Famous Scientists

  • Home
  • Top 100 Scientists
  • List of Scientists
  • Blog

Louis Pasteur

Louis Pasteur

Lived 1822 – 1895.

Louis Pasteur is one of the ‘greats’ of science. Countless millions of people alive today owe their lives to his discoveries.

Pasteur revolutionized chemistry and biology with his discovery of mirror-image organic molecules, then founded microbiology with his work on fermentation, his discovery of anaerobic bacteria, and his establishment of the germ theory of disease. The process he invented to stop foodstuffs going bad, pasteurization, is still in use worldwide today.

Advertisements

Beginnings

Louis Pasteur was born in the market town of Dole in eastern France on December 27, 1822. His father was Jean-Joseph Pasteur, a decorated former sergeant major in Napoleon Bonaparte’s army, who now worked as a tanner. His mother was Jeanne-Etiennette Roqui. Loius had an older sister and two younger sisters. The family lived modestly.

When Louis was four years old his family moved to the nearby town of Arbois. He started school aged eight at the École Primaire Arbois – it was actually a single room in the town hall. He could already read, having been taught by his father. His teachers rated his childhood academic ability as middling.

In his teenage years Louis received free tutoring from his father’s friend, Buousson de Mairet, a scholar. With this extra help, Louis began to show a growing academic ability – he started winning prizes at school – and it increasingly looked like a degree-level education would be appropriate for him.

His father envisaged his son becoming a respected teacher at a high school.

Pastel portrait of his father, by Louis Pasteur, aged 15.

In addition to his academic prowess, Louis also showed considerable artistic talent, especially his pastel portraits.

At the end of October 1838, aged 15, Louis Pasteur arrived in Paris, where he was to live in a dormitory and attend a boarding school – the Institution Barbet – to prepare him for the École Normale Supérieure in Paris – an elite college – often called more simply the École Normale or ENS.

Unfortunately Louis was utterly miserable in Paris, missing home terribly. He lasted a little over two weeks before his father made a long journey and took him home to Arbois.

In 1839, aged 16, he moved to Besançon, just 30 miles (49 km) from Arbois to board at the Royal College, a high school. Closer to his hometown, he felt less homesick, worked very hard, and passed his school diploma exam in 1840. He was then able to earn money as a teaching assistant at the Royal College.

For two years Pasteur earned money while he improved his academic qualifications. He then sat the entrance exam for the ENS. He failed. Although he had prepared for the exam by taking extra lessons in mathematics, physics and chemistry, he had also spent of lot of his time – too much time – drawing pastel portraits.

Pasteur worked for another year as a teaching assistant before moving to Paris in 1843 to study at Lycée Saint-Louis, a high school that aimed to get its students into the ENS. There he won the prize for top physics student and passed the ENS’s entrance exam with a high rank.

In 1844, aged 21, he entered the École Normale Supérieure. In 1845 he earned his science degree. In 1846 he placed third in physical sciences in the Agrégation – a highly prestigious government-run open exam for anyone who wanted to work in education: following this he was assigned to a high school teaching job in Tournon – a thought that horrified him.

He wanted to stay in Paris and continue with scientific research and higher-level teaching.

A Life in Science

Louis Pasteur

Louis Pasteur at the École Normale

Fortunately, a chemistry professor at the École Normale by the name of Antoine Jérome Balard had liked what he’d seen of Pasteur.

Balard was an eminent scientist, famed for his discovery of the element bromine in 1826. He offered Pasteur work as a chemistry graduate assistant along with the opportunity to carry out research for a doctorate.

Balard also waged a successful campaign against the government education department, which was trying to force Pasteur to move to the teaching job in Tournon.

In 1847 the 24 year-old Pasteur submitted a thesis in chemistry and a further thesis in physics. He was awarded a Ph.D. He had worked incredibly hard on his research – a habit that would remain with him all his life.

The following year, aged just 25, he was appointed as professor of chemistry at the University of Strasbourg.

Louis Pasteur’s Contributions to Science

Optically Active Molecules

Pasteur made his first great discovery in 1848. For a number of years, scientists had been puzzled about organic chemicals such as tartaric acid. A large number of natural organic substances had been found to rotate the plane of polarized light to the left or right, while the apparently identical substances made in the laboratory did not.

Pasteur, who had made a study of polarized light for his physics thesis, discovered the solution to the puzzle. He showed that molecules could exist in mirror-image forms, as shown in the image below.

Handed molecules

Left and Right Handed Molecules: although the molecules above appear very similar, they differ in the same way as your right hand differs from your left hand. One molecule is a mirror image of the other. They cannot be superimposed on one another. They affect light differently.

This was an enormously significant discovery in the history of science, revealing an asymmetry at the very heart of the natural world: many of the molecules made in nature are either left- or right-handed. Pasteur’s discovery paved the way for crucial breakthroughs in chemistry, biochemistry, and pharmaceuticals.

Fermentation

In 1854, aged 31, Pasteur left Strasbourg to become Dean of the Faculty of Sciences at Lille University – a very senior position for such a young scientist.

One of his students at Lille told him about a problem that was bothering his industrialist father. Emile Bigo-Danel’s father owned a distillery in Lille that converted sugar beet to alcohol by fermentation. Sometimes the fermentations went wrong and produced low concentrations of alcohol. Sometimes the alcohol soured.

Pasteur was fascinated by the problem and decided to investigate the phenomenon of fermentation.

Marie Laurent Pasteur“Louis… is now up to his neck in beet juice. He spends all his days in the distillery.”

Marie Laurent Pasteur
1856
 

At the time, the most commonly accepted explanation of fermentation was that it was a process caused by yeast – a single-celled microorganism – dying and decomposing. This was despite the fact that in 1836 Theodor Schwann had already shown that fermentation of sugar to alcohol required the action of living yeast. Schwann had been ridiculed for his work!

In 1858 and subsequent years, Pasteur published the results of the intensive research work he carried out in Lille, establishing that fermentation is a process involving the action of living yeast. Living yeast converts sugar into alcohol.

He found that the action of a different yeast makes milk go sour, converting milk sugars to lactic acid. If this yeast contaminates a wine fermentation, the wine is soured by the production of lactic acid.

Pasteur wrote:

“alcoholic fermentation is an act correlated with the life and organization of the yeast cells, not with the death or putrefaction of the cells.”

His work was conclusive. The scientific world now accepted that the action of living yeast was necessary for fermentation to take place.

Years later Pasteur wrote a personal letter to Schwann expressing his admiration, saying:

Louis Pasteur“For twenty years past I have been traveling along some of the paths opened up by you.”

Louis Pasteur
Letter to Schwann, 1878
 

The Discovery of Anaerobic Life

In 1857, aged 34, Pasteur returned to the École Normale in Paris as Director of Scientific Studies. No laboratory was available for him and the government said there was no money to fund any research. Determined to continue with his work, Pasteur personally paid for the conversion of part of the École Normale’s attic space to a laboratory and funded his own research work there.

His faith in his ability to make more scientific breakthroughs was soon rewarded with the discovery of an entirely new type of living organism – anaerobic microbes – microbes that live without the need for air or the oxygen gas it contains.

Pasteurization

After spending several years observing the beneficial and harmful effects of microbes on foodstuffs, in 1862 Pasteur invented the pasteurization process. During pasteurization, farm and brewery products such as milk, wine and beer are heated briefly to a temperature between 60 and 100°C, killing microorganisms that can cause them to go bad.

Spontaneous Generation of Life

Many scientists continued to believe that simple lifeforms were spontaneously generated; this despite the fact that a number of scientists, such as Theodor Schwann, had carried out work showing that microbes could not simply appear out of nowhere in dirty ponds or decaying meat.

When they learned that Pasteur was going to enter the ‘life’ debate, his scientific friends tried to dissuade him – it was too hot a topic to handle and they didn’t want to see their friend burned! However, Pasteur’s work in the laboratory had already convinced him that Schwann was correct.

In 1860 the French Academy announced a prize of 2,500 Francs to anyone who provided convincing experimental proof for or against spontaneous generation of life.

Pasteur was awarded the prize in 1862. He showed that no microbes ever grew in nutrient solutions that had been sterilized by heating, provided the air above the solutions was also sterilized. If unsterilized air was allowed into the space above the solutions, microbes began growing in the solutions. The microbes were present in the unheated air.

bacteria

A colony of bacteria. Pasteur provided the evidence that finally convinced the scientific world that microbes could not spontaneously generate.

The Germ Theory of Disease

Pasteur’s work in fermentation and spontaneous generation and his discovery that pasteurization could prevent foodstuffs going bad led him to the conclusion that diseases are caused by germs – microscopic organisms. To stay healthy we need to prevent these organisms getting into our bodies.

Pasteur recommended using filtration, exposure to heat, or exposure to chemicals to remove germs.

Joseph Lister read Pasteur’s work, and in 1867 he implemented antiseptic methods in surgery – sterilizing surgical instruments and cleaning wounds with carbolic acid. These innovations cut infections and deaths following operations dramatically.

Years later, at a gathering in Paris to celebrate Pasteur’s seventieth birthday, Lister said to Pasteur:

Joseph Lister“As a matter of fact, there is no one living in the entire world to whom the medical sciences owe so much as they do to you… Thanks to you, surgery has undergone a complete revolution which has robbed it of its terrors and extended its efficacious powers almost without limit.”

Joseph Lister
December 27th, 1892
 

Silkworm Disease

In 1863 Pasteur became professor of geology, physics, and chemistry at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts of Paris.

Soon he turned his attention to a problem that had very little to do with any of the subjects that he was professor of.

The French silkworm industry – indeed the entire European silkworm industry – was being destroyed by a disease nobody seemed to be able to stop. Government tax revenues had been devastated and areas once prosperous were beset by poverty and hunger.

Pasteur was not a biologist. He knew nothing about worms. He had never performed a dissection in his life. In 1865, however, he was implored to investigate the problem. He did not want to get involved, but after turning down repeated requests, he finally accepted the task.

And having accepted it, he launched himself into it with enormous energy, working until his health broke from exhaustion. His wife, Marie, also launched herself into the work, growing the silkworms he needed for experiments and writing notes.

Finally, after several false dawns and mistakes, near the end of 1867, Pasteur discovered that the silkworm’s eggs were being attacked by parasitic microbes. He gave instructions to owners of farms telling them how to prevent the problem. Next season, he was almost reduced to tears when problems persisted. He realized then that there must be a second microbe at work, totally independent of the first one.

Pasteur conquered this microbe too, but at great personal cost – in 1868, aged 45 he suffered a stroke. In the same year the brilliance of his work was recognized by the University of Bonn, where he was made an honorary Doctor of Medicine. The Austrian Government awarded Pasteur the 5,000 Florins they had offered as a reward to anyone who could solve the silkworm problem.

The work he carried out on silkworm diseases left him eager, despite now suffering from health issues of his own, to apply the lessons he had learned to human health.

Anthrax and Rabies Vaccines

Pasteur discovered methods of protecting people against two deadly diseases – anthrax (demonstrated in 1881) and rabies (demonstrated in 1885). He devised ways of producing weakened forms of the anthrax and rabies microbes and used these to vaccinate people.

When injected into people, Pasteur’s vaccines fired up their immune systems so potently that they were able to overcome the deadly forms of the diseases.

Pasteur’s success in the case of anthrax left a bitter taste in the mouth of a medical rival, and was certainly not in the best traditions of science. Pasteur secretly used the method of Jean Joseph Henri Toussaint, a veterinarian, to prepare anthrax vaccine for a public demonstration, rather than his own patented method. Toussaint should be remembered as the discoverer or (at the very least) co-discoverer of the anthrax vaccine.

Pasteur in lab

Louis Pasteur in his laboratory. The red object in the jar is the spinal cord of a rabbit infected with rabies. He used this to develop the rabies vaccine.

The Pasteur Institute

In 1887 Pasteur founded the institute that bears his name. The Pasteur Institute seeks to continue its founder’s goals of studying microorganisms and treating and preventing diseases.

Eight of its researchers have been awarded Nobel Prizes in medicine. Its researchers were the first to isolate the HIV virus and their discoveries have led to better treatments for deadly diseases such as diphtheria, influenza, plague, polio, tetanus, tuberculosis, and yellow fever.

Pasteur spent the final years of his life, from 1888 onwards, living with his wife Marie in a large apartment he created for himself at the Institute in Paris. She continued to live there for 15 years after her husband’s death, until her own death in 1910.

Some Personal Details and the End

Soon after arriving to become professor of chemistry at Strasbourg, Pasteur met Marie Laurent, daughter of the university’s rector. They married in May 1849. Pasteur was 26 and Marie was 23 years old.

Marie married Pasteur knowing and accepting that he was unusually dedicated to his research work – the story goes that on their wedding day someone had to be sent to the laboratory to remind Pasteur to go to his wedding!

Following their marriage, Marie became Pasteur’s trusted sounding board for ideas and the recorder of his thoughts.

The couple had five children, of whom three died of typhoid in childhood – an almost unbearable loss for the couple.

At the age of just 45 Pasteur suffered the first of the strokes that would undermine his health in his later years. In 1894, aged 71, a major stroke hit his health badly.

Louis Pasteur died of a stroke in Paris on September 28, 1895, aged 72.

He was held in such high esteem by the people of France that he was buried in the Cathedral of Notre Dame after a state funeral. Later his remains were moved to a crypt in the Pasteur Institute in Paris. When Marie died, she was also buried in the Institute’s crypt.

Advertisements

Author of this page: The Doc
Images digitally enhanced and colorized by this website. © All rights reserved.

Cite this Page

Please use the following MLA compliant citation:

"Louis Pasteur." Famous Scientists. famousscientists.org. 20 May. 2016. Web.  
<www.famousscientists.org/louis-pasteur/>.

Published by FamousScientists.org

Further Reading

Percy Frankland & Mrs Percy Frankland
Pasteur
Cassell and Company Limited, London, 1901

Albert Keim & Louis Lumet, translated by Frederic Taber Cooper
Louis Pasteur
Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York, 1914

Rene J. Dubos
Louis Pasteur Free Lance Of Science
Little, Brown And Company, Boston, 1950

Patrice Debré, translated by Elborg Forster
Louis Pasteur
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000

More from FamousScientists.org:
  • francesco redi
    Francesco Redi
  • maurice hilleman
    Maurice Hilleman
  • rudolf virchow
    Rudolf Virchow
  • theodor schwann
    Theodor Schwann
Advertisements

Search Famous Scientists

Scientist of the Week

  • Linda Buck: Discovered how we smell things

Recent Scientists of the Week

  • Jan Ingenhousz: Discovered photosynthesis
  • Barry Marshall: Overturned the Medical Establishment
  • Linus Pauling: Maverick Giant of Chemistry
  • William Röntgen: The Discovery of X-rays
  • Howard Florey: Brought penicillin to the world
  • Henrietta Leavitt: The key to the size of the universe
  • Archimedes: A mind beyond his time
  • Stanley Milgram: The infamous Obedience Experiments
  • C. V. Raman: Color change allows harm-free health check of living cells
  • Rosalind Franklin: Shape-shifting DNA
  • Robert Boyle: A new science is born: chemistry
  • Carl Woese: Rewrote Earth’s history of life
  • Alfred Wegener: Shunned after he discovered that continents move
  • Henri Poincaré: Is the solar system stable?
  • Polly Matzinger: The dog whisperer who rewrote our immune system’s rules
  • Otto Guericke: In the 1600s found that space is a vacuum
  • Alister Hardy: Aquatic ape theory: our species evolved in water
  • Elizebeth Friedman: Became the world’s most famous codebreaker
  • Evangelista Torricelli: We live at the bottom of a tremendously heavy sea of air
  • Eudoxus: The first mathematical model of the universe
  • James Black: Revolutionized drug design with the Beta-blocker
  • Inge Lehmann: Discovered our planet’s solid inner core
  • Chen-Ning Yang: Shattered a fundamental belief of physicists
  • Robert Hooke: Unveiled the spectacular microscopic world
  • Barbara McClintock: A Nobel Prize after years of rejection
  • Pythagoras: The cult of numbers and the need for proof
  • J. J. Thomson: Discovered the electron
  • Johannes Kepler: Solved the mystery of the planets
  • Dmitri Mendeleev: Discovered 8 new chemical elements by thinking
  • Maurice Hilleman: Record breaking inventor of over 40 vaccines
  • Marie Curie: Won – uniquely – both the chemistry & physics Nobel Prizes
  • Jacques Cousteau: Marine pioneer, inventor, Oscar winner
  • Niels Bohr: Founded the bizarre science of quantum mechanics
  • Srinivasa Ramanujan: Untrained genius of mathematics
  • Milutin Milankovic: Proved Earth’s climate is regulated by its orbit
  • Antoine Lavoisier: The giant of chemistry who was executed
  • Emmy Noether: The greatest of female mathematicians, she unlocked a secret of the universe
  • Wilder Penfield: Pioneer of brain surgery; mapped the brain’s functions
  • Charles Nicolle: Eradicated typhus epidemics
  • Samuel Morse: The telegraph and Morse code
  • Jane Goodall: Major discoveries in chimpanzee behavior
  • John Philoponus: 6th century anticipation of Galileo and Newton
  • William Perkin: Youthful curiosity brought the color purple to all
  • Democritus: Atomic theory BC and a universe of diverse inhabited worlds
  • Susumu Tonegawa: Discovered how our bodies make millions of different antibodies
  • Cecilia Payne: Discovered that stars are almost entirely hydrogen and helium

Top 100 Scientists

  • Our Top 100 Scientists

Our Most Popular Scientists

  • Astronomers
  • Biologists & Health Scientists
  • Chemists
  • Geologists and Paleontologists
  • Mathematicians
  • Physicists
  • Scientists in Ancient Times

List of Scientists

  • Alphabetical List

Recent Posts

  • Perfect Numbers and our Tiny Universe
  • What Happens when the Universe chooses its own Units?
  • Hipparchus and the 2000 Year-Old Clue
  • Darwin Pleaded for Cheaper Origin of Species
  • You Will Die For Showing I’m Wrong!
  • Getting Through Hard Times – The Triumph of Stoic Philosophy
  • Johannes Kepler, God, and the Solar System
  • Charles Babbage and the Vengeance of Organ-Grinders
  • Howard Robertson – the Man who Proved Einstein Wrong
  • Susskind, Alice, and Wave-Particle Gullibility




Alphabetical List of Scientists

Louis Agassiz | Maria Gaetana Agnesi | Al-BattaniAbu Nasr Al-Farabi | Alhazen | Jim Al-Khalili | Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi | Mihailo Petrovic Alas | Angel Alcala | Salim Ali | Luis Alvarez | Andre Marie Ampère | Anaximander | Carl Anderson | Mary Anning | Virginia Apgar | Archimedes | Agnes Arber | Aristarchus | Aristotle | Svante Arrhenius | Oswald Avery | Amedeo Avogadro | Avicenna

Charles Babbage | Francis Bacon | Alexander Bain | John Logie Baird | Joseph Banks | Ramon Barba | John Bardeen | Charles Barkla | Ibn Battuta | William Bayliss | George Beadle | Arnold Orville Beckman | Henri Becquerel | Emil Adolf Behring | Alexander Graham Bell | Emile Berliner | Claude Bernard | Timothy John Berners-Lee | Daniel Bernoulli | Jacob Berzelius | Henry Bessemer | Hans Bethe | Homi Jehangir Bhabha | Alfred Binet | Clarence Birdseye | Kristian Birkeland | James Black | Elizabeth Blackwell | Alfred Blalock | Katharine Burr Blodgett | Franz Boas | David Bohm | Aage Bohr | Niels Bohr | Ludwig Boltzmann | Max Born | Carl Bosch | Robert Bosch | Jagadish Chandra Bose | Satyendra Nath Bose | Walther Wilhelm Georg Bothe | Robert Boyle | Lawrence Bragg | Tycho Brahe | Brahmagupta | Hennig Brand | Georg Brandt | Wernher Von Braun | J Harlen Bretz | Louis de Broglie | Alexander Brongniart | Robert Brown | Michael E. Brown | Lester R. Brown | Eduard Buchner | Linda Buck | William Buckland | Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon | Robert Bunsen | Luther Burbank | Jocelyn Bell Burnell | Macfarlane Burnet | Thomas Burnet

Benjamin Cabrera | Santiago Ramon y Cajal | Rachel Carson | George Washington Carver | Henry Cavendish | Anders Celsius | James Chadwick | Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar | Erwin Chargaff | Noam Chomsky | Steven Chu | Leland Clark | John Cockcroft | Arthur Compton | Nicolaus Copernicus | Gerty Theresa Cori | Charles-Augustin de Coulomb | Jacques Cousteau | Brian Cox | Francis Crick | James Croll | Nicholas Culpeper | Marie Curie | Pierre Curie | Georges Cuvier | Adalbert Czerny

Gottlieb Daimler | John Dalton | James Dwight Dana | Charles Darwin | Humphry Davy | Peter Debye | Max Delbruck | Jean Andre Deluc | Democritus | René Descartes | Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel | Diophantus | Paul Dirac | Prokop Divis | Theodosius Dobzhansky | Frank Drake | K. Eric Drexler

John Eccles | Arthur Eddington | Thomas Edison | Paul Ehrlich | Albert Einstein | Gertrude Elion | Empedocles | Eratosthenes | Euclid | Eudoxus | Leonhard Euler

Michael Faraday | Pierre de Fermat | Enrico Fermi | Richard Feynman | Fibonacci – Leonardo of Pisa | Emil Fischer | Ronald Fisher | Alexander Fleming | John Ambrose Fleming | Howard Florey | Henry Ford | Lee De Forest | Dian Fossey | Leon Foucault | Benjamin Franklin | Rosalind Franklin | Sigmund Freud | Elizebeth Smith Friedman

Galen | Galileo Galilei | Francis Galton | Luigi Galvani | George Gamow | Martin Gardner | Carl Friedrich Gauss | Murray Gell-Mann | Sophie Germain | Willard Gibbs | William Gilbert | Sheldon Lee Glashow | Robert Goddard | Maria Goeppert-Mayer | Thomas Gold | Jane Goodall | Stephen Jay Gould | Otto von Guericke

Fritz Haber | Ernst Haeckel | Otto Hahn | Albrecht von Haller | Edmund Halley | Alister Hardy | Thomas Harriot | William Harvey | Stephen Hawking | Otto Haxel | Werner Heisenberg | Hermann von Helmholtz | Jan Baptist von Helmont | Joseph Henry | Caroline Herschel | John Herschel | William Herschel | Gustav Ludwig Hertz | Heinrich Hertz | Karl F. Herzfeld | George de Hevesy | Antony Hewish | David Hilbert | Maurice Hilleman | Hipparchus | Hippocrates | Shintaro Hirase | Dorothy Hodgkin | Robert Hooke | Frederick Gowland Hopkins | William Hopkins | Grace Murray Hopper | Frank Hornby | Jack Horner | Bernardo Houssay | Fred Hoyle | Edwin Hubble | Alexander von Humboldt | Zora Neale Hurston | James Hutton | Christiaan Huygens | Hypatia

Ernesto Illy | Jan Ingenhousz | Ernst Ising | Keisuke Ito

Mae Carol Jemison | Edward Jenner | J. Hans D. Jensen | Irene Joliot-Curie | James Prescott Joule | Percy Lavon Julian

Michio Kaku | Heike Kamerlingh Onnes | Pyotr Kapitsa | Friedrich August Kekulé | Frances Kelsey | Pearl Kendrick | Johannes Kepler | Abdul Qadeer Khan | Omar Khayyam | Alfred Kinsey | Gustav Kirchoff | Martin Klaproth | Robert Koch | Emil Kraepelin | Thomas Kuhn | Stephanie Kwolek

Joseph-Louis Lagrange | Jean-Baptiste Lamarck | Hedy Lamarr | Edwin Herbert Land | Karl Landsteiner | Pierre-Simon Laplace | Max von Laue | Antoine Lavoisier | Ernest Lawrence | Henrietta Leavitt | Antonie van Leeuwenhoek | Inge Lehmann | Gottfried Leibniz | Georges Lemaître | Leonardo da Vinci | Niccolo Leoniceno | Aldo Leopold | Rita Levi-Montalcini | Claude Levi-Strauss | Willard Frank Libby | Justus von Liebig | Carolus Linnaeus | Joseph Lister | John Locke | Hendrik Antoon Lorentz | Konrad Lorenz | Ada Lovelace | Percival Lowell | Lucretius | Charles Lyell | Trofim Lysenko

Ernst Mach | Marcello Malpighi | Jane Marcet | Guglielmo Marconi | Lynn Margulis | Barry Marshall | Polly Matzinger | Matthew Maury | James Clerk Maxwell | Ernst Mayr | Barbara McClintock | Lise Meitner | Gregor Mendel | Dmitri Mendeleev | Franz Mesmer | Antonio Meucci | John Michell | Albert Abraham Michelson | Thomas Midgeley Jr. | Milutin Milankovic | Maria Mitchell | Mario Molina | Thomas Hunt Morgan | Samuel Morse | Henry Moseley

Ukichiro Nakaya | John Napier | Giulio Natta | John Needham | John von Neumann | Thomas Newcomen | Isaac Newton | Charles Nicolle | Florence Nightingale | Tim Noakes | Alfred Nobel | Emmy Noether | Christiane Nusslein-Volhard | Bill Nye

Hans Christian Oersted | Georg Ohm | J. Robert Oppenheimer | Wilhelm Ostwald | William Oughtred

Blaise Pascal | Louis Pasteur | Wolfgang Ernst Pauli | Linus Pauling | Randy Pausch | Ivan Pavlov | Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin | Wilder Penfield | Marguerite Perey | William Perkin | John Philoponus | Jean Piaget | Philippe Pinel | Max Planck | Pliny the Elder | Henri Poincaré | Karl Popper | Beatrix Potter | Joseph Priestley | Proclus | Claudius Ptolemy | Pythagoras

Adolphe Quetelet | Harriet Quimby | Thabit ibn Qurra

C. V. Raman | Srinivasa Ramanujan | William Ramsay | John Ray | Prafulla Chandra Ray | Francesco Redi | Sally Ride | Bernhard Riemann | Wilhelm Röntgen | Hermann Rorschach | Ronald Ross | Ibn Rushd | Ernest Rutherford

Carl Sagan | Abdus Salam | Jonas Salk | Frederick Sanger | Alberto Santos-Dumont | Walter Schottky | Erwin Schrödinger | Theodor Schwann | Glenn Seaborg | Hans Selye | Charles Sherrington | Gene Shoemaker | Ernst Werner von Siemens | George Gaylord Simpson | B. F. Skinner | William Smith | Frederick Soddy | Mary Somerville | Arnold Sommerfeld | Hermann Staudinger | Nicolas Steno | Nettie Stevens | William John Swainson | Leo Szilard

Niccolo Tartaglia | Edward Teller | Nikola Tesla | Thales of Miletus | Theon of Alexandria | Benjamin Thompson | J. J. Thomson | William Thomson | Henry David Thoreau | Kip S. Thorne | Clyde Tombaugh | Susumu Tonegawa | Evangelista Torricelli | Charles Townes | Youyou Tu | Alan Turing | Neil deGrasse Tyson

Harold Urey

Craig Venter | Vladimir Vernadsky | Andreas Vesalius | Rudolf Virchow | Artturi Virtanen | Alessandro Volta

Selman Waksman | George Wald | Alfred Russel Wallace | John Wallis | Ernest Walton | James Watson | James Watt | Alfred Wegener | John Archibald Wheeler | Maurice Wilkins | Thomas Willis | E. O. Wilson | Sven Wingqvist | Sergei Winogradsky | Carl Woese | Friedrich Wöhler | Wilbur and Orville Wright | Wilhelm Wundt

Chen-Ning Yang

Ahmed Zewail

Return to top of page

Famous Scientists - Privacy - Contact - About - Content & Imagery © 2025