Portal:Biology/Previous biographies
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This is a list of featured biographies from the Biology portal, sorted in reverse-chronological order.
Contents |
[edit] December 3, 2007
Norman Ernest Borlaug (born March 25, 1914) is an American agricultural scientist, humanitarian, Nobel laureate, and has been called the father of the Green Revolution. Borlaug is one of five people in history to have won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal.
Borlaug received his Ph.D. in plant pathology and genetics from the University of Minnesota in 1942. He took up an agricultural research position in Mexico, where he developed semi-dwarf high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties.
During the mid-20th century, Borlaug led the introduction of these high-yielding varieties combined with modern agricultural production techniques to Mexico, Pakistan, and India. As a result, Mexico became a net exporter of wheat by 1963. Between 1965 and 1970, wheat yields nearly doubled in Pakistan and India, greatly improving the food security in those nations. These collective increases in yield have been labeled the Green Revolution, and Borlaug is often credited with saving over a billion people from starvation. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 in recognition of his contributions to world peace through increasing food supply.
More recently, he has helped apply these methods of increasing food production to Asia and Africa. Borlaug has continually advocated the use of his methods and biotechnology to decrease world famine. His work has faced environmental and socioeconomic criticisms, including charges that his methods have created dependence on monoculture crops, unsustainable farming practices, heavy indebtedness among subsistence farmers, and high levels of cancer among those who work with agriculture chemicals. He has emphatically rejected many of these as unfounded or untrue. In 1986, he established the World Food Prize to recognize individuals who have improved the quality, quantity or availability of food around the globe.
[edit] April 23, 2007
Alfred Russel Wallace, OM, FRS (January 8, 1823 – November 7, 1913) was a British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist and biologist. He did extensive field work first in the Amazon River basin, and then in the Malay Archipelago, where he identified the Wallace line dividing the fauna of Australia from that of Asia.
He is best known for independently proposing a theory of natural selection which prompted Charles Darwin to publish his own more developed and researched theory sooner than he had intended. He was also one of the leading evolutionary thinkers of the 19th century who made a number of other contributions to the development of evolutionary theory, including the concept of warning colouration in animals. Wallace was also considered the 19th century’s leading expert on the geographical distribution of animal species and is sometimes called the "father of biogeography".
Wallace was strongly attracted to radical ideas in politics, religion and science. His advocacy of spiritualism and his belief in a non material origin for the higher mental faculties of humans strained his relationship with the scientific establishment, especially with other early proponents of evolution. He was a strong critic of what he considered to be an unjust social and economic system in 19th-century Britain. He was one of the first prominent scientists to raise concerns over the environmental impact of human activity.
[edit] 2006-12-12
Johann Georg Adam Forster (November 27, 1754 – January 10, 1794) was a German naturalist, ethnologist, travel writer, journalist, and revolutionary. At an early age, he accompanied his father on several scientific expeditions, including James Cook's second voyage to the Pacific. His report from that journey, A Voyage Round the World, contributed significantly to the ethnology of the people of Polynesia and remains a respected work among both scientists and ordinary readers. As a result of the report Forster was admitted to the Royal Society at the early age of twenty-two and came to be considered one of the founders of modern scientific travel literature.
After his return to continental Europe, Forster turned towards academics. From 1778 to 1784 he taught natural history at the Collegium Carolinum in Kassel and continued later at Academy of Vilna (1784-1787) until he accepted the position of head librarian at the University of Mainz in 1788. Most of his scientific work during this time consisted of essays on botany and ethnology, but he also prefaced and translated many books about travels and explorations, including a German translation of Cook's diaries.
Forster was a central figure of the Enlightenment in Germany, and corresponded with most of its adherents, including Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who was a close friend of his. His ideas and personality influenced strongly one of the greatest German scientists of the 19th century, Alexander von Humboldt. When the French took control of Mainz in 1792, Forster became one of the founders of the Jacobin Club there and went on to play a leading role in the Mainz Republic, the earliest republican state in Germany. During July 1793 and while he was in Paris as a delegate of the young Mainz Republic, Prussian and Austrian coalition forces regained control of the city and Forster was declared an outlaw. Unable to return to Germany and separated from his friends and family, he died in Paris of illness in early 1794.
[edit] 2006-10-16
Rosalind Elsie Franklin (25 July 1920 – 16 April 1958) was a British physical chemist and crystallographer who made important contributions to the understanding of the fine structures of DNA, viruses, coal and graphite. Franklin is best known for her contribution to the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953. In the years following, she led pioneering work on the tobacco mosaic and polio viruses. She died in 1958 of cancer of the ovary.
[edit] 2006-08-16
Barbara McClintock (June 16, 1902 – September 2, 1992) was a pioneering American scientist and one of the world's most distinguished cytogeneticists. McClintock received her PhD in botany from Cornell University in 1927, where she was a leader in the development of maize cytogenetics. The field remained the focus of her research for the rest of her career. From the late 1920s, McClintock studied chromosomes and how they change during reproduction in maize. She developed the technique to visualize maize chromosomes and used microscopic analysis to demonstrate many fundamental genetic ideas, including genetic recombination by crossing-over during meiosis—a mechanism by which chromosomes exchange information. She produced the first genetic map for maize, linking regions of the chromosome with physical traits, and demonstrated the role of the telomere and centromere, regions of the chromosome that are important in the conservation of genetic information. She was recognized amongst the best in the field, awarded prestigious fellowships and elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1944.
During the 1940s and 1950s, McClintock discovered transposition and used it to show how genes are responsible for turning physical characteristics on or off. She developed theories to explain the repression or expression of genetic information from one generation of maize plants to the next. Encountering skepticism of her research and its implications, she stopped publishing her data in 1953. Later, she made an extensive study of the cytogenetics and ethnobotany of maize races from South America. McClintock's research became well understood in the 1960s and 1970s, as researchers demonstrated the mechanisms of genetic change and genetic regulation that she had demonstrated in her maize research in the 1940s and 1950s. Awards and recognition of her contributions to the field followed, including the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine awarded to her in 1983 for the discovery of genetic transposition; to date, she has been the first and only woman to receive an unshared Nobel Prize in that category.
[edit] 2006-07-26
Heinrich Hermann Robert Koch (December 11, 1843 – May 27, 1910) was a German physician. He became famous for the discovery of the anthrax bacillus (1877), the tuberculosis bacillus (1882) and the cholera bacillus (1883) and for his development of Koch's postulates. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his tuberculosis findings in 1905. He is considered one of the founders of bacteriology.
His work on tuberculosis, for which he was awarded a Nobel Prize, provided the intellectual framework that allowed subsequent researchers to identify causal agents of disease - Koch's postulates.
After Koch's success the quality of his own research declined (especially with the fiasco over his ineffective TB cure "tuberculin"), although his pupils found the organisms responsible for diphtheria, typhoid, pneumonia, gonorrhoea, cerebrospinal meningitis, leprosy, bubonic plague, tetanus, and syphilis, among others, by using his methods.
[edit] July 11, 2006
George Ledyard Stebbins, Jr. (January 6, 1906 — January 19, 2000) was an American botanist and geneticist who is widely regarded as one of the leading evolutionary biologists and botanists of the 20th century. Stebbins received his PhD in botany from Harvard University in 1931. He went on to the University of California, Berkeley where his work with E. B. Babcock on the genetic evolution of plant species and his association with a group of evolutionary biologists known as the Bay Area Biosystematists, led him to develop a comprehensive synthesis of plant evolution. His most important publication in this regard was Variation and Evolution in Plants, which combined genetics and Darwin's theory of natural selection, and is considered to be a major contribution to modern evolutionary synthesis.
From 1950, Stebbins was instrumental in the establishment of the Department of Genetics at the University of California, Davis. He was active in numerous organizations involved in the promotion of evolution, and science more generally, and was elected to the National Academy of Science. He was also involved in the development of evolution-based science programs for Californian high schools, and the conservation of rare plants in that state.
[edit] May 19, 2006
Lynn Margulis (1938 —) is a biologist and University Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is best-known for her theory on eukaryotic organelle genesis, the endosymbiotic theory, which is now accepted in the mainstream as the explanation for how certain organelles were formed.
In 1966 Margulis wrote a theoretical paper entitled The Origin of Mitosing Eukaryotic Cells. The paper is considered a landmark in modern endosymbiotic theory. Margulis's endosymbiotic theory formulation is the first to rely on direct microbiological observations (as opposed to paleontological or zoological observations which were previously the norm for new works in evolutionary biology). The paper was initially heavily rejected, as symbiosis theories had been dismissed by mainstream biology at the time. Despite constant criticism of her ideas for decades, Margulis is famous for her tenacity in pushing her theory forward, despite the opposition she faced at the time.
The underlying theme of endosymbiotic theory, as formulated in 1966, was interdependence and cooperative existence of multiple prokaryotic (single celled) organisms; one organism engulfed another, yet both survived and eventually evolved over millions of years into eukaryotic cells. Her 1970 book, Origin of Eukaryotic Cells, discusses her early work pertaining to this organelle genesis theory in detail. Currently, her endosymbiotic theory is recognized as the key method by which some organelles have arisen (see endosymbiotic theory for a discussion) and is widely accepted by mainstream scientifics. The endosymbiotic theory of organogenesis was actually proven in the 1980s, when the genetic material of mitochondria and chloroplasts was found to be different from that of nuclear DNA.
[edit] April 10, 2006
Gregor Mendel (1822–1884) was an Austrian monk who is often called the "father of genetics" for his study of the inheritance of traits in pea plants. Mendel showed that there was particular inheritance of traits according to his laws of inheritance. The significance of Mendel's work was not recognized until the turn of the 20th century.
It was not until the early 20th century that the importance of his ideas was realized. In 1900, his work was rediscovered by Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns, and Erich von Tschermak. His results were quickly replicated, and genetic linkage quickly worked out. Biologists flocked to the theory, as while it was not yet applicable to many phenomena, it sought to give a genotypic understanding of heredity which they felt was lacking in previous studies of heredity which focused on phenotypic approaches. Most prominent of these latter approaches was the biometric school of Karl Pearson and W.F.R. Weldon, which was based heavily on statistical studies of phenotype variation. The strongest opposition to this school came from William Bateson, who perhaps did the most in the early days of publicizing the benefits of Mendel's theory (the word "genetics", and much of the discipline's other terminology, originated with Bateson). This debate between the biometricians and the Mendelians was extremely vigorous in the first two decades of the twentieth century, with the biometricians claiming statistical and mathematical rigor, while the Mendelians claimed a better understanding of biology. In the end, the two approaches were synthesized as the modern synthesis of evolutionary biology, especially by work conducted by Ronald Fisher in 1918.
[edit] March 8, 2006
Thomas Huxley (1825 – 1895) was a British biologist known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his defence of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.
His scientific debates against Richard Owen demonstrated that there were close similarities between the cerebral anatomy of humans and gorillas. Huxley did not accept many of Charles Darwin's ideas, such as gradualism, and was more interested in advocating a materialist professional science than in defending natural selection.
Thomas Huxley coined the term "agnosticism" to describe his stance on religious belief (see Thomas Henry Huxley and agnosticism). He is credited with inventing the concept of "biogenesis", a theory stating that all cells arise from other cells, and also "abiogenesis," describing the generation of life from non-living matter.
[edit] March 2, 2006
Ernst Haeckel (1834 – 1919) was an eminent German biologist and philosopher who promoted Charles Darwin's work in Germany. Haeckel was a zoologist, an accomplished artist and illustrator, and later a professor of comparative anatomy. He was one of the first to consider psychology as a branch of physiology. He also proposed many now ubiquitous terms including "phylum" and "ecology." His chief interests lay in evolution and life development processes in general, including development of nonrandom form, which culminated in the beautifully illustrated Kunstformen der Natur (Art forms of nature).
Haeckel advanced the "recapitulation theory" which proposed a link between ontogeny (development of form) and phylogeny (evolutionary descent), summed up in the phrase "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny". He supported the theory with embryo drawings that have since been shown to be inaccurate, and the theory is no longer generally accepted.
[edit] February 23, 2006
Thomas Malthus, (1766 – 1834) was an English demographer and political economist best known for his pessimistic but highly influential views on population growth. Malthus' Principle of Population was based on the idea that population, if unchecked, increases at an exponential rate (i.e. 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, etc.) whereas the food supply grows at a linear rate (i.e. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, etc.). Only natural causes (eg. accidents and old age), misery (war, pestilence, and above all famine), moral restraint and vice (which for Malthus included infanticide, murder, contraception and homosexuality) could check excessive population growth; otherwise, the end result would be catastrophe. Malthus' ideas figured prominently in the work of Charles Darwin, who partially based his theory of evolution on the idea of competition of species for limited resources.
