Famous Scientists

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

Oswald Avery

Oswald Avery

Lived 1877 – 1955.

Oswald Avery led the team that discovered DNA passes heredity instructions through successive generations of organisms – it carries the chemical code of life.

Avery and his colleagues published their discovery in a classic paper describing what came to be known as the Avery–MacLeod–McCarty experiment. The experiment actually represented more than a decade’s worth of scientific investigations.

Advertisements

Beginnings

Oswald Theodore Avery was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada on October 21, 1877. His British parents, Joseph Francis Avery and Elizabeth Crowdy, had arrived in Canada four years earlier.

They had emigrated because Joseph, a Baptist minister, felt a spiritual calling to do God’s work in North America. The couple’s three sons were all born in Canada; Oswald was the second son.

The family moved to New York City, USA when Oswald was 10 years old. His father had been invited to take over as pastor of Mariner’s Temple Baptist mission. The mission was on New York’s lower East Side, an overcrowded part of the city with a multitude of social problems – a tough place for children to grow up.

In their spare time Oswald and his older brother Ernest taught themselves to play the cornet. From the age of 12 onwards Oswald and Ernest performed music on Sundays outside the mission. The idea was to entice passers-by inside. The neighborhood’s population included many Catholics and Jews, and Oswald’s father was eager to convert them to the Baptist creed.

Oswald was a highly talented musician. Later he was awarded a scholarship to the National Conservatory of Music, a scholarship he did not use.

At the age of 15, Oswald suffered two shocks: first the death of his brother Ernest most likely from tuberculosis; then the death of his father from kidney disease.

No Science at College

In 1893, just before reaching the age of 16, Oswald Avery got his diploma from New York Male Grammar School and enrolled at Colgate Academy.

He became a freshman at New York’s Colgate University in 1896, where again his musical talent shone through and he became leader of the college band.

He majored in humanities, averaging higher than 9 out of 10 in his final years. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in humanities in June 1900, age 22. He had taken science courses only when they were compulsory.

The courses he chose in his final year included Philosophy, English Literature, Political Economy, Public Speaking, and History of Art.

Medical School

By the fall of 1900, Avery’s ideas about his future had changed dramatically: he entered medical school – Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York.

He continued to score good grades at Columbia, with one ironic exception. The man who would eventually become a world-renowned bacteriologist scored his worst grades in the bacteriology course.

In 1904, age 26, Avery graduated and moved into general medical practice.

An Introduction to Bacteriology

After two years working as a family doctor, Avery was fed up. Too many of his patients were suffering from incurable conditions, leaving him feeling thoroughly helpless.

He reached the conclusion that the best way he could help society would be to find ways of stopping microorganisms killing people. He decided to become a microbiologist.

He made the transition gradually, working part-time in milk bacteriology – his job was to make measurements of bacteria in milk before and after pasteurization.

Pneumonia Research

In 1907, age 30, Avery became assistant director of the Hoagland Laboratory in Brooklyn, New York. There, in addition to teaching students, he trained in modern chemical and bacteriological methods. He also learned to carry out experiments with unusually meticulous care – this would be one of the characteristics of his future research work.

He began his research career with a study of fermented milk products such as yogurt. He investigated their role in controlling harmful gut bacteria in humans, a theme that would became fashionable again about 100 years later.

Lactobacillus plantarum

Image of Lactobacillus plantarum bacteria, common in fermented foods. The presence of such bacteria in the human gut is believed to improve our health.

Avery published nine papers in academic journals. In 1913, a paper he wrote about tuberculosis caught the eye of Rufus Cole, director of the Rockefeller Institute in Manhattan. On a visit to Hoagland, Cole made a point of having a chat with Avery, sizing him up.

The upshot was that Avery became a bacteriologist at the Rockefeller Institute in September 1913, a month before his thirty-sixth birthday.

For the rest of his career, Avery focused his research on pneumonia bacteria. Penicillin antibiotics were still decades away, and over 50 thousand people in America were dying of pneumonia every year.

A Strange Way to Become an American

America entered World War 1 in 1917. Avery attempted to join the U.S. Army Medical Corps as an officer. He was refused, because, although he had lived all his adult life in America – over 30 years in fact – he was not a citizen.

Avery, 40 years old and an eminent bacteriologist, enlisted as a private – the lowest rank. Then, because he was on active duty in wartime, he was naturalized as an American citizen. In 1918 he was promoted to Medical Corps Captain.

The Discovery that Genes are DNA

Heredity and DNA Before Avery

Mendel, Miescher, and DNA

In 1866, Gregor Mendel, working in Moravia (now the Czech Republic), showed offspring inherit their parents’ physical characteristics according to clear mathematical rules. His work was ignored until 1900.

In 1871, Friedrich Miescher in Germany discovered a new substance, naming it nuclein, because it came from the cell nucleus. Today we call this substance deoxyribonucleic acid or, more simply, DNA.

Scientists did not actually suspect that DNA played a role in heredity. They knew something must carry instructions from parents to offspring, and they knew the instructions followed Mendel’s laws. These instructions – the units of heredity – were given the name genes.

Nobody knew what genes were made of, but for a long time they were thought to be based on proteins.

The Griffith Experiment – Life Gets Weird

In 1928, Frederick Griffith in the UK found something amazing – he turned one strain of bacteria into another.

His work involved Streptococcus pneumoniae, a species that has two strains – Rough (R) and Smooth (S) – so named because of their appearance under the microscope.

rough vs smooth

Cartoon representation of Streptococcus pneumoniae rough and smooth strains.

Rough is not especially harmful. Smooth is a killer.

Griffith experimented by infecting mice with R and S bacteria. He found:

  • Mice infected with R survived – as expected.
  • Mice infected with S died – as expected.
  • Mice infected with heat-killed S survived – as expected.
  • Mice infected with a mixture of R and heat-killed S died – NOT expected. Moreover, living S were found in the bodies of mice infected with a mixture of R and heat-killed S – NOT expected.

Something from the dead S had prompted the living R to produce living S. And, very significantly, the change was heritable: When R was transformed to S, the following generations of bacteria were S.

After Avery

From Skepticism to Belief

Griffith’s work interested Avery. It related to his own specialty – pneumonia bacteria. Avery admired Griffith, but greeted his extraordinary results with disbelief, suspecting the bacteria were contaminated.

A young research fellow in Avery’s lab, Martin Dawson, repeated Griffith’s work. When Dawson confirmed Griffith’s results, Avery was forced to admit that R to S transformation was a fact. Other laboratories came to the same conclusion.

No Need for Mice

Dawson continued researching the strange phenomenon. In 1930, he made significant progress, proving that mice were innocent bystanders. He mixed R and heat-killed S bacteria in glassware and saw R reproducing to produce S.

First Isolation of DNA

Dawson moved to a new job and Avery enthused another young Rockefeller researcher, James Alloway, to begin working on what he called the transforming principle.

Alloway dissolved heat-killed S cells and filtered out fragments to leave a fibrous substance. We now know this was DNA, but Alloway did not. He found this substance was all that was required to transform R to S. In 1932, Alloway moved to a new job.

DNA

The white substance is DNA extracted from cell nuclei.

Dawson and Alloway offered theories about the transforming principle, neither of which would prove to be correct.

Slow, Difficult Work

Avery began carrying out experiments himself, but his time was severely limited by work on other major studies. He also spent about six months away from the lab seriously ill.

The experiments were difficult, often producing results that could not be repeated. Progress was very slow.

By 1935, Avery’s evidence suggested to him that neither proteins nor carbohydrates caused the transformation. Perhaps, he speculated in 1936, a nucleic acid was the key factor? Of course, there are only two nuclei acids, DNA and RNA, so Avery was getting close to the answer. However, many more years would pass before he felt he had proof of his speculation.

Getting Faster – Proteins and Lipids Positively Ruled Out

In 1935, Avery was joined by a new young researcher, Colin MacLeod, a prodigy who had been admitted to Montreal’s McGill University at the age of 15.

MacLeod and Avery had unusually similar backgrounds: they were each natives of Nova Scotia and each had moved to New York. They were both qualified medical doctors who had shifted careers into bacteriology. Their fathers had both been protestant church ministers, and both had moved to Canada from the UK.

MacLeod gave the research a new impetus, developing more reliable laboratory techniques. However, both Avery and MacLeod were involved in other projects too.

In 1940, they dropped all other work to concentrate on the transforming principle, toiling together for long hours in the laboratory.

By 1941, Avery and MacLeod were certain the transforming principle was protein-free and lipid-free. They knew this because they could reliably remove these substances from heat-killed S bacteria, and see that whatever was left caused the R to S transition.

At this stage MacLeod officially left the project; he had been appointed Professor of Bacteriology at New York University’s School of Medicine. In practice, however, he came back frequently as the project neared its exciting conclusion.

Rough is Transformed to Smooth by Smooth’s DNA

With MacLeod’s official departure, Maclyn McCarty, a 30-year-old postdoctoral fellow from Indiana, joined the project in September 1941. McCarty had been carrying out research at Johns Hopkins Hospital. When his boss there, Professor Edwards Park, heard McCarty was going to join Avery’s lab, he told McCarty that Avery was at the top of the stratosphere for research.

Progress was now rapid. The scientists removed all other parts of the cell to leave just the transforming substance. McCarty established by chemical testing that the substance could only be deoxyribonucleic acid, i.e. DNA. Avery noted that DNA had not even been found in these bacteria before.

Avery–MacLeod–McCarty

Near the end of 1943, Avery, MacLeod, and McCarty submitted their work for publication in the Journal of Experimental Medicine. It was published the following year.

They had discovered that DNA is genetic material. It induces heritable changes in bacteria. It has very high molecular weight, and is therefore a huge molecule. Their work came to be known as the Avery–MacLeod–McCarty experiment.

Joshua Lederberg“The publication of Avery, MacLeod and McCarty just 50 years ago marked the opening of the contemporary era of genetics, its molecular phase.”

Joshua Lederberg, 1994
Microbiologist, Nobel Prize in Medicine 1958
 

Genes are DNA

Ironically, Avery’s work was completed while World War 2 was raging. He and his colleagues discovered one of the secrets of life in a time when more scientists than ever were seeking efficient ways of delivering death.

Avery was 66 years old when his DNA work was finally published.

The idea that genes are DNA was strongly resisted. A number of influential scientists would not let go of the idea that genes were proteins. They explained away Avery’s results by saying his DNA was contaminated by proteins. However, in time, nobody could contradict DNA’s new status.

One of the few scientists to quickly embrace Avery’s work was Edwin Chargaff, and it was he who took the next great steps toward understanding DNA’s role in genetics.

By 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick had discovered DNA’s structure and how it replicates. Avery lived long enough to see this.

Scientists now know with certainty that DNA carries the instructions needed to assemble lifeless molecules into living organisms.

Frank Macfarlane Burnet“…the discovery that DNA could transfer genetic information from one pneumococcus to another… heralded the opening of the field of molecular biology…”

Frank Macfarlane Burnet, Changing Patterns, 1968
Virologist, Nobel Prize in Medicine 1960
 

No Nobel Prize

Avery was never awarded a Nobel Prize. He was nominated frequently for work on antigens he did in the 1930s. He was also nominated for his DNA work. The nominations were not successful.

In 1945, the British Royal Society awarded Avery its prestigious Copley Medal, and in 1947 he received America’s major prize in medicine – the Lasker Award.

James Watson“Avery’s experiment made it [DNA] smell like the essential genetic material.”

James D. Watson, The Double Helix, 1968
Geneticist, Nobel Prize in Medicine 1962
 

Some Personal Details and the End

Avery lived mainly for his work. He never married and had no children. He never lost his fondness for music, and in his vacations he enjoyed spending time sailing.

He had been a notable public speaker and debater at college, but in his professional life he was usually reluctant to speak in public. In fact, he was really only at ease in his laboratory, in the company of his researchers. Everyone called him ‘Fess’ – short for Professor.

In 1948, age 71, Avery moved to Nashville, Tennessee to enjoy some family life. He rented a large house close to the home of his younger brother Roy, who was teaching bacteriology at Vanderbilt University. Avery spent a lot of time with Roy’s family. His cousin Minnie Wandell became his housekeeper.

Oswald Theodore Avery died age 78 on February 20, 1955 in Nashville of liver cancer. He was buried in Nashville’s Mount Olivet Cemetery.

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:

"Oswald Avery." Famous Scientists. famousscientists.org. 20 Jul. 2016. Web.  
<www.famousscientists.org/oswald-avery/>.

Published by FamousScientists.org

Further Reading
Oswald T. Avery, Colin M. MacLeod, Maclyn McCarty
Studies on the Chemical Nature of the Substance Inducing Transformation of Pneumococcal Types – Induction of Transformation by a Desoxyribonucleic Acid Fraction Isolated from Pneumococcus Type III
Journal of Experimental Medicine Vol. 79, No. 2, pp. 137–158, 1943

René Jules Dubos
The Professor, the Institute, and DNA
Rockefeller Univ. Press, 1976

Horace Freeland Judson
The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology
Simon & Schuster, 1979

Maclyn McCarty
The Transforming Principle
W. W. Norton & Company, 1986

Joshua Lederberg
The Transformation of Genetics by DNA
Genetics Vol. 136, pp. 423-426, February, 1994

Acknowledgements
Image of DNA in flask in the Berlin Museum of Natural History by LoKiLeCh under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

Image of Frank Macfarlane Burnet by Denver Faingold under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

More from FamousScientists.org:
  • francis-crick
    Francis Crick
  • craig venter
    Craig Venter
  • erwin chargaff
    Erwin Chargaff
  • Gregor Mendel
    Gregor Mendel
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