was an English biologist credited with framing the basic principles of modern animal ecology. Elton was educated first at Liverpool College and then at New College, Oxford, from which he...
American biologist
Alfred Sherwood Romer was a U.S. paleontologist widely known for his concepts of evolutionary history of vertebrate animals. The explicit use of comparative anatomy and embryology in studies of fossil...
Belgian physician
Andreas Vesalius was a Renaissance physician who revolutionized the study of biology and the practice of medicine by his careful description of the anatomy of the human body. Basing his observations on...
American scientist
Theodosius Dobzhansky was a Ukrainian-American geneticist and evolutionist whose work had a major influence on 20th-century thought and research on genetics and evolutionary theory. The son of a mathematics...
German biologist
Rudolf Jaenisch is a German biologist known for his development of the first transgenic animal (an organism that has had genes from another species inserted into its genome) and for his research on epigenetic...
German biologist
August Weismann was a German biologist and one of the founders of the science of genetics. He is best known for his opposition to the doctrine of the inheritance of acquired traits and for his “germ plasm”...
Swiss physician and naturalist
Conrad Gesner was a Swiss physician and naturalist best known for his systematic compilations of information on animals and plants. Noting his learning ability at an early age, his father, an impecunious...
German-American botanist and biologist
Katherine Oppenheimer was a German American botanist, biologist, and wife of Los Alamos Laboratory director J. Robert Oppenheimer. After her birth in Germany, Katherine Puening moved with her family to...
American scientist
Charles Henry Turner was an American behavioral scientist and early pioneer in the field of insect behaviour. He is best known for his work showing that social insects can modify their behaviour as a result...
American biologist
Lynn Margulis was an American biologist whose serial endosymbiotic theory of eukaryotic cell development revolutionized the modern concept of how life arose on Earth. Margulis was raised in Chicago. Intellectually...
American geneticist and biophysicist
James Watson is an American geneticist and biophysicist who played a crucial role in the discovery of the molecular structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the substance that is the basis of heredity....
American microbiologist
Maurice Hilleman was an American microbiologist and virologist who developed more than 40 vaccines, including those for varicella (chickenpox), hepatitis A, hepatitis B, measles, meningitis, mumps, and...
British physician
Sir Hans Sloane, Baronet was a British physician and naturalist whose collection of books, manuscripts, and curiosities formed the basis for the British Museum in London. As a child Sloane possessed a...
British biologist
Richard Henderson is a Scottish biophysicist and molecular biologist who was the first to successfully produce a three-dimensional image of a biological molecule at atomic resolution using a technique...
American molecular biologist
Susan L. Lindquist was an American molecular biologist who made key discoveries concerning protein folding and who was among the first to discover that in yeast, inherited traits can be passed to offspring...
American physician and biologist
Robert J. Lefkowitz is an American physician and molecular biologist who demonstrated the existence of receptors—molecules that receive and transmit signals for cells. His research on the structure and...
Canadian immunologist and cell biologist
Ralph M. Steinman was a Canadian immunologist and cell biologist who shared the 2011 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (with American immunologist Bruce A. Beutler and French immunologist Jules A....
American molecular biologist and geneticist
Gary Ruvkun is an American molecular biologist and geneticist renowned for his groundbreaking research on microRNA (miRNA) and RNA interference (RNAi) as well as for his work on aging and longevity. In...
American scientist
Norman Ernest Borlaug was an American agricultural scientist and plant pathologist, and winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1970. Known as the “Father of the Green Revolution,” Borlaug helped lay the...
Japanese microbiologist
Ōmura Satoshi is a Japanese microbiologist known for his discovery of natural products, particularly from soil bacteria. Of special importance was Ōmura’s discovery of the bacterium Streptomyces avermitilis,...
Japanese biologist
Yoshinori Ohsumi is a Japanese cell biologist known for his work in elucidating the mechanisms of autophagy, a process by which cells degrade and recycle proteins and other cellular components. Ohsumi’s...
German-American scientist
Günter Blobel was a German-born American cellular and molecular biologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1999 for his discovery that proteins have signals that govern their...
British biologist
John Gurdon is a British developmental biologist who was the first to demonstrate that egg cells are able to reprogram differentiated (mature) cell nuclei, reverting them to a pluripotent state, in which...
American molecular biologist and biochemist
Elizabeth Blackburn is an Australian-born American molecular biologist and biochemist who was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, along with American molecular biologist Carol W. Greider...
American molecular biologist
Carol W. Greider is an American molecular biologist who was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, along with American molecular biologist and biochemist Elizabeth H. Blackburn and American...
American-born physicist and spy
Theodore Hall was an American-born physicist and spy who during World War II worked on the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb and also delivered details on its design to the Soviet Union....
American physiologist
Phillip A. Sharp is an American molecular biologist, awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, along with Richard J. Roberts, for his independent discovery that individual genes are often...
Swiss biophysicist
Jacques Dubochet is a Swiss biophysicist who succeeded in vitrifying water around biomolecules, thereby preventing the formation of ice crystals in biological specimens. Dubochet discovered that water...
American developmental biologist and molecular geneticist
Victor Ambros is an American developmental biologist and molecular geneticist best known for his pioneering work in the discovery of microRNA (miRNA), a type of small RNA molecule that serves essential...
Ethiopian biologist and public health official
Tedros Adhanom is an Ethiopian biologist and public health official who was the first African to serve as director general (2017– ) of the World Health Organization (WHO). During his tenure with WHO, he...
American biologist and educator
Ruth Patrick was an American aquatic biologist and educator widely regarded as one of the early pioneers of the science of limnology. She is best known for her work with diatoms (a type of algae encased...
American biologist
James Thomson is an American biologist who was among the first to isolate human embryonic stem cells and the first to transform human skin cells into stem cells. Thomson grew up in the Chicago suburb of...
Swedish biologist
Torsten Wiesel is a Swedish neurobiologist, recipient with David Hunter Hubel and Roger Wolcott Sperry of the 1981 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. All three scientists were honoured for their investigations...
American microbiologist
Carl Woese was an American microbiologist who discovered the group of single-cell prokaryotic organisms known as archaea, which constitute a third domain of life. Woese attended Amherst College in Massachusetts,...
Soviet biologist and agronomist
Trofim Lysenko was a Soviet biologist and agronomist, the controversial “dictator” of Communistic biology during Joseph Stalin’s regime. He rejected orthodox genetics in favor of “Michurinism” (named for...
French naturalist
Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire was a French naturalist who established the principle of “unity of composition,” postulating a single consistent structural plan basic to all animals as a major tenet of...
Canadian-American scientist
Sidney Altman was a Canadian American molecular biologist who, with Thomas R. Cech, received the 1989 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their discoveries concerning the catalytic properties of RNA, or ribonucleic...
American physician and biologist
Brian K. Kobilka is an American physician and molecular biologist whose research on the structure and function of cell-surface molecules known as G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs)—the largest family...
American physician and microbiologist
Albert Bruce Sabin was a Polish American physician and microbiologist best known for developing the oral polio vaccine . He was also known for his research in the fields of human viral diseases, toxoplasmosis,...
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