Alfred Nobel. Alfred Nobel is well known for inventing dynamite, which revolutionized the usage of high explosives in the contemporary era. He was also the one who established the Nobel Prizes. Louis Pasteur. French chemist and microbiologist — Louis Pasteur is renowned for his discoveries of the principles of vaccination and pasteurization.
Carl Sagan. In the s and s, Carl Sagan was perhaps one of the most well-known scientists. Nikola Tesla. Nikola Tesla , a Serbian-American engineer and scientist, made many inventions geared towards the application of electric power. He pioneered AC generation and transmission technologies and invented the first alternating current AC motor. James Watson. James Dewey Watson was an American geneticist and biophysicist who discovered the molecular structure of deoxyribonucleic acid DNA , the substance that is the very basis of heredity.
More Science. Please email or share this article! Email Pin FB. FitzRoy founded the U. But after losing his fortunes, suffering from depression and poor health, and facing fierce criticism of his forecasting system, he slit his throat in Jean-Baptiste Lamarck — Lamarck may be remembered as a failure today, but to me, he represents an important step forward for evolutionary thinking.
Before he suggested that species could change over time in the early 19th century, no one took the concept of evolution seriously. Lucretius 99 B. My path to the first-century B. Instead, she married rich. She also fought to make her alma mater more accessible to women, leading to an all-female dormitory, allowing more women to enroll.
A champion of the national parks enough right there to make him a hero to me! Rolf O. As the wolf population has nearly disappeared and moose numbers have climbed, patience and emotional investment like his are crucial in the quest to learn how nature works.
Marie Tharp — I love maps. So did geologist and cartographer Tharp. In the midth century, before women were permitted aboard research vessels, Tharp explored the oceans from her desk at Columbia University.
With the seafloor — then thought to be nearly flat — her canvas, and raw data her inks, she revealed a landscape of mountain ranges and deep trenches. Her keen eye also spotted the first hints of plate tectonics at work beneath the waves.
Science needs to get out of the lab and into the public eye. Over the past hundred years or so, these scientists have made it their mission. Sean M. Carroll — : The physicist and one-time Discover blogger has developed a following among space enthusiasts through his lectures, television appearances and books, including The Particle at the End of the Universe, on the Higgs boson. Rachel Carson — : With her book Silent Spring , the biologist energized a nascent environmental movement.
In , Discover named Silent Spring among the top 25 science books of all time. Richard Dawkins — : The biologist, a charismatic speaker, first gained public notoriety in with his book The Selfish Gene , one of his many works on evolution. Stephen Jay Gould — : In , the paleontologist Gould was a guest on The Simpson s, a testament to his broad appeal. Among scientists, Gould was controversial for his idea of evolution unfolding in fits and starts rather than in a continuum. His posthumously published A Sand County Almanac is a cornerstone of modern environmentalism.
Bill Nye — : What should an engineer and part-time stand-up comedian do with his life? For Nye, the answer was to become a science communicator. Oliver Sacks — : The neurologist began as a medical researcher, but found his calling in clinical practice and as a chronicler of strange medical maladies, most famously in his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.
Sagan brought the wonder of the universe to the public in a way that had never happened before. His subsequent works have filled many a bookshelf with provocative discussions of biodiversity, philosophy and the animals he has studied most closely: ants.
As science progresses, so does the roll call of new voices serving as bridges between lab and layman. Here are some of our favorite emerging science stars:. British physicist Brian Cox became a household name in the U. Neuroscientist Carl Hart debunks anti-science myths supporting misguided drug policies via various media, including his memoir High Price.
From the Amazon forest to the dissecting table, YouTube star and naturalist Emily Graslie brings viewers into the guts of the natural world, often literally. When not talking dinosaurs or head transplants on Australian radio, molecular biologist Upulie Divisekera coordinates RealScientists , a rotating Twitter account for science outreach.
Mixing pop culture and chemistry, analytical chemist Raychelle Burks demystifies the molecules behind poisons, dyes and even Game of Thrones via video, podcast and blog.
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Take the first step today. You May Also Like. Read More 8 minute read. S SOP. Penrose also invented twistor theory, which is a novel way to look at the structure of spacetime, leading us to a deeper understanding of the nature of gravity.
Along with the Wolf Foundation Prize for Physics, Penrose has received numerous other awards, including the De Morgan Medal for his wide and original contributions to mathematical physics in , the Naylor Prize of the London Mathematical Society in , and the Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in Penrose has stated his belief that there are some facets of human thinking that can never be emulated by a machine.
He maintains that his work explains what physics and mathematics can tell us about how the mind works, what they can't, and what we need to know to understand the physical processes underlying our conscious experience. Web resource: Roger Penrose Home Page.
Stanley B. In , he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Prusiner demonstrated that prions may be formed when a normal, benign cellular protein acquires an altered shape.
His concept of infectious proteins, as well as his proposal of multiple biologically active shapes or conformations for a single protein, were considered heretical at the time, but are now widely though not universally acceptedIn humans, prions are now believed to cause such neurodegenerative diseases as Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease and kuru.
Prusiner conducted his medical school training at the University of Pennsylvania and his postgraduate clinical training at the University of California, San Francisco. Web resource: Stanley B. Prusiner's Home Page. Henry F. Schaefer III. Schaefer received his Ph. Using supercomputers and simulations rather than actual chemical substances, his lab uncovers chemical structures by crunching numbers.
His theoretical research has been directed at one of the most challenging problems in molecular quantum mechanics, the problem of electron correlation in molecules. Schaefer is the author of more than 1, scientific publications, the majority appearing in the Journal of Chemical Physics and the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Some of his research challenges the work of Nobel Prize winner Gerhard Herzberg regarding the geometry of triplet methylene.
Web resource: Henry F. Thomas C. He is best known for his work in the area of synaptic transmission, which is the process by which signaling chemicals known as neurotransmitters are released by one neuron and bind to and activate the receptors of another neuron.
During his postdoctoral training, he worked on describing the role of the LDL receptor in cholesterol metabolism, for which Michael S. Brown and Joseph L. Goldstein were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in Sterols are a major class of biomolecule and critical for life. This discovery led to the development of statin-derived cholesterol medications such as atorvastatin Lipitor , which is today a top-selling branded pharmaceutical drug. Web resource: Thomas C.
Jack W. Szostak is a biologist and a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School. Greider , for discovering the details of telomere function. During the s, Szostak and his colleagues demonstrated in a series of experiments that telomeresregions of repetitive nucleotide sequences located at each end of a chromosome moleculeprotect the ends of chromosomes from deterioration and from fusion with neighboring chromosomes. Szostak earned his Ph. He has made many contributions to the field of genetics.
He is credited with the construction of the world's first yeast artificial chromosome. In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Szostak has also won the Dr.
The Szostak Lab is currently researching the origin of lifethe chemical and physical processes that facilitated the transition from chemical evolution to biological evolution on the early earth.
As a way of exploring these processes, his laboratory is trying to build a synthetic cellular system that undergoes Darwinian evolution. Web resource: Jack W. Szostak's Home Page. James M. Tour is a synthetic organic chemist, specializing in nanotechnology and serves as the T. Tour earned his Ph. Tour was ranked one of the top 10 chemists in the world over the past decade by Thomson Reuters in He is best known for his work in molecular electronics and molecular switching molecules.
Tour holds more than 60 United States patents, plus many non-US patents. Tour's most important contributions have been in molecular electronics, which involves nanoscale electronic devices utilizing molecular switiching molecules. His team at Rice has constructed many different kinds of nanoscale elecro-mechanical systems.
One of the best know of these is the "nonocar," a nanoscale "automobile. Tour has over research publications and is active in consulting on several national defense-related topics, in addition to numerous other professional committees and panels.
The Houston Chronicle reports that Tour wakes up at am every morning to study the Bible for two hours. Web resource: James M. Tour's Home Page. Charles H. Townes is a physicist who taught at several universities, including the University of Tokyo, the University of Paris, the University of California, and Columbia University, among others.
He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in , along with Nikolay Basov and Alexander Prokhorov, for fundamental work in the quantum electronics of oscillators and amplifiers. Their work opened up the whole field of modern lasers. Townes received the Ph. During World War II, he worked on designing radar systems and he holds a number of patents in that area. From there, he began to apply the microwave technique of wartime radar research to spectroscopy, providing a powerful tool for the study of the structure of atoms and molecules, as well as a potential new way of controlling electromagnetic waves.
Web resource: Charles H. Townes's NobelPrize. Harold E. Varmus is a biologist and the current Director of the National Cancer Institute. Michael Bishop, for their discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes.
Varmus earned his Ph. Most of Varmus's scientific research was conducted at the University of California-San Francisco's Medical School, where he and his colleagues studied the cellular origins of oncogenes in a chicken retrovirus.
Their discoveries led to the isolation of many cellular genes that normally control growth and development and are frequently mutated in human cancer. Varmus is also widely known for his research on the replication cycles of retroviruses and of the hepatitis B family of viruses, as well as on the functions of genes implicated in cancer and the development of mouse models of human cancer. He has authored over scientific papers and five books, including The Art and Politics of Science. Web resource: Harold E.
Varmus's Home Page. Craig Venter. Craig Venter is a biologist and entrepreneur. Venter founded Celera Genomics, a private research group, to carry out his sequencing of the human genome, in direct competition with the government effort at the NIH to accomplish that result.
JCVI is home to more than scientists and other staff, has more than , square feet of laboratory space, and is the world leader in genomic research. Venter earned his Ph. In , he joined the National Institutes of Health. The HGP was an international scientific research project whose aim was to identify and map the entire sequence of DNA base pairs that make up the human genome. The HGP also attempted to identify and map the various biological functions for which the human genotype is responsible.
It remains the largest collaborative biological project in history. Venter's JCVI is also committed to science education, offering programs in science, math, and technology for students of all ages. Venter was awarded the Dickson Prize in , the National Medal of Science in , and the Kistler Prize in , among other honors and awards. Web resource: The J. Craig Venter Institute. James D. Watson greatly expanded the CSHL's level of funding and research, making it into a world-leading research center in molecular biology.
Later, he shifted the laboratory's research emphasis to the study of cancer. Watson received his Ph. Watson taught at Harvard University for many years, where he received a series of academic promotions from assistant professor to associate professor to full professor of biology.
Web resource: James D. Watson's Home Page. Steven Weinberg. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in , along with Sheldon Lee Glashow and Abdus Salam, for their contributions to a unified theory of the weak and electromagnetic interactions between elementary particles.
Their work, which involved the prediction of the weak neutral current interactions W and Z bosons , which were later experimentally confirmedachieved the unification of two of the four fundamental forces of nature.
Weinberg earned his Ph. Weinberg has conducted pioneering researched in many areas of physics, including quantum field theory, gravitational theory, supersymmetry, superstrings, and cosmology.
Weinberg's influence and importance are confirmed by the fact that he is frequently among the top scientists with the highest research effect indices, such as the h-index and the creativity index. Weinberg is also well-known for his outspoken negative opinions on religion. Weinberg has a large number of awards to his name, including the National Medal of Honor in , the Benjamin Franklin Medal for Distinguished Achievements in Sciences from the American Philosophical Society in , and the James Joyce Award in , among many others.
Web resource: Steven Weinberg's Home Page. George M. Whitesides is a Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University. He is known for his work in a very wide variety of areas of chemistry, notably NMR spectroscopy, organometallic chemistry, soft lithography, micro-fabrication, microfluidics, nanotechnology, molecular self-assembly and self-organization, and research into the origin of life.
Whitesides earned a Ph. He is the author of more than 1, scientific articles and is listed as an inventor on more than 50 patents.
Whitesides has one of the highest Hirsch index rating of all living chemists, which measures both the productivity and impact of the published work of a scientist or scholar. Whitesides's current research interests continue to span a very wide array of fields, from cell-surface biochemistry to science for developing economies.
Web resource: George M. Whitesides's Home Page. Edward O. Wilson is a biologist and naturalist. His specialty is myrmecologythe study of antson which he is considered to be the world's leading authority. Upon his retirement in , he assumed the titles of Professor Emeritus and Honorary Curator in Entomology.
Wilson is also famous for his many popular books on evolutionary biology, for his advocacy of environmental causes specially preserving biodiversity , and for his efforts to advance the secular humanist worldview. He is a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. Wilson first tried to enlist in the United States Army, but he failed his Army medical examination due to his impaired eyesight.
He completed his undergraduate education and later completed his Ph. In addition to his work in myrmecology, Wilson has also authored a number of best-selling popular works on various aspects of biology and the philosophy of science, including On Human Nature , Biophilia and Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. The latter was another controversial work which argued that the natural sciences are destined to replace the social sciences and even the humanities. Wilson, who was raised in Alabama as a Southern Baptist, adheres to the philosophy of scientific humanism, which he sees as "the only worldview compatible with science's growing knowledge of the real world and the laws of nature.
Wilson has long taken a special interest in preserving endangered species. In , he assisted in establishing a nonprofit, the E.
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