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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Kary Mullis

Kary Banks Mullis, Nobel Prize winning chemist, was born on December 28, 1944, in Lenoir, North Carolina. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1966. He earned a Ph.D. degree in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1972 and lectured in biochemistry there until 1973. That year, Kary became a postdoctoral fellow in pediatric cardiology at...

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Arthur Kornberg

Arthur Kornberg (March 3, 1918 – October 26, 2007) was an American biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1959 for his discovery of "the mechanisms in the biological synthesis of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)" together with Dr. Severo Ochoa of New York University. In 1953, he became Professor and Head of the Department of Microbiology, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, until 1959. There he continued...

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Har Gobind Khorana

Dr. Hargobind Khorana was born on 9th January 1922 at Raipur, Punjab (now in Pakistan). Dr.Khorana was responsible for producing the first man-made gene in his laboratory in the early seventies. This historic invention won him the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1968 sharing it with M.W. Nuremberg and R.W. Holley for interpreting the genetic code and analyzing its function in protein synthesis. They all independently made contributions...

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Louis Pasteur

Louis Pasteur was a world renowned French chemist and biologist. He was born on December 27 1822 in the town of Dole in Eastern France. In 1847 Pasteur was awarded his doctorate and then took up a post as assistant to one of his teachers. He spent several years teaching and carrying out research at Dijon and Strasbourg and in 1854 moved to the University of Lille where he became professor of chemistry. Here he continued...

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Stephen Hawking

Stephen William Hawking (born 8 January 1942) is a British theoretical physicist and author. His significant scientific works to date have been collaboration with Roger Penrose on theorems on gravitational singularities in the framework of general relativity, and the theoretical prediction that black holes should emit radiation, often called Hawking radiation. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a lifetime...

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Werner Arber

Swiss microbiologist Werner Arber was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology in 1978, sharing the $165,000 award with Daniel Nathans and Hamilton O. Smith. Observing that when a virus entered bacterium, most of the viral deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) was destroyed, Arber theorized that the bacterium produced an enzyme that severed the viral DNA into smaller pieces. Nathans and Smith later proved that Arber was correct...

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Phillip A. Sharp

Phillip Allen Sharp is an American geneticist and molecular biologist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1993 for his discovery of RNA splicing, the technique of modifying the RNA. He shared the prize with Richard J. Roberts. Sharp discovered that genes in eukaryotes are not contiguous strings but they contain introns. The messenger RNA can be spliced to delete these introns and different proteins can be obtained...

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Frederick Sanger

Frederick Sanger is an English Biochemist and two time Nobel Laureate in Chemistry. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1958 for his work on the structure of proteins (especially insulin) and in 1980 he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Walter Gilbert and Paul Berg. Gilbert and Sanger shared half of the prize for their breakthrough in the determination of nucleic acid base sequence. Frederick Sanger proved...

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Matthew Paul Berg

Molecular biologist who in 1972 created the first recombinant DNA molecules, and, in doing so, created the field of genetic engineering. Berg, in 1972, combined DNA from the cancer-causing monkey virus SV40 with that of the virus lambda to create the first recombinant DNA molecules. However, upon realizing the dangers of his experiment, terminated it before it could be taken any further. He immediately, in what is now called...

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Friedrich Miescher

Friedrich (Fritz) Miescher was born in Basel, Switzerland. The Miescher family was well-respected and part of the intellectual elite in Basel. Friedrich's father was a physician and taught pathological anatomy; Friedrich's uncle, Wilhelm His, was a well-known embryologist. Miescher was an excellent student despite his shyness and a hearing handicap. Miescher initially wanted to be a priest, but his father opposed the idea...

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Isolating Hereditary Material: Frederick Griffith, Oswald Avery, Alfred Hershey, and Martha Chase

In the first half of the twentieth century, Gregor Mendel's principles of genetic inheritance became widely accepted, but the chemical nature of the hereditary material remained unknown. Scientists did know that genes were located on chromosomes and that chromosomes consisted of DNA and proteins. At the time, however, proteins seemed to be a better choice for the genetic material, because chemical analyses had shown that proteins are more varied than DNA in their chemical composition,...

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Barbara McClintock and the Discovery of Jumping Genes (Transposons)

Some of the most profound genetic discoveries have been made with the help of various model organisms that are favored by scientists for their widespread availability and ease of maintenance and proliferation. One such model is Zea mays (maize), particularly those plants that produce variably colored kernels. Because each kernel is an embryo produced from an individual fertilization, hundreds...

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The Watson and Crick Structure of DNA

Today, our series on models of DNA is concluded with a discussion of the correct structure determined by James Watson and Francis Crick. Although they made an unlikely pair, the two men succeeded where one of the era’s leading scientists – Linus Pauling – failed, and in the process they unraveled the secrets of what may be the most important molecule in human history. In the fall of 1951, James Watson was studying...

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