Sir John B. Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka

Two pioneers of stem cell research have shared the Nobel Prize for medicine or physiology John Gurdon from the UK and Shinya Yamanaka from Japan were awarded the prize for changing adult cells into stem cells, which can become any other type of cell in the body. Prof Gurdon used a gut sample to clone frogs and Prof Yamanaka altered genes to reprogramme cells.When a sperm fertilises an egg there is just one type of cell. It...

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Joseph Lister

Joseph Lister (5 April 1827 – 10 February 1912) was a British surgeon and a pioneer of antiseptic surgery, who promoted the idea of sterile surgery while working at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. Lister successfully introduced carbolic acid (now known as phenol) to sterilise surgical instruments and to clean wounds, which led to a reduction in post-operative infections and made surgery safer for patients. Lister was interested...

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Robert Koch

Robert Koch is considered to be one of the founders of the field of bacteriology. He pioneered principles and techniques in studying bacteria and discovered the specific agents that cause tuberculosis, cholera, and anthrax. For this he is also regarded as a founder of public health, aiding legislation and changing prevailing attitudes about hygiene to prevent the spread of various infectious diseases. For his work on tuberculosis,he...

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Stanley Lloyd Miller

Stanley Lloyd Miller born in Oakland, California (March 7, 1930) an American chemist and biologist who is known for his studies into the origin of life, particularly the Miller–Urey experiment which demonstrated that organic compounds can be created by fairly simple physical processes from inorganic substances. However, it has since been demonstrated that the conditions used for the experiment may not have been an accurate representation...

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Robert W. Holley

Holley, Robert William, 1922-93, American biochemist, b. Urbana, Ill., Ph.D. Cornell, 1947. He was a professor at Cornell (1948-68) before he joined (1968) the Salk Institute, and he continued an association with Cornell after 1968. Holley received the 1968 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine jointly with Har Gobind Khorana and Marshall W. Nirenberg for their interpretation of the genetic code and its function in protein synthesis. Holley...

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Antony van Leeuwenhoek

Anton van Leeuwenhoek was a linen merchant in Delft, the Netherlands, whose passion for science helped make him one of the most important figures in the history of microbiology. Van Leeuwenhoek saw his first microscope, in use in the fabric trade, in 1653, and he soon bought one of his own. He read Robert Hooke's Micrographia, and it reportedly enthralled him. By 1668, he was grinding lenses for his own simple microscopes...

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Edward Jenner

Edward Jenner was born in 1749, in Berkeley. He wanted to get rid of small pox for ever so he carried out a simple experiment, which turned out to change everyone's lives for the better. Edward Jenner noticed that cows sometimes got a disease called cowpox. Because the milkmaids had to milk the cows, they often also caught cowpox…but it didn't seem to harm them. Edward Jenner was intrigued - milkmaids that had caught cowpox...

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Craig Venter

John Craig Venter (born October 14, 1946) is an American biologist and entrepreneur. He is known for being one of the first to sequence the human genome and for creating the first cell with a synthetic genome. Venter founded Celera Genomics, The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) and the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), and is now working at JCVI to create synthetic biological organisms. In  1984, he moved to the...

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