Fritz Haber (1868 - 1934)

During his time at University of Karlsruhe from 1894 to 1911, Fritz Haber and his assistant Robert Le Rossignol invented the Haber–Bosch process, which is the catalytic formation of ammonia from hydrogen and atmospheric nitrogen under conditions of high temperature and pressure. This discovery was a direct consequence of Le Châtelier’s principle, announced in 1884, […]

Max Planck (1858 - 1947)

Max Planck came from a traditional, intellectual family. His paternal great-grandfather and grandfather were both theology professors in Göttingen; his father was a law professor in Kiel and Munich. Planck was born in Kiel, Holstein, to Johann Julius Wilhelm Planck and his second wife, Emma Patzig. He was baptized with the name of Karl Ernst […]

Ernest Rutherford (1871 - 1937)

Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson, OM, FRS (30 August 1871 – 19 October 1937) was a New Zealand-born British physicist who came to be known as the father of nuclear physics. Encyclopædia Britannica considers him to be the greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday (1791–1867). In early work, Rutherford discovered the concept of radioactive […]

Heinrich Hertz (1857 - 1894)

Heinrich Rudolf Hertz was born in 1857 in Hamburg, then a sovereign state of the German Confederation, into a prosperous and cultured Hanseatic family. His father Gustav Ferdinand Hertz (originally named David Gustav Hertz) (1827–1914) was a barrister and later a senator. His mother was Anna Elisabeth Pfefferkorn. Hertz’s father converted from Judaism to Christianity […]

Michael Faraday (1791 - 1867)

Michael Faraday FRS (/ˈfæ.rəˌdeɪ/; 22 September 1791 – 25 August 1867) was an English scientist who contributed to the study of electromagnetism and electrochemistry. His main discoveries include the principles underlying electromagnetic induction, diamagnetism and electrolysis. Although Faraday received little formal education, he was one of the most influential scientists in history. It was by […]

Enrico Fermi (1901 - 1954)

Enrico Fermi (Italian: [enˈriːko ˈfermi]; 29 September 1901 – 28 November 1954) was an Italian physicist and the creator of the world’s first nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1. He has been called the “architect of the nuclear age” and the “architect of the atomic bomb”.[2] He was one of the very few physicists in history […]

Niels Bohr (1885 - 1962)

Niels Henrik David Bohr (Danish: [ne̝ls ˈb̥oɐ̯ˀ]; 7 October 1885 – 18 November 1962) was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. Bohr was also a philosopher and a promoter of scientific research. Niels Bohr developed the […]

Max Born (1882 - 1970)

Max Born (German: [bɔɐ̯n]; 11 December 1882 – 5 January 1970) was a German physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics. He also made contributions to solid-state physics and optics and supervised the work of a number of notable physicists in the 1920s and 1930s. Born won the 1954 Nobel […]

Ugo Fano (1912 - 2001)

Ugo Fano earned his doctorate in mathematics at the University of Turin in 1934, under Enrico Persico, with a thesis entitled Sul Calcolo dei Termini Spettrali e in Particolare dei Potenziali di Ionizzazione Nella Meccanica Quantistica (On the Quantum Mechanical Calculation Spectral Terms and their Extension to Ionization). As part of his PhD examination he […]

Roger Wolcott Sperry (1913 - 1994)

In 1942, Roger Wolcott Sperry began work at the Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology, then a part of Harvard University. There he focused on experiments involving the rearranging of motor and sensory nerves. He left in 1946 to become an assistant professor, and later associate professor, at the University of Chicago. In 1949, during a […]

Herman Eisen (1918 - 2014)

Herman Eisen’s first faculty position was at NYU in the then-new Department of Industrial Medicine, where he was funded to work part-time as a researcher and invest the remainder of his time in clinical practice. He found this combination unsustainable and therefore was receptive when approached by Barry Wood to recruit him to Washington University […]

Salvador Luria (1912 - 1991)

Salvador Luria arrived in New York City on September 12, 1940, and soon changed his first and middle names. With the help of physicist Enrico Fermi, whom he knew from his time at the University of Rome, Luria received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship at Columbia University. He soon met Delbrück and Hershey, and they collaborated […]

Renato Dulbecco (1914 - 2012)

After the war Renato Dulbecco resumed his work at Levi’s laboratory, but soon he moved, together with Levi-Montalcini, to the U.S., where, at Indiana University, he worked with Salvador Luria on bacteriophages. In the summer of 1949 he moved to Caltech, joining Max Delbrück’s group (see Phage group). There he started his studies about animal […]

Howard Martin Temin (1934 - 1994)

Howard Martin Temin’s first exposure to experimental science was during his time at the California Institute of Technology as a graduate student in laboratory of Professor Renato Dulbecco. Temin originally studied embryology at CIT, but after about a year and a half, he switched to animal virology. He became interested Dulbecco’s lab after a chance […]

John Kendrew (1917 - 1997)

John Kendrew shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for chemistry with Max Perutz for determining the first atomic structures of proteins using X-ray crystallography. Their work was done at what is now the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Kendrew determined the structure of the protein myoglobin, which stores oxygen in muscle cells. On Saturday […]

Daniel Nathans (1928 - 1999)

Daniel Nathans (October 30, 1928 – November 16, 1999) was an American microbiologist. He shared the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for the discovery of restriction enzymes. Daniel Nathans was born in Wilmington, Delaware, the last of nine children born to Russian Jewish immigrant parents, Sarah (Levitan) and Samuel Nathans. During the Great […]

Edward Tatum (1909 - 1975)

Edward Lawrie Tatum (December 14, 1909 – November 5, 1975) was an American geneticist. He shared half of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1958 with George Beadle for showing that genes control individual steps in metabolism. The other half of that year’s award went to Joshua Lederberg. Beadle and Tatum’s key experiments […]

George Beadle (1970 - 1989)

In 1931 George Beadle was awarded a National Research Council Fellowship at the California Institute of Technology at Pasadena, where he remained from 1931 until 1936. During this period he continued his work on Indian corn and began, in collaboration with Professors Theodosius Dobzhansky, S. Emerson, and Alfred Sturtevant, work on crossing-over in the fruit […]

Francis Crick (1916 - 2004)

Francis Harry Compton Crick OM FRS[1][4] (8 June 1916 – 28 July 2004) was a British molecular biologist, biophysicist, and neuroscientist, most noted for being a co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953 with James Watson and Rosalind Franklin. Together with Watson and Maurice Wilkins, he was jointly awarded the 1962 Nobel […]

Linus Pauling (1901 - 1994)

Linus Carl Pauling (February 28, 1901 – August 19, 1994) was an American chemist, biochemist, peace activist, author, and educator. He published more than 1,200 papers and books, of which about 850 dealt with scientific topics. New Scientist called him one of the 20 greatest scientists of all time, and as of 2000, he was […]

Martha Chase (1927 - 2003)

Martha Chase was born in 1927 in Cleveland, Ohio. She had only one sister, Ruth Chase. In 1950 she received her bachelor’s degree from the College of Wooster and in 1964 her PhD from the University of Southern California. In 1952 Chase met the American bacteriophage expert Alfred Hershey at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory from […]

Lise Meitner (1878 - 1968)

Lise Meitner (English: /ˈliːzə ˈmaɪtnər/; 7 November 1878 – 27 October 1968) was an Austrian-Swedish physicist who worked on radioactivity and nuclear physics. Otto Hahn and Meitner led the small group of scientists who first discovered nuclear fission of uranium when it absorbed an extra neutron; the results were published in early 1939. Meitner and […]

Erwin Chargaff (1905 - 2002)

Erwin Chargaff proposed two main rules in his lifetime which were appropriately named Chargaff’s rules. The first and best known achievement was to show that in natural DNA the number of guanine units equals the number of cytosine units and the number of adenine units equals the number of thymine units. In human DNA, for […]

Rosalind Franklin (1920 - 1958)

Rosalind Elsie Franklin (25 July 1920 – 16 April 1958) was an English chemist and X-ray crystallographer who made contributions to the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), RNA (ribonucleic acid), viruses, coal, and graphite. Although her works on coal and viruses were appreciated in her lifetime, her contributions to the discovery […]

Rachel Carson (1907 - 1964)

Rachel Louise Carson (May 27, 1907 – April 14, 1964) was an American marine biologist, author, and conservationist whose book Silent Spring and other writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement. Rachel Carson began her career as an aquatic biologist in the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, and became a full-time nature writer in […]

John Muir (1838 - 1914)

John Muir (/mjʊər/; April 21, 1838 – December 24, 1914) also known as “John of the Mountains”, was a Scottish-American naturalist, author, environmental philosopher, glaciologist and early advocate for the preservation of wilderness in the United States. His letters, essays, and books describing his adventures in nature, especially in the Sierra Nevada, have been read […]

Aldo Leopold (1887 - 1948)

In 1909, Aldo Leopold was assigned to the Forest Service’s District 3 in the Arizona and New Mexico territories. At first, he was a forest assistant at the Apache National Forest in the Arizona Territory. In 1911, he was transferred to the Carson National Forest in northern New Mexico. Leopold’s career, which kept him in […]

Arthur J. Jackson (1924 - 2017)

Arthur J. Jackson was born in Cleveland, Ohio on October 18, 1924. He moved to Portland, Oregon with his parents in 1939, and completed Grant High School there. After graduation, he worked in Alaska for a naval construction company until November 1942, when he returned to Portland and enlisted in the United States Marine Corps […]

Gabe Pressman (1924 - 2017)

After earning his master’s degree from Columbia in 1947, Gabe Pressman worked for a short period as a journalist for the Newark Evening News. Columbia then awarded him a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship, and he spent the next 15 months in Europe as a freelance journalist, contributing feature stories for various outlets, including the Overseas News […]

Michael Powell (1905 - 1990)

Michael Powell entered the film industry in 1925 through working with director Rex Ingram at the Victorine Studios in Nice, France (the contact with Ingram was made through Powell’s father, who owned a hotel in Nice). He first started out as a general studio hand, the proverbial “gofer”: sweeping the floor, making coffee, fetching and […]