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Science > Timeline > Scientists > 17th-21st century
France, Germany, UK, USA
Evelyn Ruth Maisel USA 1921-2023
Evelyn M. Witkin (...) discovered how DNA repairs Itself
Her findings led to breakthroughs in the treatment of cancer and in the understanding of the mechanics of evolution.
(...)
In a career that began at the dawn of modern genetic research in the late 1940s, Dr. Witkin explored the ways in which radiation both damaged DNA and generated a repair mechanism, what she came to call the SOS response.
The repair mechanism produces an enzyme that in turn creates replacement parts for the damaged DNA.
But it’s an imperfect process that can at times turn out slightly different versions, or mutations
— what scientists call mutagenesis.
Her insight into the SOS response, which Dr. Witkin developed with Miroslav Radman, then a scientist at the Free University of Brussels, shed new light on how solar radiation and chemicals in the environment affect
humans’ genetic makeup.
“She discovered the first coordinated response to stress in cells,” Joann Sweasy, a geneticist at the University of Arizona who studied under Dr. Witkin, said in a phone interview.
“And that’s so incredibly important for understanding evolution, and for understanding mutagenesis in terms of tumors.”
Dr. Witkin was still a graduate student at Columbia when she spent the summer of 1944 working at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, on the north shore of Long Island.
Though she had no background in microbiology — her research until then had been with fruit flies — on her first day there she was assigned to generate mutations in cultures of the bacteria E. coli.
She placed several under a germicidal ultraviolet lamp.
Almost all of them died.
But four colonies survived.
“At this point, I asked, ‘Why did they survive? Maybe a mutation made them resistant,’” Dr. Witkin told The New York Times in 2016.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/13/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/13/
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/15/
John Bannister Goodenough Germany, USA 1922-2023
scientist who shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his crucial role in developing the revolutionary lithium-ion battery, the rechargeable power pack that is ubiquitous in today’s wireless electronic devices and electric and hybrid vehicles
(...)
Until the announcement of his selection as a Nobel laureate, Dr. Goodenough was relatively unknown beyond scientific and academic circles and the commercial titans who exploited his work.
He achieved his laboratory breakthrough in 1980 at the University of Oxford, where he created a battery that has populated the planet with smartphones, laptop and tablet computers, lifesaving medical devices like cardiac defibrillators, and clean, quiet plug-in vehicles, including many Teslas, that can be driven on long trips, lessen the impact of climate change and might someday replace gasoline-powered cars and trucks.
Like most modern technological advances, the powerful, lightweight, rechargeable lithium-ion battery is a product of incremental insights by scientists, lab technicians and commercial interests over decades.
But for those familiar with the battery’s story, Dr. Goodenough’s contribution is regarded as the crucial link in its development, a linchpin of chemistry, physics and engineering on a molecular scale.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/26/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/26/
Narinder Singh Kapany India 1926-2021
By the time he entered graduate school at Imperial College London in 1952, he realized he wasn’t alone.
For decades researchers across Europe had been studying ways to transmit light through flexible glass fibers.
But a host of technical challenges, not to mention World War II, had set them back.
He persuaded one of those scientists, Harold Hopkins, to hire him as a research assistant, and the two clicked.
Professor Hopkins, a formidable theoretician, provided the ideas;
Dr. Kapany, more technically minded, figured out the practical side.
In 1954 the pair announced a breakthrough in the journal Nature, demonstrating how to bundle thousands of impossibly thin glass fibers together and then connect them end to
end. along with a separate article by another author in the same issue, marked the birth of fiber optics, the now-ubiquitous communications technology that carries phone calls, television shows and billions of cat memes around the world every day. journalists took to calling Dr. Kapany the “father of fiber optics,” and several even claimed that he had been robbed of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics, which instead went to Charles Kao for his own groundbreaking work in fiber optics.
(...)
Narinder Singh Kapany was born on Oct. 31, 1926, in Moga, a town in Punjab, in northwest India, and raised in Dehradun, about 200 miles to the east.
His father, Sundar Singh Kapany, worked in the coal industry; his mother, Kundan Kaur Kapany, was a homemaker.
After graduating from Agra University (now Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar University), he worked for a government munitions factory in Dehradun before moving to England.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/
William Kirk English USA 1929-2020
engineer and researcher who helped build the first computer mouse and, in 1968, orchestrated an elaborate demonstration of the technology that foretold the computers, tablets and smartphones of today
(...)
after leaving a career in the Navy, Mr. English joined a Northern California research lab called the Stanford Research Institute, or S.R.I. (now known as SRI International).
There he met Douglas Engelbart, a fellow engineer who hoped to build a new kind of computer.
At a time when only specialists used computers, entering and retrieving information through punched cards, typewriters and printouts, Mr. Engelbart envisioned a machine that anyone could use simply by manipulating images on a screen.
It was a concept that would come to define the information age, but by his own admission Mr. Engelbart had struggled to explain his vision to others.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/
John Horton Conway UK / USA 1937-2020
He made profound contributions to number theory, coding theory, probability theory, topology, algebra and more — and created games from it all.
He died of the coronavirus.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/
Murray Gell-Mann USA 1923-2019
Murray Gell-Mann (...) transformed physics with his preternatural ability to find hidden patterns among the tiny particles that make up the universe, earning a Nobel Prize
(...)
Much as atoms can be slotted into the rows and columns of the periodic table of the elements, Dr. Gell-Mann found a way, in 1961, to classify their smaller pieces — subatomic particles like protons, neutrons, and mesons, which were being discovered by the dozen in cosmic rays and particle accelerator blasts.
Arranged according to their properties, the particles clustered in groups of eight and 10.
In a moment of whimsy, Dr. Gell-Mann, who hadn’t a mystical bone in his body, named his system the Eightfold Way after the Buddha’s eight-step path to enlightenment.
He groaned ever after when people mistakenly inferred that particle physics was somehow related to Eastern philosophy.
Looking deeper, Dr. Gell-Mann realized that the patterns of the Eightfold Way could be further divided into triplets of even smaller components.
He decided to call them quarks after a line from James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake”: “Three quarks for Muster Mark.”
With Dr. Gell-Mann at the forefront, physics took on a Joycean feel.
Before long there were up quarks and down quarks, strange quarks and charm quarks, top quarks and bottom quarks, all stuck together with particles called gluons.
The funny nomenclatur was as much a Gell-Mann inspiration as the mathematics.
“Murray Gell-Mann dominated theoretical particle physics during the 1950s and ′60s, a period with an abundance of new experimental discoveries,” his colleague David J. Gross, another Nobel laureate in physics, said in an interview for this obituary in 2010.
“With almost magical intuition Gell-Mann discerned the patterns and symmetries connecting the many new particles that were found.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/24/
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/24/
John Dombrowski Roberts USA 1918-2016
organic chemist who pioneered the use of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and other techniques to reveal the structures of molecules and the dance of atoms as they rearrange in chemical reactions http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/07/science/john-roberts-organic-chemistry.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/07/
Thomas Walter Bannerman Kibble India, UK 1932-2016
Sir Tom Kibble (...) was one of the world’s foremost theoretical physicists and, with the Nobel laureate Peter Higgs, discoverer of the “Higgs-Kibble mechanism” for giving mass to the fundamental particles of the universe. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jun/08/sir-tom-kibble-obituary
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jun/08/
Harold Krotoschiner USA 1939-2016
Harold Kroto (...) shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering a new arrangement of carbon known as the buckyball
(...)
As a spectroscopic chemist, Dr. Kroto used electromagnetic radiation to reveal the structures of molecules.
His Nobel Prize-winning discovery, which he shared with Richard E. Smalley and Robert F. Curl Jr. of Rice University in Houston, was the Buckminsterfullerene molecule, a cage of 60 carbon atoms made of interlocking pentagons and hexagons.
Dr. Kroto, who had a passion for art, named it after Buckminster Fuller, the visionary architect whose geodesic dome-shaped buildings closely resemble the fullerene sphere.
“Nobody had ever thought of a molecule that could be that symmetrical and only consist of one element that is carbon,” said Naresh Dalal, a chemistry professor at Florida State University, where Dr. Kroto worked for nearly a decade before returning to England in the fall of 2015.
The buckyball was the third form of carbon to be found after diamonds and graphite.
Dr. Kroto often likened the molecule to a soccer ball (or a “football” when speaking to audiences outside of the United States) with a cavity in the middle that could carry smaller molecules.
(...)
The fullerene discovery opened a new field of nanotechnology that at one point was the subject of more than 1,000 published papers a year.
The molecule has potential applications in drug delivery, computing and high-speed transportation, Dr. Dalal said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/05/
Wesley Allison Clark USA 1927-2016
physicist who designed the first modern personal computer
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/
James Loton Flanagan USA 1925-2015
pioneer in the field of acoustics, envisioning and providing the technical foundation for speech recognition, teleconferencing, MP3 music files and the more efficient digital transmission of human conversation
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/31/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/31/
Jacob David Bekenstein USA 1947-2015
physicist who prevailed in an argument with Stephen Hawking that revolutionized the study of black holes, and indeed the nature of space-time itself (...)
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/22/science/space/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/22/
Jennifer A. Doudna
biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley (who) helped make one of the most monumental discoveries in biology: a relatively easy way to alter any organism’s DNA, just as a computer user can edit a word in a document.
The discovery has turned Dr. Doudna (the first syllable rhymes with loud) into a celebrity of sorts, the recipient of numerous accolades and prizes.
The so-called Crispr-Cas9 genome editing technique is already widely used in laboratory studies, and scientists hope it may one day help rewrite flawed genes in people, opening tremendous new possibilities for treating, even curing, diseases. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/12/science/jennifer-doudna-crispr-cas9-genetic-engineering.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/12/
John F. Nash Jr USA
Dr. Nash and his wife, Alicia, in Paris in 1960.
By then, mental illness had begun to take its toll on him.
Though the couple divorced in 1963, she stood by him, and they later remarried.
John F. Nash Jr., Math Genius Defined by a ‘Beautiful Mind,’ Dies at 86 NYT MAY 24, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/25/
mathematician who shared a Nobel Prize in 1994 for work that greatly extended the reach and power of modern economic theory and whose long descent into severe mental illness and eventual recovery were the subject of a book and a film, both titled “A Beautiful Mind”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/25/
Alexander Rich USA 1924-2015
James Watson and Francis Crick worked out the spiral structure of DNA in 1953, but they were not proved right until Dr. Alexander Rich used X-rays to produce a distinct image of the famous double helix in 1973.
(...)
For nearly six decades, Dr. Rich, who died at 90 on April 27 in Boston, doggedly investigated DNA and RNA, the fundamental molecules of life.
He helped puzzle out the structure of collagen, a protein that is abundant in ligaments and skin, and he discovered that DNA can exist in an odd zigzag form, which he called Z-DNA.
His work provided insights into how cells manufacture proteins, and laid the groundwork for techniques that scientists use to identify, manipulate and replace bits of genetic material.
Diagnostics for H.I.V. infection and tests for genes that cause breast cancer are among the technologies built on his discoveries. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/06/us/alexander-rich-dies-at-90-confirmed-dnas-double-helix.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/06/us/
Ernest Joachim Sternglass USA 1923-2015
Ernest J. Sternglass ('s) research in radiation physics laid the foundation for important technological advances and who became a prominent opponent of nuclear weapons
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/21/
Val Logsdon Fitch USA 1923-2015
Val Fitch teaching at Princeton in 1980, the year he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics.
The research that led to his winning discovery was conducted at the Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Photograph: William Sauro The New York Times
Val Fitch, Who Discovered Universe to Be Out of Balance, Is Dead at 91 By DENNIS OVERBYE NYT FEB. 10, 2015
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/11/
Val Fitch (...) shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physics for work that revealed a surprising imbalance in the laws of nature and helped explain why the collision of matter and antimatter has not destroyed everything in the universe
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/11/us/
Martin Lewis Perl USA 1927-2014
Martin Perl (...) was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering a new subatomic particle, one of the building blocks of the universe
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/04/
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/04/
John Woodland Hastings USA 1927-2014
Harvard biochemist whose improbable discovery of how bacteria communicate became the foundation for groundbreaking research in the development of more effective antibiotics
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/
John Robert Huizenga USA 1921-2014
physicist who helped build the world’s first atom bomb, solve dozens of atomic riddles and debunk claims that scientists in Utah had achieved nuclear fusion in a jar of water
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/30/science/
John Warcup Cornforth 1917-2013
Australian-born scientist who shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1975 (...) Dr. Cornforth was awarded the Nobel for deciphering a class of chemical reactions that are important in living organisms.
His research, centering on the behavior of hydrogen atoms and molecules, helped reveal the chemical steps necessary for the body to produce a precursor to cholesterol and the role of enzymes in shepherding such reactions. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/20/world/asia/john-w-cornforth-96-nobel-winning-chemist-dies.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/20/world/asia/
Harold Melvin Agnew USA 1921-2013
last surviving major figure to have been present at the birth of the nuclear age — who helped build the world’s first reactor and atomic bombs, flew on the first atomic strike against Japan, filmed the mushroom cloud, helped perfect the hydrogen bomb and led the Los Alamos National Laboratory at the height of the cold war
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/02/us/
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/02/us/
James Power Gordon USA 1928-2013
Distinguished Columbia University physicists, some of them Nobel Prize winners, called it a “harebrained scheme.”
But James P. Gordon, principal builder of a refrigerator-size device that would help revolutionize modern life, believed in it enough to bet a bottle of bourbon that it would work.
He was a 25-year-old graduate student in December 1953 when he burst into the seminar room where Charles H. Townes, his mentor and the inventor of the device, was teaching.
The device, he announced, had succeeded in emitting a narrow beam of intense microwave energy.
Dr. Townes’s team named it the maser, for microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, and it would lead to the building of the first laser, which amplified light waves instead of microwaves and became essential to the birth of a new technological age.
Lasers have found a wide range of practical applications from long-distance telephone calls to eye surgery, from missile guidance systems to the checkout counter at the supermarket.
In 1964, Dr. Townes and two Russians, Nikolai G. Basov and Aleksandr M. Prokhorov, shared the Nobel Prize for Physics for the development of masers and lasers, the Russians having worked separately from Dr. Townes.
Some thought Dr. Gordon, who died on June 21 at 85, deserved a share as well.
At the time of the maser’s invention, Dr. Townes credited it “to the triumph and glory” of Dr. Gordon. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/science/james-gordon-dies-at-85-work-paved-way-for-laser.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/
Donald Arthur Glaser USA 1926-2013
Donald A. Glaser (...) won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1960 for inventing, at 25, an ingenious device called the bubble chamber to trace the paths of subatomic particles http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/science/donald-glaser-nobel-winner-in-physics-dies-at-86.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/
Kenneth Ira Appel 1932-2013
Kenneth I. Appel (...) helped usher the venerable mathematical proof into the computer age, solving a longstanding problem concerning colors on a map with the help of an I.B.M. computer making billions of decisions
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/technology/
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/
Janet Davison USA 1925-2013
physician who four decades ago became the first person to show a conclusive link between certain genetic abnormalities and certain cancers
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/21/us/
Carl Richard Woese USA 1928-2012
biophysicist and evolutionary microbiologist whose discovery 35 years ago of a “third domain” of life in the vast realm of micro-organisms altered scientific understanding of evolution
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/01/
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/05/09/
George Arthur Cowan USA 1920-2012
chemist who helped build the first atomic bomb, detect the first Soviet nuclear explosion and test the first hydrogen bomb
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/25/
Irving Millman USA 1923-2012
microbiologist whose work led to the creation of a vaccine against hepatitis B that is credited with saving millions of lives
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/27/
David Leigh Waltz USA 1943-2012
computer scientist whose early research in information retrieval provided the foundation for today’s Internet search engines
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/24/
Baruch Samuel Blumberg USA 1925-2011
Nobel Prize-winning biochemist and medical anthropologist who discovered the hepatitis B virus, showed that it could cause liver cancer and then helped develop a powerful vaccine to fight it, saving millions of lives
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/07/
Rosalyn Sussman USA 1921-2011
medical physicist who persisted in entering a field largely reserved for men to become only the second woman to earn a Nobel Prize in Medicine
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/02/us/
Norman Bernard Krim USA 1913-2011
electronics visionary who played a pivotal role in the industry’s transition from the bulky electron vacuum tube, which once lined the innards of radios and televisions, to the tiny, far more powerful transistor
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/21/
Norman Foster Ramsey Jr. USA 1915-2011
Nobel Prize-winning physicist who developed a precise method to probe the structure of atoms and molecules and used it to devise a remarkably exact way to keep time
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/07/us/
Horace Freeland Judso USA 1931-2011
science writer whose 1979 book “The Eighth Day of Creation” is regarded as the definitive account of the breakthroughs that transformed molecular biology in the mid-20th century
(...)
Ten years in the making and based on interviews with more than a hundred scientists, “The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology” revisited the critical discoveries in molecular biology, notably the double-helix structure of DNA, its mode of replication and the role of RNA and proteins in carrying out its commands.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/
Willard Sterling Boyl USA 1924-2011
Willard S. Boyle won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for helping to develop a device that is at the heart of virtually every camcorder, digital camera and telescope in use
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/10/
William Nunn Lipscomb Jr. USA 1919-2011
Harvard chemistry professor who won a Nobel Prize in 1976 for his research on the structure of molecules and on chemical bonding
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/16/us/
John McCarthy USA 1927-2011
computer scientist who helped design the foundation of today’s Internet-based computing and who is widely credited with coining the term for a frontier of research he helped pioneer, Artificial Intelligence, or A.I.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/oct/25/
Betty Jean Jennings / Bartik USA 1924-2011
one of the first computer programmers and a pioneering forerunner in a technology that came to be known as software
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/08/
Max Palevsky USA 1924-2010 pioneer in computers
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/us/
H. Edward Roberts, PC pioneer USA 1941-2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/
John B. Fenn USA 1917-2010 Nobel winner who studied large molecules
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/
Eugene Goldwasser USA 1922-2010
a largely unsung biochemist whose 20-year pursuit of an elusive protein led to the development of a widely used anemia drug that became one of the biggest products of the biotechnology industry
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/21/
Frank Whittle 1907-1996
British Royal Air Force (RAF) engineer officer.
He is credited with independently inventing the turbojet engine (some years earlier than Germany's Dr. Hans von Ohain) and is regarded by many as the father of jet propulsion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Whittle
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/
http://www.nytimes.com/1996/08/10/
https://www.theguardian.com/life/opinion/
Julius Robert Oppenheimer USA 1904-1967
Rosalind Elsie Franklin 1920-1958
In 1951 the young British scientist began one of the key scientific investigations of the century.
Rosalind Franklin produced an x-ray photograph that helped show the structure of DNA, the molecule that holds the genetic code that underpins all life.
The discovery was integral to the transformation of modern medicine and has been described as one of the greatest scientific achievements ever. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04r7h7k - Mon. 6 February 2017
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04r7h7k - Mon. 6 February 2017
Jonas Salk USA 1914-1955
Dr. Jonas Salk (...) in the 1950's developed the first successful vaccine against poliomyelitis, the viral illness that had gripped a fearful nation with images of children doomed to death or paralysis http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/1028.html
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/dm52sa.html https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/bmsalk.html
http://www.npr.org/blogs/npr-history-dept/2015/04/10/
John von Neumann 1903-1957
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/feb/26/
Albert Einstein Germany, USA 1879-1955
Alexander Fleming UK 1881-1955
Alan Mathison Turing UK 1912-1954
Francis William Aston UK 1877-1945
Francis Aston.
Nobel medal sale highlights work of forgotten chemist who predicted the atom bomb O Saturday 21 May 2016 13.51 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/may/21
He won the Nobel prize for his work on atoms, in particular isotopes and formulation of the whole-number rule.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/may/21/
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/may/21/
Thomas Alva Edison USA 1847-1931
Charles Darwin UK 1809-1882
https://www.theguardian.com/science/
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/05/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/19/
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/24/
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/jan/21/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/gallery/2009/jun/11/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/interactive/2009/feb/12/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/video/2009/jan/30/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/jan/21/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/jan/19/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/jun/22/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/apr/17/
https://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSL16852315
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/may/17/
Samuel Finley Breese Morse USA 1791-1872
Contrary to myth, Samuel Morse did not invent the telegraph, but he made key improvements to its design, and his work to deploy it would transform communications worldwide. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/theymadeamerica/whomade/morse_lo.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/theymadeamerica/whomade/
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/25/
Edward Jenner UK 1749-1823
English physician who was a contributor to development of the smallpox vaccine.
The practice of vaccination was popularized by Jenner, and since then has been used ubiquitously to prevent several diseases.
The terms vaccine and vaccination are derived from Variolae vaccinae (smallpox of the cow), the term devised by Jenner to denote cowpox.
He used it in 1798 in the long title of his Inquiry into the Variolae vaccinae known as the Cow Pox, in which he described the protective effect of cowpox against smallpox.
Jenner is often called a pioneer of immunization.
Using a method valid in immunology before the discovery of germ theory, his work saved many lives.
In Jenner's time, smallpox killed around 10% of the British population, with the number as high as 20% in towns and cities where infection spread more easily.
In 1821, he was appointed physician extraordinary to King George IV, and was also made mayor of Berkeley and justice of the peace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Jenner
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ https://www.cdc.gov/smallpox/history/history.html
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/02/01/
Benjamin Franklin America / USA 1706-1790
https://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/
Isaac Newton UK 1643 - 1727
English physicist and mathematician
(...)
In 1667, Newton returned to Cambridge, where he became a fellow of Trinity College.
Two years later he was appointed second Lucasian professor of mathematics.
It was Newton's reflecting telescope, made in 1668, that finally brought him to the attention of the scientific community and in 1672 he was made a fellow of the Royal Society.
From the mid-1660s, Newton conducted a series of experiments on the composition of light, discovering that white light is composed of the same system of colours that can be seen in a rainbow and establishing the modern study of optics (or the behaviour of light).
In 1704, Newton published 'The Opticks' which dealt with light and colour.
He also studied and published works on history, theology and alchemy.
In 1687, with the support of his friend the astronomer Edmond Halley, Newton published his single greatest work, the 'Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica' ('Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy').
This showed how a universal force, gravity, applied to all objects in all parts of the universe. http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/newton_isaac.shtml
https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/
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