Famous Biologists

A history of biology in
biography
This section of the website offers biographies
describing the lives, contributions, and
discoveries of renowned biologists from all eras
of biology.
Louis Agassiz (1807-1873). Swiss-born
American zoologist, geologist, and
paleontologist, with a special expertise in
ichthyology. Founder and director of Harvard's
Museum of Comparative Zoology, one of the
most famous scientists of his day.
Read more >>
Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605). Italian
naturalist and physician. Together with Conrad
Gesner, he led the Renaissance movement that
put a new emphasis on the study of the nature.
Read more >>

Mary Anning (1799-1847). British

paleontologist. Often described as the greatest
fossil hunter ever known. Read more >>
Werner Arber (1929-). Swiss microbiologist
and geneticist. Shared the 1978 Nobel Prize in
Physiology or Medicine with Hamilton Smith and
Daniel Nathans for the discovery of restriction
endonucleases, which led to the development of
recombinant DNA technology. Read more >>
Aristotle (384-322 B.C.). Greek philosopher
and early scientist. Often called the "father of
biology." Read more >>

FAMOUS BIOLOGISTS (B)

Karl Ernst von Baer (1792-1876). German
biologist and scientific explorer. One of the
founders of embryology, von Baer discovered
the notochord and the embryonic blastula.
Read more >>
David Baltimore (1938-). American biologist.
Shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or
Medicine with Howard Temin and Renato
Dulbecco for their discovery of reverse

transcriptase.
Read more >>

A dog-cow hybrid?

George Beadle (1909-1975). American

geneticist. By means of x-ray irradiation of the
mold Neurospora crassa and screening of the
resulting mutants, Beadle showed, with Edward
Tatum, that mutations induced in genes
corresponded to alterations in specific enzymes.
This finding led to the acceptance of the one
gene/one enzyme hypothesis. Shared with

Tatum half the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physiology or

Medicine. Read more >>

FAMOUS BIOLOGISTS (C)

Erwin Chargaff (1905-2002). AustroHungarian-born American biochemist whose
experiments provided crucial information
allowing Watson, Crick, and Wilkins to elucidate
the double-helix structure of DNA.
Read more >>
Georges Cuvier (1769-1832). French naturalist
and zoologist. Founder of the fields of vertebrate
paleontology and comparative anatomy. One of
the most prolific authors of scientific literature in
the history of biology. Read more >>

FAMOUS BIOLOGISTS (D)

Raymond Dart (1893-1988). Pioneering
paleoanthropologist. Discoverer of the Taung
Child, he was the first scientist to provide hard
evidence that humans first evolved in Africa.
Read more >>
Charles Darwin (1809-1882). English
naturalist. One of the most famous scientists

who ever lived. His book, On the Origin of

Species, convinced many of the reality of
evolution. Remembered for the theory of natural
selection, the credit for which he had to share
with Alfred Wallace, who formulated it
independently.
This section of the website offers biographies
describing the lives, contributions, and
discoveries of renowned biologists from all eras
of biology.
Hugo de Vries (1848-1935). The most
influential post-Darwinian saltationist up to the
time of Eldredge and Gould, de Vries dominated
evolutionary thought during the the early
twentieth century. Read more >>
Renato Dulbecco (1914-). Italian virologist.
Shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or
Medicine with Howard Temin and David
Baltimore for their discovery of reverse
transcriptase. Read more >>

FAMOUS BIOLOGISTS (E)

Niles Eldredge (1943-). American
paleontologist, who, along with Stephen Jay
Gould, revived the saltationist tradition in

biology by pointing out that the typical fossil

form comes into being rapidly and remains
largely the same thereafter, right up to the time
of extinction ("punctuated equilibrium").
Read more >>
Conrad Gesner (1516-1565). Renaissance
Swiss naturalist, called the "German Pliny." Both
Gesner and his longer-lived contemporary Ulisse
Aldrovandi belonged to the generation of
scholars who revived the ancient practice of
studying the natural world. Read more >>
Richard Goldschmidt (1878-1958) Germanborn American geneticist. First biologist to
integrate genetics, development, and evolution.
Although one of the most prominent geneticists
of his era, Goldschmidt was rejected by his
colleagues when he proposed a saltational
theory of evolution. Read more >>
Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002). American
paleontologist, who, along with Niles Eldredge,
revived the saltationist tradition in biology by
pointing out that the typical fossil form comes
into being rapidly and remains largely the same
thereafter, right up to the time of extinction
("punctuated equilibrium"). Read more >>

Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859).

Prussian naturalist and scientific explorer. As a
public personification of science, Humboldt was
to the nineteenth century, what Einstein was to
the twentieth.
Read more >>

FAMOUS BIOLOGISTS (K)

Frances Oldham Kelsey (1914-). The FDA
reviewer who single-handedly prevented
marketing of Thalidomide in the U.S. Savior of
thousands of children and a leader of the
modern American movement toward more
stringent regulation of the distribution of drugs.
Read more >>

FAMOUS BIOLOGISTS (I)

Jan Ingenhousz (1730-1799). Showed light is
essential to plant respiration and further
demonstrated that the gas released by plants is
oxygen. Read more >>

FAMOUS BIOLOGISTS (L)

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829). Early
evolutionary theorist. Long before Darwin,

Lamarck proposed that human beings had

evolved from apes. Read more>>
Louis and Mary Leakey The
paleoanthropologist team that convinced the
world that humans first evolved in Africa.
Read more >>
Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778). Swedish
botanist, zoologist, and taxonomist. Creator of
the modern system of scientific nomenclature.
Early evolutionary theorist. Read more >>
Charles Lyell (1797-1875). Scottish geologist
and paleontologist. Gave the Pliocene Epoch its
name. A friend and supporter of Charles Darwin,
Lyell, established uniformitarianism as a
scientific principle. Read more >>

FAMOUS BIOLOGISTS (M)

Barbara McClintock (1902-1992). American
cytogeneticist. One of the foremost biologists of
the twentieth century. During her research on
color mosaicism in maize in the early 1940s, she
discovered transposons, mobile genetic
elements that can move from one location to
another within the genome. McClintock

produced the first genetic map for maize. Also a

pioneer in theory, she proposed the idea of gene
regulation and showed how it could be
affected by transposition long before such a
notion was accepted or even considered by
other biologists. She also demonstrated many
basic genetic phenomena, such as meiotic
crossing over, and the roles of telomeres and
centromeres. Other scientists had trouble
understanding her conceptually difficult papers
and rejected her claims about transposition and
gene regulation. It was more than twenty years
before they realized she had been right. For her
discovery of transposition she received the 1983
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. No other
woman biologist has ever been awarded the
unshared prize in that category.
Gregor Mendel (1822-1884). Austrian
scientist/monk. Showed inheritance of traits
follows particular rules, now known as Mendel's
Laws. In an fascinating, original article, guest
author David Allen, discusses Mendel's
hybridization research, and how it has been
misrepresented at times by both sides of the
modern debate between Darwinians and
creationists. Read more >>

Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866-1945). American

geneticist. Elucidated the connection between
meiosis and genetic segregation. His discoveries
about genes and their locations on
chromosomes helped make biology into an
experimental science. Nobel Prize in Physiology
or Medicine (1933).

FAMOUS BIOLOGISTS (N)

Daniel Nathans (1928-1999). American
microbiologist. Shared the 1978 Nobel Prize in
Physiology or Medicine with Hamilton Smith and
Werner Arber for the discovery of restriction
endonucleases, which led to the development of
recombinant DNA technology. Read more >>

FAMOUS BIOLOGISTS (P)

Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD). Ancient Roman
naturalist, also known as Gaius Plinius Secundus
or Caius Plinius Secundus. Pliny's only surviving
work, his great Natural History, covers nearly
the entire field of ancient knowledge about the
natural world. Read more >>

FAMOUS BIOLOGISTS (R)

John Ray (1628-1705). English naturalist.
Perhaps the most important classifier prior to

Linnaeus. He was a leading figure in the

movement to abandon the Scholastic tradition
and base biological classification on the
observed traits of organisms. Major works:
Historia Plantarum (1686); Synopsis methodica
Animalium Quadrupedum et Serpentini Generis
(1693); Historia Insectorum (1710); Synopsis
methodica Avium et Piscium (1713).
Ren Antoine Ferchault de Raumur (16831757). French scientist. Made important
contributions to many fields of biology,
especially entomology, ornithology, and
agriculture.

FAMOUS BIOLOGISTS (S)

Adam Sedgwick (1785-1873). British
paleontologist. Namer of the Devonian and
Cambrian periods. One of the foremost
scientists of his era. Read more >>
Hamilton O. Smith (1931-). American
microbiologist. Shared the 1978 Nobel Prize in
Physiology or Medicine with Werner Arber and
Daniel Nathans for the discovery of restriction
endonucleases, which led to the development of
recombinant DNA technology. Read more >>

William Smith (1769-1839). Established from

geological evidence, independently of Cuvier,
the fact that evolution has occurred over time.
Read more >>

FAMOUS BIOLOGISTS (T)

Edward Lawrie Tatum (1909-1975). American
geneticist. By means of x-ray irradiation of the
mold Neurospora crassa and screening of the
resulting mutants, Tatum showed, with George
Beadle, that mutations induced in genes
corresponded to alterations in specific enzymes.
This finding led to the acceptance of the one
gene/one enzyme hypothesis. Shared with
Beadle half of the 1958 Nobel Prize in
Physiology or Medicine. Read more >>
Howard Martin Temin (1934-). American
geneticist. Shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in
Physiology or Medicine with Renato Dulbecco
and David Baltimore for their discovery of
reverse transcriptase. Read more >>
Theophrastus (c. 372 - c. 287 B.C.). Ancient
Greek philosopher, successor of Aristotle as
head of the Lyceum. His Enquiry into Plants
(Historia plantarum) and Origins of Plants

(Causae plantarum) are the beginning of all

subsequent botanical thought. Remarkably,
Theophrastus knew that plants engaged in
sexual reproduction, a fact thereafter forgotten
and not rediscovered until the eighteenth
century.

FAMOUS BIOLOGISTS (V)

Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564). The founder of
modern human anatomy. Born in Brussels near
a hill where condemned criminals were tortured,
executed, and left to rot, Vesalius must have
been familiar with the details of human anatomy
even as a child. As a medical professor, he went
on to make the acquaintance intimate by
handling and dissecting the bodies himself
this had been the job of underling barbersurgeons up to that time. Though bodies were in
short supply, he used every means legal, and
sometimes, illegal to get the materials he
needed for his studies. In his memoirs he recalls
forays by night to search the stakes and gibbets
for classroom materials. His gristly habits paid
off. Unlike his predecessors, Vesalius' drawings
were based on direct observation. He
transformed his field of research and forever
changed the teaching of medicine. Vesalius'

masterwork, De humani corporis fabrica (On the

Fabric of the Human Body, 1543, 1555),
remained the basis of medical illustration for
generations and still influences how we look at
our bodies today.

FAMOUS BIOLOGISTS (W-Z)

Alfred Wallace (1823-1913). British naturalist.
Developed the theory of natural selection
independently of Charles Darwin. One of the
most creative, adventurous, and amiable
biologists of the 19th century. Read more >>
John Xantus (1825-1894) Hungarian
naturalist. Collected and identified many new
animals and plants in the southwestern U.S. and
Mexico. Read more >>
Norton Zinder (1928-) American biologist.
Discoverer of bacterial transduction, the transfer
of genetic material from one bacterium to
another by bacteriophages. This process is now
much used in the intentional genetic
transformation of bacteria.