Top Biologists

Oswald Avery 1877 – 1955.
Discovered that DNA passes heredity instructions through successive generations of organisms – it carries the chemical code of life, as revealed by the Avery–MacLeod–McCarty experiment.

James Black 1924 – 2010.
Revolutionized drug design with beta-blockers for heart disease and histamine antagonists for stomach ulcers.

Elizabeth Blackwell 1821 – 1910.
The first woman to qualify as a physician in America; founder of America’s first medical school for women.

Linda Buck Born 1947.
Co-discovered how our sense of smell works: humans have about 350 different types of odor receptor cell which send signals directly into the brain’s olfactory bulb.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal 1852 – 1934.
Founder of modern neuroscience: proved the neuron doctrine, which says that neurons behave as biochemically distinct cells rather than a network of interlinked cells.

Rachel Carson 1907 – 1964.
A founder of 20th century environmentalism, her book Silent Spring led to a reappraisal of the effect of chemicals such as DDT on the environment, leading to bans and heavy restrictions.

George Washington Carver c.1860 – 1943.
Improved the agricultural economy of the United States by promoting nitrogen-providing peanuts as an alternative crop to cotton to prevent soil depletion.

Erwin Chargaff 1905 – 2002.
Chargaff’s rules paved the way to the discovery of DNA’s structure.

Jacques Cousteau 1910 – 1997.
Oscar winning marine pioneer; coinvented the breathe-on-demand valve for SCUBA diving; popularized marine biology with several dramatic television series.

Francis Crick 1916 – 2004.
Codiscovered DNA’s structure and replication mechanism; established the Sequence Hypothesis and the Central Dogma; discovered that DNA uses a triplet code to control the formation of proteins from amino acids.

Marie Curie 1867 – 1934.
Codiscovered the chemical elements radium and polonium; made numerous pioneering contributions to the study of radioactive elements; carried out the first research into the treatment of tumors with radiation.

Charles Darwin 1809 – 1882.
Authored one of the most famous books in history, On the Origin of Species, in which he described and provided evidence for the theory of evolution by natural selection.

John Eccles 1903 – 1997.
Discovered how messages pass between nerve cells in mammals, establishing that both excitatory and inhibitory processes are chemical in nature, rather than electrical.

Empedocles c. 490 BC – c 430 BC.
An ancient theory of natural selection; mass conservation; and the four elements which are now often misattributed to Aristotle.

Ronald Fisher 1890 – 1962.
Invented experimental design; devised the statistical concept of variance; unified evolution by natural selection with Mendel’s rules of inheritance, so defining the new field of population genetics.

Alexander Fleming 1881 – 1955.
Discovered that treating wounds and infections with antiseptic agents caused more deaths than if no action were taken. Discovered penicillin and predicted the rise of antibiotic resistant bacteria.

Howard Florey 1898 – 1968.
Howard Florey and his scientific team transformed penicillin from a scientific curiosity into a potent antibiotic – a magic bullet that has saved countless millions of lives.

Rosalind Franklin 1920 – 1958.
Provided much of the experimental data used to establish the structure of DNA; discovered that DNA can exist in two forms.

Galen 129 – c. 216
Began his practice as a physician to gladiators and established a link between diet and health. Galen created a flawed doctrine that dominated Western and Arab medicine for 1,500 years.

Jane Goodall Born 1934.
Ground breaking discoveries in chimpanzee behavior; established that chimpanzees have similar social behavior to humans and also that they make tools and hunt for meat.

Stephen Jay Gould 1941 – 2002.
Devised the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which proposes that evolution consists of long periods of stability broken by shorter periods of rapid change. An award-winning author and popularizer of science.

Alister Hardy 1896 – 1985.
Created the aquatic ape theory, which claims that our species evolved in water.

William Harvey 1578 to 1657.
Explained blood circulation for the first time, showing there is a complete circuit beginning and ending in the heart.

George de Hevesy 1885 – 1966.
Pioneered isotopes as tracers to study chemical and biological processes; discovered how plants and animals utilize particular chemical elements after they are taken in as nutrients. Discovered element 72, hafnium.

Maurice Hilleman 1919 – 2005.
The most prolific inventor of vaccines in history; developed over forty vaccines; invented eight of the fourteen vaccines used in routine vaccination schedules today; his vaccines may account for as many as eight million lives saved every year.

Hippocrates 460 BC – c. 370 BC.
The father of Western medicine: systematized medical treatments, disentangling them from religion and superstitions; trained physicians; produced a large body of medical textbooks. The famous Hippocratic Oath binds physicians to good ethical practices.

Robert Hooke 1635 – 1703.
Discovered cells and wrote one of the most significant books in scientific history, Micrographia, revealing the microscopic world for the first time.

Jack Horner Born 1946.
Popularizer of science: discovered that dinosaurs cared for their young and some nested in colonies. Working on reactivating dormant dinosaur DNA to hatch a modern-day dinosaur.

Irene Joliot-Curie 1897 – 1956.
Codiscovered how to convert stable chemical elements into ‘designer’ radioactive elements; these have saved millions of lives and are used in tens of millions of medical procedures every year.

Frances Kelsey 1914 – 2015.
In the early 1960s, thousands of children died or were born malformed because their mothers took the drug thalidomide during pregnancy. Few ‘thalidomide babies’ were born in the USA, largely because Frances Kelsey blocked American sales.

Karl Landsteiner 1868 – 1943.
Discovered the human blood group system, paving the way for safe blood transfusions; discovered the Rh factor in blood; proved polio is an infectious disease spread by a virus; discovered haptens.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek 1632 – 1723.
The father of microbiology, he used remarkable self-made lenses to discover single-celled animals and plants, bacteria, and spermatozoa.

Carolus Linnaeus 1707 – 1778.
Organized our view of the natural world with the two-part naming system we use to classify all lifeforms; named and classified about 13,000 lifeforms; broke with tradition by classifying humans in the same way as other lifeforms.

Barbara McClintock 1902 – 1992.
Groundbreaking genetics: showed that genes switch the physical traits of an organism on or off; discovered chromosomal crossover, which increases genetic variation in species; discovered transposition – that genes can move about within chromosomes.

Gregor Mendel 1822 – 1884.
Founded the science of genetics; identified many of the rules of heredity; identified recessive and dominant traits, and that traits are passed from parents to offspring in a mathematically predictable way.

Franz Mesmer 1734 – 1815.
Mesmer wrongly believed he had discovered a remarkable new phenomenon, which he called animal magnetism. He used this to treat people with psychosomatic illnesses. The treatment actually worked through the power of suggestion, later recognized as the genuine phenomenon of hypnosis (or mesmerism).

Charles Nicolle 1866 – 1936.
Discovered that typhus is carried by lice; showed how epidemics could be prevented. Discovered inapparent infections.

Florence Nightingale 1820 – 1910.
A health pioneer who transformed nursing into a respected, highly trained profession; used statistics to analyze wider health outcomes; advocated sanitary reforms largely credited with adding 20 years to life expectancy between 1871 and 1935.

Louis Pasteur 1822 – 1895.
The father of modern microbiology; transformed chemistry and biology with his discovery of mirror-image molecules; discovered anaerobic bacteria; established the germ theory of disease; invented food preservation by pasteurization.

Linus Pauling 1901 – 1994.
Maverick giant of chemistry; formulated valence bond theory and electronegativity; founded the fields of quantum chemistry, molecular biology, and molecular genetics. Discovered the alpha-helix structure of proteins; proved that sickle-cell anemia is a molecular disease.

Wilder Penfield 1891 – 1976.
Pioneer of brain surgery who mapped the human brain, showing which parts of it are most strongly associated with functions such as the different senses, different body movements, and speech.

Philippe Pinel 1745 – 1826.
Founded scientific psychiatry; made humane changes to the conditions under which mentally ill people were held; promoted the idea that mentally ill people should be understood as individuals.

Francesco Redi 1626 – 1697.
Devised and performed the first controlled experiments in scientific history; showed that flies breed and lay eggs and do not spontaneously generate; founded modern parasitology.

Theodor Schwann 1810 – 1882.
Established that the cell is the basic unit of all living things; his classification of cells is the foundation of modern histology; discovered the enzyme pepsin; identified the role microorganisms play in alcohol fermentation.

Gene Shoemaker 1928 to 1997.
The first astrogeologist and a founder of planetary impact science; proposed microscopic life could travel between planets on rocks blasted into space by asteroid impacts.

B. F. Skinner 1904 – 1990.
The 20th century’s most influential psychologist; pioneered the science of behaviorism; discovered the power of positive reinforcement in learning; designed the first psychological experiments producing quantitatively repeatable results.

Nettie Stevens 1861 – 1912.
Discovered that an organism’s sex is determined by its chromosomes, now known as the XY sex-determination system – the discovery was the first time a link was demonstrated between a physical characteristic and chromosome differences.

Susumu Tonegawa Born 1939.
Discovered how the immune system produces millions of different antibodies to combat almost any micro-organism. In doing so, he solved the tantalizing long-term puzzle of antibody diversity.

Youyou Tu Born 1930.
Discovered the drug artemisinin, a treatment for malaria, extracting it from sweet wormwood, an herb utilized in Chinese fever treatments for more than 2,000 years. Artemisinin and its derivatives have saved or improved the lives of millions of people.

Harold Urey 1893 – 1981.
Discovered deuterium; showed how isotope ratios in rocks reveal past Earth climates; founded modern planetary science; the Miller-Urey experiment demonstrated that electrically sparking simple gases produces amino acids – the building blocks of life.

Craig Venter Born 1946.
First to read the entire genome of a free-living organism; played a major role in mapping the human genome; discovered more genes than had ever been previously documented; created synthetic DNA and new bacteria species.

Andreas Vesalius 1514 – 1564.
Founded modern anatomy, overthrowing misconceptions about the body that had persisted for over a thousand years.

Rudolf Virchow 1821 – 1902.
A founder of both pathology and social medicine, Virchow correctly identified that diseases are caused by malfunctioning cells. He named leukemia and was the first to catalog and name conditions such embolism, thrombosis, chordoma, and ochronosis.

George Wald 1906 – 1997.
Explained the chemistry of the eye after discovering the vitamin A chemical cycle that allows our eyes to record light. Established the chemistry of color vision and color blindness.

Selman Waksman 1888 – 1973.
Discovered antibiotics made by soil-dwelling bacteria including streptomycin, the first effective treatment for tuberculosis; coined the word antibiotic.

Alfred R. Wallace 1823 – 1913.
Independently formulated the theory of evolution by natural selection; was one of the first biologists to express concern about the effects human activities were having on the natural world.

Maurice Wilkins 1916 – 2004.
Initiated the experimental research into DNA that culminated in Watson and Crick’s discovery of its structure in 1953; crystallized DNA and obtained the best quality X-ray images of DNA seen at that time, indicating DNA molecules were helix shaped.

Sergei Winogradsky 1856 – 1953.
Founded microbial ecology; discovered chemosynthetic life forms which obtain energy from chemical reactions rather than from sunlight; discovered nitrogen-fixing bacteria in soil that make nitrates available to green plants.

Carl Woese 1916 – 2004.
Discovered a third basic form of life, the Archaea; redrew the tree of life; revolutionized biology using genetic analysis, allowing all forms of life to be included in the study of evolution.