FAMOUS SCIENTIST

Linus Pauling (1901-1994)

2012-01-19T23:39:00.000-08:00

Linus Pauling was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1901 where his father was a druggist. He attended Oregon Agricultural College from 1917, receiving the bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering 1922.

For his doctoral work, which concerned X-ray studies of inorganic crystal structure, he moved to the California Institute of Technology and by the time he graduated in 1925 he already published twelve scientific paper. He joined the faculty in 1927.

At the age 26, Pauling accepted an assistant professorship of chemistry at Caltech and became the youngest member of the faculty.

At Caltech, Pauling explored the structure and behavior of molecules and in 1939, published The Nature of the Chemical Bond and the Structure of Molecules and Crystals.

His research over involved many areas: chemical bonds, the race for the structure of DNA, sickle-cell anemia, the relationship between nutrition and mental health, vitamin C and the common cold.

In 1954 he won Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research into the chemical structures of complex substances.

During world War II Pauling worked on explosives rocket propulsion and substitute for human blood. Oppenheimer offered him the chance to head up the chemistry division of the Manhattan Project but he declined.

He spent several years at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Santa Barbara and then return to academic, first at the University of California in San Diego then at Stanford University.

In 1972 he founded the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine in Palo Alto, where he centered his activity.He won the Noble Peace Prize in 1963 and he was the first scientific Nobel Laureate to also won Nobel Peace Prize.

Linus Pauling (1901-1994)

Biography of Julius Robert Oppenheimer (1904 – 67)

2011-10-28T19:33:00.000-07:00

Julius Robert Oppenheimer directed the Los Alamos National Laboratory for Manhattan Project during Word War II.

He over saw the production of the atomic bomb dropped in Japan in August 1945.

Robert was born into a life of wealthy Jewish and attended excellent private schools in New York. He educated at Harvard, Cambridge, and Gottingen, where he gained his PhD in 1927.

In 1929 Oppenheimer accepted academic positions at both University of California, Berkeley and California Institute of Technology. Throughout the 1930s Oppenheimer built up a reputation as a theoretical physicist, making several important contributions to quantum theory. Outside science his interests included literature and politics.

Oppenheimer’s early research was devoted in a particular to energy processes of subatomic particles, including electrons, positrons and cosmic rays.

He trained a whole generations of US physicist, who were greatly affected by his qualities of leadership and intellectual dependent.
When in 1942, the United States government decided to build atom bomb. Oppenheimer was chosen to direct the project. He helped to select the site for the laboratory in Los Alamos and proved to be a director with sufficient intellectual authority to command the support of several hundred scientists and sufficient diplomatic skill to deal with the politicians and general.

Oppenheimer was undoubtedly successful, for on 16 July 1945 and atom bomb was exploded in nearby New Mexico desert. Oppenheimer was involved in and supported the decision to drop the first bomb in Japanese town rather than on an uninhabited area as a threat.

After the war, Oppenheimer served as director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Prince University.

Oppenheimer retired to the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton, where he had been appointed director in 1947.

In 1963 he was given the Enrico Fermi Award by the AEC and in 1964 he was invited to Los Alamos to lecture to a packed audience. He died of cancer of the throat on February 18, 1967.
Biography of Julius Robert Oppenheimer (1904 – 67)

Harry Steenbock (1886-1967)

2011-10-16T18:49:00.000-07:00

Harry Steenbock was born in 1886. he was an American biochemist and nutritionist and a professor of biochemistry at University of Wisconsin.

The history begins in 1924 when Professor Harry Steenbock discovered a method of activating vitamin D in certain food.

He developed a method for increasing the vitamin D content of food and drugs in a process of irradiation.

Steenbock has been working on ways to effectively treat rickets, which is caused by a nutritional deficiency of vitamin D

This find was eventually responsible for eliminating the childhood disease rickets.

He decided to patent his findings, based on partly on his desire to protect the public from unscrupulous or incompetent firms and from monopolization of the industry by a private patentee.

He then help to develop a innovative non-profit organization the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), to market the patent for the support of research at the University. It was established in 1925 at a cost of nine hundred dollars.

WARF licensed the steenbok patents to Quaker Oats on an exclusive basis for the production of vitamin-enriched cereal products.

In the years after 1925 and especially after World War II, WARF probably the most important reason when University was able to develop and maintain its position as one do the nation’s and world’s major research university.
Harry Steenbock (1886-1967)

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543)

2011-10-02T19:45:00.000-07:00

Nicolaus Copernicus was born in Thorn, Poland on February 19, 1473 . He came from a wealthy family, and received a good education at the University of Cracow, especially in mathematics and astronomy.

This including mathematics with Euclidean geometry and astronomy taught by Albert Brudzewski and canon law at the university.

He went to Italy and continued his study in law and medicine as well as astronomy and returned to Cracow in 1503. Later Copernicus worked as church administrator and as a doctor.

He read the ideas of ancient Greek astronomers and mathematicians. These learned men believed Earth was the center of the universe and that all he other heavenly bodies, including the sun, revolved around it.

Meanwhile Copernicus continued his private research and kept a low profile and eventually made public of his theory.

In 1512, Copernicus published a description of his ‘heliocentric’ model of the solar system. In this model, the sun was the center of the solar system.

The same idea had been proposed by Aristarchus and mathematician Pythagoras but Copernicus worked out his system in full mathematician detail.

From 1514 Copernicus started the description of his new astronomical theory. In 1530, Copernicus completed and gave to the world his remarkable work De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium or On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres.

His work explains the fundamentals of the theory that the Erath revolves around the Sun, contrary to the general belief that the sun revolves around the Earth.

He claims that heliocentrism provides a simpler or more coherent explanation of the solar system.

The idea strongly influenced Galileo, who 80 years later was able to demonstrate it with his telescope.

Nicolaus Copernicus died in May 24, 1543. Only a few weeks later his great book De Revolutionibus was published.
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543)

Carlo Rubbia – Nobel Prize Winner in Physics

2011-08-25T18:44:00.000-07:00

Carlo Rubbia, Italian physicist who shared the 1984 Nobel Prize in physics with the Dutch physicist Simon van der Meer for their discovery of the subatomic W and Z particles.

The W and Z particles was proven existence by Rubbia which used a new proton-antiproton collider with sufficient energy for production of these of these very heavy particles.

W and Z bosons existence strongly confirms the availability of the electroweak theory, proposed in the 1970s, that the weak force and electromagnetism are different manifestations of a single basic kind of physical interaction.

Rubbia was born in Gorizia and obtained his doctorate from the University of Pisa in 1957.

He helped develop pulsed gas particle detectors and gained his degree with a thesis on cosmic ray experiments.

He taught there for two years before moving to Columbia University as a research fellow.

In 1960 he became a physicist and CERN Geneva and in 1970 he also was appointed a physics professor at Harvard University.

Rubbia divided between teaching at Harvard and research at CERN in Geneva, where a beam particle beam accelerator used counter-rotating beams of protons colliding against each other.

The experiment began in 1981 and the discovery of W and Z bosons obtained in 1983 led to conclude that in some decays of the W particles, the first evidence for the six quark, called top, had been found.

Rubbia served as director general of CERN from 1989-93 and as President of ENEA until July 2005.
Carlo Rubbia – Nobel Prize Winner in Physics

Luis Alvarez (1911-1988)

2011-08-14T23:01:00.000-07:00

Luis Alvarez was outstanding as scientist and engineer. Luis Alvarez is most famous for his Nobel Prize winning effort to discover and study over 70 new elementary particles, many of which exist for less than 1/1,000,000 of a second.

He was born in San Francisco in June 13 1911. Luis began his studies at the University of Chicago in 1928 then moved to California after graduation to accept a research position at the University of California, Berkeley. He graduated with PhD in 1936 also from University of Chicago.

Beginning in 1936, his entire career was spent at the University of California, Berkeley, as professor of physics from 1945 to 1978, and professor emeritus from 1978.

He was on leave at the Radiation Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1940 to 1943, at the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago in 1943-1944, and at the Los Alamos Laboratory of the Manhattan District from 1944 to 1945.

As a physicist, he discovered more than seventy new atomic particles, designed detonators for the atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and was responsible for developing three types of radar.

Alvarez discovered new radioisotope of hydrogen and helium that later became important on low temperature research. He also developed a new method for producing beams of ultra –slow neutrons.

Alvarez had designed and built the first Berkeley 40 foot long linear proton accelerator, which was completed in 1947.

He was awarded the Albert Einstein Medal in 1961 and Nobel Prize in Physics in 1968.
Luis Alvarez (1911-1988)

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)

2011-07-01T09:01:00.000-07:00

Leonardo da Vinci was born on 15 April 1452 in the small town of Anchiano, which was close to Vinci in Italy. He was the illegitimate son of a legal clerk and a peasant girl. Da Vinci was not merely an indication of his birthplace but was also his family’s surname.

Leonardo da Vinci is primarily known as an artist, but he was also one of the greatest scientific minds ever to have lived.

He was a gifted and inventor of machines, he understood key principle that would only be fully explained by Newton nearly two centuries later.

His drawing of a primitive airoplane, parachute and even type of helicopter anticipate discoveries hundreds of years away. He created complicated gears, pulleys, a mechanical saw, a coin making machine, a rope making machine, cranes, a centrifuge pump and many more.

Leonardo was also a scientist who studied anatomy; he studied the bodies of animals and people. He learned how many parts the human body works.

Leonardo’s early anatomical studies were rather unfocused, for he wished to explain every aspect of the human body – not just structural anatomy, but also conception and growth, the expression of the emotions, the nature of the senses and so on.
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)

Pecquet John (1622-1674)

2011-05-11T04:04:00.001-07:00

Pecquet John, a celebrated anatomist, was born at Dieppe in 1622.

He received a medical education at Montpellier, from which university he obtained the degree of MD.

He afterwards went to Pairs, where he became associated with Mentel and other anatomist in their scientific pursuits.

In 1647 he discovered the thoracic duct while working on animal dissection. He was an anatomist of Paris at that time.

Pecquet reported in his findings in ‘Experiment nova anatomica’ in 1651.

Pecquet actually rediscovered the thoracic duct traced to the lacteal vessels, and demonstrated the passage of the cycle through the duct onto the subelavian vein.

This discovery soon gave his name a celebrity throughout Europe and added important confirmation of the Harveian account of the circulation.

Pecquet also wrote some papers on anatomical subjects, in the Memoirs of the Academy of Sciences, in which society he was admitted a member in 1666 and in the Journal des Savans.
Pecquet John (1622-1674)

Herophilus (335-280 BC)

2011-04-25T07:02:00.000-07:00

Often called the father of anatomy. Herophilus of Chalcedon was a well respected physicians and teacher of medicine in Alexandria.

Herophilus was born at Chalcedon, Greek city on the Propontus, nearly opposite to Byzantium.

Herophilus received his early training as physician from Chrysippus, a widely known Stoie philosopher, who had taught at the school of Cnidus and had also written on medical topics.

Herophilus showed a decided learning toward the study of anatomy. He was the pupil of Praxagoras of Cos. He was an original investigator and the first of the Hippocratic school to distinguish himself as an anatomist.

Herophilus lived during a period in Greek medical history when human dissection was allowed, and he greatly advanced the study of scientific anatomy through his extensive dissections of human cadavers.

He experimented on living animals and even on condemned criminals placed at his disposal in the prisons.

Some of the books written by Herophilus have been used for several centuries but only a few fragments from his texts have survived.

He had a good picture of the nervous system, including the connection between the brain, spinal cord and nerves.

He argued that the brain was the center of the nervous system, rejecting Aristotle’s claim that the heart was the seat of intelligence.
Herophilus (335-280 BC)

Biography of Christiaan Eijkman

2011-03-16T06:20:00.001-07:00

Christiaan Eijkman was a Dutch physician and pathologist who demonstrated that beriberi is caused by poor diet. He discovered that beriberi is a vitamin deficiency disease.

He was awarded the 1929 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. He shared the prize with Sir Frederick Hopkins.

Christiaan Eijkman was born on August 11, 1858 at Nijkerk in The Netherlands.

In 1875, Eijkman became a student at the Military Medical School of the University of Amsterdam. He received a medical degree in 1883 with honors by written thesis ‘On Polarization of the Nerves’.

Later he served as medical officer in the Dutch East Indies in the year of 1883-85.

Eijkman was a director of the Geneeskundig Laboratorium (medical laboratory) in Batavia from 1888 to 1896 and during that time he made a number of important researches in nutritional sciences.

Because of his fundamental studies on fowl and the rice diet, he was knighted by Queen Wilhelmina with the Order of the Dutch Lion in 1920.
Biography of Christiaan Eijkman

Discovery of Vitamins B by Casimir Funk

2011-02-13T22:02:00.000-08:00

Beriberi, was endemic for centuries and finally proved to be deficiency disease. In 1890 Eijkman developed a polyneuritis by feeding polished rice to hens. This was cured by feeding rice polishing by Dr. Casimir Funk in 1911.

Casimir Funk born in 1884, had grown up in a Poland that was then under a Russian government.

His father, a physician, was able to send Casimir at the age of sixteen to continue his studies in Switzerland, first in Geneva then moving to Berne to specialize in organic chemistry and obtain a doctoral degree at the early age of twenty.

He began his career in Warsaw before moved in 1904 to Pasteur Institute in Paris; then in 1906 to Berlin to work on amino acids and again in 1901 to the Lister Institute in London.

In London, he managed to extract from yeast a compound that was very effective against beriberi, which he called vitamin because its amine content,

He made a great advances in 1912 when he hypothesized that certain diseases such as beriberi, scurvy, pellagra and rickets are caused by deficiency of nutrients.

Casimir Funk coined the word “vitamine”. He describe an organic compound ‘thyamin’ as a ‘vital amine’ and it became known as vitamin B.

He believed that all these substance were ‘vital amines’, however, it was soon shown that most of the vitamins are unrelated chemically and that only a few of them are amines.

Later, as each vitamin was isolated in pure form and its chemical structure was determined, it was given a chemical name.
Discovery of Vitamins B by Casimir Funk

Antoine Lavoisier 1743 – 1794

2010-08-30T02:59:00.000-07:00

Antoine Lavoisier 1743 – 1794
Antoine Lavoisier a French chemist, is referred to as the ‘Father of Modern Chemistry’. He was born to wealth and educated as a lawyer in France, began his scientific study at age twenty-one.

Antoine went back to basics of chemistry and invented the modern way of defining chemical elements.

He also wrote a ‘Great Treatise’ on Chemistry and even helped to introduce the metric system.

Lavoisier studied the composition of air and showed that its was a chemical reaction involving a gas he called oxygen.

As well as showing the importance of oxygen for combustion, he discovered its importance in respiration.

In 1783 he began heat measuring experiments using a calorimeter and showed that the heat produced by respiration was equal to the heat produced when the same amount of oxygen was used to burn charcoal.

Lavoisier was the first to discover that water is made up of oxygen and hydrogen.
Antoine Lavoisier 1743 – 1794

Anthemios of Tralles

2010-07-24T18:39:00.000-07:00

Anthemios of Tralles
Tralles was a wealthy city in ancient Greek Ruins of the city are situated on a plateau above the present day Turkish city of Aydin in Asia Minor, which is near to Ephesus.

In 334 BC Tralles was used as a base by Alexander the Great and later it was occupied by the Romans.

After the collapse of the western half of the Roman Empire in the fifth century AD Tralles remained a part of the Byzantine Empire until its destruction in 1282.

Anthemios, Greek architect, geometer, mathematician and physicist, was one of the great son of Tralles and was probably educated in Alexandria.

He is especially famed as architect (with Isodorus of Miletos) of the great Church of Santa Sophia in Istanbul.

This vast building, later a Turkish mosque and now a museum, was built for the Emperor Justinian between 532 and 537 AD.

It was an early and, certainly for many centuries, the largest example of pendentive construction to support a dome.

This form, using the spherical triangles of the pendentives, enabled a circular based dome to be supported safely upon piers that stood in a square plan below.

It gradually replaced the earlier squinch type of structure, though both forms of design stem from Middle Eastern origins.

At Santa Sophia the dome rises to 180ft (55m) above floor level and has a diameter of over 100 ft (30m). Together with Isodorus, Anthemios also worked upon the Church of the Holy Apostles in Istanbul.

He was a competent mathematician is evident from a fragment of a work of his On burning-mirrors. The first portion of the fragment gives a solution of the problem, ‘To contrive that a ray of the sun (admitted through a small hole or window) shall fall at a given point without moving away at any hour or season.’

This effected by constructing an ellipsoidal mirror, one focus of which is at the point where the ray of the sum is admitted, and the other at the point to which the ray is required to be reflected at all time. An interesting feature of the construction and proof is that Anthemios uses the well known method of drawing an ellipse by means of a string stretched tight round two pins fixed at the foci and a pencil moving round inside the string in such way as to keep the string always taut.
Anthemios of Tralles

Ampere, Andre-Marie

2010-06-20T18:07:00.000-07:00

Ampere, Andre-Marie
He was a French physicist and mathematician who established laws and principles relating magnetism and electricity to each other.

Ampere was repeated to have mastered all the then-known mathematics by the age of 12. He became Professor of Physics and Chemistry at Bourg in 1801 and a Professor of mathematics at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris in 1809.

Observing a demonstration in 1820 of Oersted’s discovery that a magnetic needle was deflected when placed near a current carrying wire, Ampere was inspired to investigate the subject of electricity, of which he had no previous experience.

Within a week he had prepared the first of several important communications on his discoveries to the Academy of Sciences in Paris.

Included was a new hypothesis formed on the basis of his experiments on the relation between electricity and magnetism.

He investigated the forces exerted on each other by current carrying conductors and the properties of a solenoid.

His mathematical theory describing these phenomenon provided the foundations for the development of electrodynamics and his classic work Theorie mathematique des phenomenes electrodynamiques was published in 1827.

The name ‘ampere’ was adopted to replace the name ‘weber’ as a unit of current after Helmholtz proposed such as a change in 1881.

Ampere, Andre-Marie

Magnus Albertus (1192-1280)

2010-05-18T20:59:00.000-07:00

Magnus Albertus (1192-1280)
He also known as Albrecht of Cologne. A Dominican priests, philosopher and scientist who also dealt in astrology and alchemy.

Born in Lauingen, he studied in Padua, and entering the newly founded Dominican order, taught theology in the schools of Hildesheim, Ratisbon and Cologne, where St Thomas Aquinas was his pupil.

His compilation of botanical plants in 1250, De Vegetabilibus (on plants), remained popular work on the subject for many centuries.

He was a faithful follower of Aristotle and wrote voluminous commentaries on his works.

He was also an alchemist, although his work express doubts about the possibility of transmutation of the elements, and he was the first to describe arsenic detail.

Of his works the most notable are the Summa theologiae and the Summa de creaturis.
Magnus Albertus (1192-1280)

Sir Frederick Augustus Abel

2010-04-20T23:53:00.001-07:00

Sir Frederick Augustus Abel
(July 17 1827 - September 6, 1902)
Abel’s father was a well known musician and his grandfather was court painter to the grand duke of Mecklenberg-Schwerin.

Despite this artistic background, Abel developed an early interest in science after visiting his uncle A. J. Abel, a mineralogist and pupil of Berzelius.

In 1845 he was one of the first of the pupils to study at the Royal College of Chemistry under August von Hoffmann, remaining there until 1851.

After a brief appointment as chemical demonstrator at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, he succeeded Michael Faraday in 1852 as a lecturer in chemistry at the Riyal Military Academy at Woolwich.

In 1854 he became ordnance chemist and chemist to the war department.

Abel’s career was thus devoted exclusively to the chemistry of explosives. New and powerful explosives, including guncotton and nitroglycerin had recently been invented but were unsafe to use.

Abel’s first achievement was to show how guncotton could be rendered stable and safe. His method was to remove all traces of the sulfuric and nitric used in its manufacture by mincing, washing in soda until all the acid had been removed, and drying.

In 1888 he was appointed president of government committee to find new high explosive. The two existing propellants, Poudre B and ballistite had various defects most important of which was a tendency to deteriorate during storage.

Together with Sir James Dewar, Abel introduced the new explosive, Cordite, in 1889. This was the mixture of guncotton and nitroglycerin with camphor and petroleum added as stabilizers and preservatives.

Abel was knighted in 1891 and created a baronet in 1893.
Sir Frederick Augustus Abel

Niels Bohr

2010-03-26T01:16:00.000-07:00

Niels Bohr
Danish physicist and Nobel Prize winner born in Copenhagen and educated at Copenhagen University, he went to England to work with Sir J J Thompson at Cambridge and Ernest Rutherford at Manchester University and returned to Copenhagen University as Professor (1916).

He greatly extended the theory of atomic structure when he explained the spectrum of hydrogen by means of Rutherford’s atomic model and the quantum theories of Albert Einstein and Max Planck (1913).

Bohr model later shown to be solution of Erwin Schrodinger’s equation.

During World War II he escaped from German-occupied Denmark and assisted atom bomb research in the US, returning to Copenhagen in 1945.

He later worked on nuclear physics and developed the liquid drop model of the nucleus used by Hans Bethe and Baron Carl vou Weizsacker.

He was founder and director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics at Copenhagen, (1920-22) and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1922.

His son, Aage Niels Bohr, won the 1975 Nobel Prize for Physics.
Niels Bohr

Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen

2010-03-03T01:57:00.001-08:00

Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen
Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was born in Lennep, Germany, but moved to Apeldoorn, Holland as a child with his family, who were engaged in the cloth industry.

His early schooling was marred by his expulsion from a Utrecht school for a prank.

He obtained a mechanical engineering degree from the zurich Polytechnic School and his Ph.d from the University of Zurich in 1869 after submitting a thesis on gases.

He was appointed as a professor of physics at the University of Giessen from 1879-88.

Röntgen served in 1894 as rector of the University of Wurzburg, where he discovered X-rays.

He also made significant contributions to the understanding of light, the specific heats of gases, crystallography and piezoelectric materials.

On November 8, 1895 using Hittorf and Crookes vacuum tubes covered with black paper to study cathode rays (following up work by Menard and Hertz), Röntgen noticed the fluorescence of barium platinocyanide crystals next to his experimental apparatus; he immediately began experimenting with these new kinds of rays, which were obviously different from cathode rays (stream of electrons).

He determined that X-rays were invisible to the eye, penetrated a variety of objects , including his own hand, and could not be deflected by a magnet.
Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen

Jacques Arsene d’ Arsonval

2010-02-17T15:49:00.000-08:00

Jacques Arsene d’ Arsonval
French physician and physicist noted for his invention of the reflecting galvanometer and for contributions to electrotherapy.

He was born on 8th June 1851 in Borie, France and passed away on 31st December 1940.

After studies at colleges in Limoges and later in Paris, Arsonval became a doctor of medicine in 1877.

In 1882 the College de France established a laboratory of biophysics with Arsonval as Director and he was Professor from 1894.

His most outstanding scientific contributions were in the field of biological application of electricity. His interest in muscle currents led to a series of inventions to assist research, including the moving coil galvanometer.

In 1881 he made a significant improvement to the galvanometer by reversing the magnetic elements. It had been usual to suspend a compass needle in the center of a large, stationary coil, but Arsonval’s invention was to suspend a small, light coil between the poles of a powerful fixed magnet.

This simple arrangement was independent of the earth’s magnetic field and insensitive to vibration.

A great increase in sensitivity was achieve by attaching a mirror to the coil in order to reflect a spot of light.

For bacterial research purposes he designed the first constant temperature incubation controlled by electricity.

His experiment on the effects of high frequency, low voltage alternating currents on animals led to the first high frequency heat therapy unit being established in 1892, and later methods of physiotherapy becoming a professional discipline.
Jacques Arsene d’ Arsonval

Ernest Frederick Werner Alexanderson (1878 – 1975)

2010-01-31T19:21:00.000-08:00

Ernest Frederick Werner Alexanderson (1878 – 1975)
Ernest Frederick Werner Alexanderson, Swedish-American electrical engineer and prolific radio and television inventor responsible for developing a high frequency alternator for generating radio waves.

After education in Sweden at the High School and University of Lund and the Royal Institution of Technology in Stockholm, Alexanderson took a postgraduate course at the Berlin Charlottenburg Engineering College.

In 11901 he began work for the Swedish C & C Electric Company, joining the General Electric Company, Schenectady, New York, the following year.

There, in 1906, together with Fessenden, he developed a series of high power high frequency alternators, which had a dramatic effect on radio communications and resulted in the first real radio broadcast.

His early interest in television led to working demonstrations in his own home in 1925 and at the General Electric laboratories in 1927, and to the first public demonstration of large-screen (7 ft diagonal) projection TV in 1930.

Another invention of significance was the ‘amplidyne’, a sensitive manufacturing control system subsequently used during the Second World War for controlling anti-aircraft guns.

He also contributed to developments in electric propulsion and radio serials.

He retired from General Electric in 1948, but continued television research as a consultant for the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), filling his 321st pattern in 1955.
Ernest Frederick Werner Alexanderson (1878 – 1975)

Abel, John Jacob (1857-1938)

2010-01-15T06:40:00.001-08:00

Abel, John Jacob (1857-1938)
An eminent biochemist from Cleveland, Ohio who graduated from the University of Michigan and studied under the foremost scientists in Austria and Germany, before he returned to America in 1891 to become the professor of the therapeutics at the University of Michigan.

After a brief period in this post, he was called to Johns Hopkins University as the first professor of pharmacology at the age of 36.

His contributions include the construction of the first membrane for artificial kidneys (1913), the extraction of epinephrine (1899) and the identification of posterior pituitary hormone and hirudin (1910).

He isolated specific amino acids from the blood and determined the molecular weight of cholesterol.

He was the first to obtain a crystalline from of insulin in 1926.
Abel, John Jacob (1857-1938)

Yukawa Hideki (1907-1981)

2009-12-16T07:17:00.000-08:00

Yukawa Hideki (1907-1981)
Yukawa Hideki, Japanese physicist, who was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Physics for his prediction in 1935 of the existence of the pi-meson (pion).

The son of geologist, Yukawa was educated at Kyoto University and Osaka University, where in 1938 he was awarded his doctorate.

He taught at both Osaka and Kyoto form 1932 to 1938, when he was appointed to the chair of physics at Kyoto.

In 1930s, Yukawa sought to elucidate the nature of the strong force that holds together the protons and neutrons on the atomic nucleus.

Just as the electromagnetic, interaction can be visualized as an exchange of photons.

Yukawa suggested that the strong interaction within the nucleus could be visualized as an exchange as a particle as yet unidentified.

Yukawa calculated that such a particle would have a mass some two hundred times greater than that of the electron.

A particle fitting this description was detected in 1937; it turned out, however, to be what is now called the muon.

Yukawa’s prediction made in 1935, had to wait a further ten year before C. F Powell discovered pion in debris caused by cosmic rays.
Yukawa Hideki (1907-1981)

Laennec, Rene Theophile Hyacinthe

2009-11-15T23:18:00.001-08:00

Laennec, Rene Theophile Hyacinthe
Laennec, the son of an unsuccessful lawyer, was brought up, after his mother’s death, mainly by his uncle G.F Laennec, professor of medicine at the University of Nantes.

He was a pupil of Jean Corvisart at the Charite in Paris, qualifying as a doctor in 1804.

He worked at a number of hospitals before becoming in 1814 physician-in-chief at the Hospital Necker, where he remained until 1822.

Then he was appointed professor of medicine at the College de France.

In 1826, he was forced to retire to Brittany where he died of consumption.

In 1819 Laennec published one of the classic texts of modern medicine, De l’auscultation mediate ( on Mediate Auscultation). It advanced the work of Leopold Auenbrugger in describing sounds detected within the body and the various diseases and anatomical defects they were related to.

The work is, however best known for its description of the situation leading to his invention of the stethoscope.
In 1816 he was consulted by a young woman with heart trouble whose age and sex inhibited him from examining her by his usual method, namely placing his ear on her breasts.

Instead, Laennec tightly rolled a sheaf of paper and placed one end over the heart and the other to his ear,

He was surprised and pleased to find that the heartbeat could be heard far more clearly and distinctly than before.

The work became widely known and was translated into English in 1821 and only two years later was published in America, where it was vigorously promoted by Austin Flint.

The stethoscope itself, in improved flexible versions, rapidly became a standard part of the physician’s equipment.
Laennec, Rene Theophile Hyacinthe

The Father of Vitamins: Casimir Funk

2009-10-29T01:35:00.000-07:00

The Father of Vitamins: Casimir Funk
Vitamins are s much a part of modern life you may have a hard time believing they are first discovered less than a century ago.

Of course, people have long known that certain food contain something special.

For example, the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates prescribed liver for night-blindness (the inability to see well in dim light).

By the end of the 18th century (1795), British Navy ships carried a mandatory supply of limes or lime juices to prevent scurvy among the men, thus earning the Brits once and forever nickname limeys.

Later on, the Japanese Navy gave its sailors whole grain barley to ward off beriberi.

Everyone knew these prescriptions worked, but nobody knew why – until 1912, when Casimir Funk (1884 – 1967), a Polish biochemist working first in England and then in the United States, identified “something” in food that he called vitamins (vita – life; amines – nitrogen compounds).

The following year, Funk and a fellow biochemist, Briton Frederick Hopkins, suggested that some medical conditions such as scurvy and beriberi simply deficiency diseases caused by absence of a specific nutrient in the body.

Adding a food with the missing nutrition to one’s diet would prevent or cure the deficiency disease.
The Father of Vitamins: Casimir Funk

Albert, Wilhelm August Julius

2009-10-18T21:35:00.000-07:00

Albert, Wilhelm August Julius
He was born on January 24, 1787 in Hannover Germany. He was German mining official successful applier of wire cable.

After studying law at the University of Gottingen, Albert turned to the mining industry and in 1806 started his career in mining administration in the Harz district, where he became Chief Inspector of mines thirty years later.

His influence on the organization of the mining industry was considerable and he contributed valuable ideas for the development of mining technology.

For example, he initiated experiments with Reichenbach’s water column in Harz when it had been working successfully in the transportation of brine in Bavaria, and he encouraged Dorell to work on his miner’s elevator.

The increasing depth of shafts in the Harz district brought problems with hoisting as the ropes became too heavy and tended to break.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century iron link chains replaced the hempen ropes which which were expensive and wore out too quickly, especially in the wet conditions on the shafts.

After he had experimented for six years using counterbalancing iron link chains, which broke too easily, in 1834 he conceived the idea of producing stranded cables from iron wires.

Their breaking strength and flexibility depended greatly on the softness of the iron and the way of laying the strands.

Albert produced the cable by attaching the wires to strings which he turned evenly; this method became known as ‘Albert lay’.

He was not the first to conceive the idea of metal cables: there exist evidence for such cables as far back as Pompeii; Leonardo da Vinci made sketches of cables made from brass wires and in 1780 the French engineer Reignier applied iron cables for lightning conductors.

The idea also developed in various other mining areas, but Albert cables were the first to gain rapidly direct common usage worldwide.
Albert, Wilhelm August Julius

William Giauque (1895 – 1982)

2009-09-24T09:01:00.000-07:00

William Giauque (1895 – 1982)
William Giauque – the enigma among the Canadian Nobel Prize winners – was born in Niagara Falls, Ontario, to American parents who were living in Canada at the time.

He attended primary school in Michigan, but after his father’s death in 1908, the family returned to Niagara Falls, Ontario.

Giauque’s family found themselves in a precarious financial situation after his father’s death and they were extremely fortunate in having friendship of Dr. John Woods Beckman and wife Gertrude through this troubled time.

While he planned to be electrical engineer, after finished high school he took a job across the river at the Hooker Electro Chemical Company in Niagara Falls, New York, where he was fortunate enough to be employed in the laboratory for two years.

In the course of his work, which he found fascinating, he decided to change direction and become a chemical engineer.

Giauque enrolled at the College of Chemistry at the University of California, where he received his B.Sc degree in 1920. After two years as a teaching fellow at the University of California, he received his PhD in 1922.

He progressed through the system to become a full professor of chemistry in 1934, by which time, he was fully into the research that earned him his Nobel Price.

William Giauque was awarded the Nobel Prize or Chemistry in 1949 “for his contribution to the field of chemical thermodynamics, particularly concerning the behavior of substances at extremely low temperatures.”
William Giauque (1895 – 1982)

Cleveland Abbe

2009-09-06T18:30:00.000-07:00

Cleveland Abbe
Abbe was educated at City College, New York and taught at the University of Michigan. He then spent two years (1864-66) in Russia at the Pulkovo Observatory under Otto Struve.

On his return to America he work as director of the Cincinnati Observatory (1866-70).

Abbe was the first official weather forecaster in America.

He was appointed, in 1871, chief meteorologist with the weather service, which was later formed into the US Weather Bureau (1891) and remained in this organization for the rest of his life.

He was one of the first scientists to see the revolutionary role the telegraph had to play in weather forecasting and used reports conveyed to him from all over the country.

Abbe published over 300 papers in meteorology and from 1893 he was in charge of the journals published by the US Weather Bureau.

He was also responsible for the division of America into time zones on 1883.
Cleveland Abbe

Frederick William Herschel

2009-08-15T04:24:00.000-07:00

Frederick William Herschel
Frederick William Herschel (1738-1822) is perhaps most famous for his discovery of Uranus, the first planet found since antiquity, on March 13, 1781.

Herschel was born in Hanover, Germany and became well known as both as musician and an amateur astronomer.

He immigrated to England in 1757, and with his sister Caroline, began making the most advanced instrument of the time. The discovery of Uranus was made using a home made 15.7 cm (6.2 in) reflector.

His later creations included telescope of the day – a 12 m (40 ft) long instrument with a 1.9 m (48 in) mirror.

Appointed the personal astronomer to King George III (after whom he named the new planet), he later discover two satellites of Uranus (Titania and Oberon) in 1787, followed by two moons of Saturn (Mimas and Enceladus) in 1789.

In 1800, he discovered what he called “caloric rays” (now known as infrared radiation) during studies of the “rainbow” created when light is divided into its color by a prism. It was the first time that someone had shown the existence of forms of light that our yes cannot see.

At the very end of his life he was elected to be the first president of the newly founded Royal Astronomical Society.

Armstrong, Edwin Howard

2009-07-14T20:03:00.001-07:00

Armstrong, Edwin Howard
Armstrong was born in New York on 18 December 1890.

American engineer who invented the regenerative and superheterodyne amplifiers and frequency modulation, all major contributions to radio communication and broadcasting.

Interested from childhood in anything mechanical, as an engineer, Armstrong constructed a variety of wireless equipment in the attic of his parent’s home, including spark-gap transmitters and receivers with iron-filling ‘coherer’ detectors capable of producing weak Morse-code signals.

In 1912, while still a student of engineering at Columbia University, he applied positive, i.e. regenenarative feedback to a Lee De Forests triode amplifier to just below the point of oscillation and obtained a gain of some 1,000 times, giving a receiver sensitivity very much greater than hitherto possible.

Furthermore, by allowing the circuit to go into full oscillation he found he could generate stable continuous-waves, making possible the first reliable CW transmitter.

Sadly, his claim to priority with this invention, for which he filed US patents in 1913, the year he graduated from Columbia, led many to many years of litigation with De Forest, to whom the US Supreme Court, but unjustly awarded the patent in 1934.

The engineering world clearly did not agree with this decision, for the Institution of Radio Engineers did not revoke its previous award of a goad medal and he subsequently received the highest US scientific ward, the Franklin Medal, for this discovery.

During the First World War, after sometime as an instructor at Columbia University, he joined the US Signal Corps laboratories in Paris, where in 1918 invented the superheterodyne, a major contribution to radio-receiver design and for which he filed patent in 1920.

The principle of this circuit which underlies virtually all modern radio, TV and radar reception, is that by using a local oscillator to convert, or “heterodyne”, a wanted signal to a lower, foxed, ‘intermediate’ frequently it is possible to obtain high implication and selectivity without the need to ‘track’ the tuning of numerous variable circuits.

Returning to Columbia after the war eventually becoming Professor of Electrical Engineering, he made a fortune from the sale of his patent rights and used part of his wealth to fund his own research into further problems in radio communication particularly that of receiver noise.

In 1933, he filed four patents covering the use of wide-band frequency modulation (FM) to achieve low noise, high fidelity sound broadcasting, but unable to interest RCA he eventually built a complete broadcast transmitter at his own expense in 1939 to prove the advantages of his system.

Unfortunately, there followed another long battle to protect and exploit his patents and exhausted and virtually ruined he took his own life in 1954, just as the use of FM became an established technique.
Armstrong, Edwin Howard

Walter Houser Brattain

2009-07-06T18:14:00.000-07:00

Walter Houser Brattain
Walter Houser Brattain was a physicist, who collaboration with John Bardeen invented the point contact transistor. He shared the 1956 Nobel Prize for Physics with Bardeen and W.B Shockley.

Brattain was educated at Whitman College, the University of Oregon and Minnesota when he gained his Ph.D in 1928.

We he joined the staff of the Bell Telephone Laboratories as a research physicist and remained with them until his retirement in 1967.

In 1940s, Brattain’s interests at Bell centered on the properties of semiconductors as germanium and silicon.

Working with John Bardeen he developed the first workable point contact transistor in 1947 and they published their result in 1948.
Walter Houser Brattain

Agricola, Georgius (Georg Bauer)

2009-06-28T17:09:00.000-07:00

Agricola, Georgius (Georg Bauer)
Agricola was a physician, scientist and metallurgist of note and ot was this which led to the publication of De Re Metalicca.

He studied at Leipzig University and between 1518 and 1522 he was a school teacher in Zwickau.

Eventually he settled as a physician in Chemnitz. Later he continued his medical practiced at Joachimstal in the Erzgebirge.

This town was newly built to serve the mining community in what was at the time the most important ore-mining filed in both Germany and Europe.

As a physician in the sixteenth century he would naturally have been concerned with the development of medicines which would have led him to research the medical properties or ores and base metals.

He studied the mineralogy of his area and the mines ad the miners who were working there.

He wrote several books in Latin on geology and mineralogy.

His important work during that period was a glossary of mineralogical and mining terms in both Latin and German.

It is, however, De Re Metalicca for which he is best known.

This large volume contains twelve books which deal with mining and metallurgy, including an account of glassmaking.

Whilst one can understand the text of this textbook very easily, the quality of the illustrated woodcuts should not be neglected.

These illustrations detail the mines, furnaces, forges and the plants associated with them, unfortunately the name of the artist in unknown.

The importance of the work lies in the fact that it is an assemblage of information on all the methods and practices current at that time.

The book was clearly intended as a textbook of mining and mineralogy and as such it would have been brought to England by German engineers when they were employed by Mines Royal in the Keswick area in the late sixteenth century.

In addition to his studies in preparation for De Re Metalicca, Agricola was an ‘adventurer’ holding shares in the Gottesgab mine in the Erzegebirge.
Agricola, Georgius (Georg Bauer)

Frederick Banting

2009-05-27T18:09:00.001-07:00

Frederick Banting
Frederick Banting received the Nobel Price for Medicine in 1923 for his discovery of insulin as a treatment for diabetes. He was only thirty two year old.

The Nobel Price had only been introduced and awarded since 1901, and Banting was the first Canadian to receive one. As a result of his Nobel Price, he went from obscurity to world fame, from small town doctor to world renowned scientist and he became a national hero overnight.

The discovery of insulin was not vague esoteric or of questionable value to society. Its impact was clear, practical and immediate. There were literally millions of people all over the world who suffered from diabetes and who could previously only look forward to a life with a progressive, debilitating illness that usually led to an early death.

Frederick Banting was born in November 19, 1891 on a farm near Alliston, Ontario. He attended school in Alliston, where he had an average but undistinguished academic career but he excel at athleticism was good at art and was a hard working determined student.

After graduating from high school, Banting entered Divinity College to satisfy his parent’s wishes. He soon realized the medicine was his real interest and he transferred into the medical program.

When he graduated as a doctor in 1916, World War I was at its peak, and he felt compelled to do his part for his country. He enlisted on the Royal Canadian Army medial corps and was sent to Europe to work as a military surgeon in a rear field hospital.

After the war he served for a year as resident surgeon at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children. But for a young doctor just out of the army, earning a decent living was practical necessity. So Banting opened a small practice in London, Ontario.

He also lectured at the Medical school of the University of Western Ontario, and conducted research in neurophysiology under Dr. F.R Miller.

One day while Banting was preparing a lecture in the pancreas he read a paper by Moses Barron in a medical journal. The article described changes that occurred in the pancreatic juice when the pancreatic duct was blocked by gallstone.

Banting was intrigued by the possibility that something that occurred in this process might hold the secret to diabetes – a disease that had distressed Banting since school days, when young classmate slowly wasted away from the disease before his eyes and finally died in her teens.

He had the idea but neither a lab nor funds for the necessary research. Banting arranged meeting with Dr. John MacLeod of the University of Toronto to use facilities in the university.

The first human patient treated with insulin was a fourteen year old boy with severe juvenile diabetes. His discovery was remarkable and immediate. Other patients followed with the same impressive results.
Frederick Banting

Archimedes of Syracuse

2009-05-02T18:21:00.000-07:00

Archimedes of Syracuse
He was Greek engineer who made the first measurement of specific gravity.
He studied in Alexandria, after which he returned to Syracuse where he spent most of the rest of the life.

He made many mathematical discoveries, including the most accurate calculation of pi made up to that time.

In engineering he was the founder of the science of hydrostatics. He is well known for the discovery of ‘Archimedes Law’ that a body wholly or partly immersed in a fluid loses weight equal to the weight of the fluid displaced.

He thus made the first measurement of specific gravity.

Archimedes also proved the law of the lever and developed the theory of mechanical advantage boasting to his cousin Hieron, ‘Give me a place to stand on and with a lever I will move the whole world.’

To prove his point, he launched one of the biggest ships built up to that date.
During his time in Egypt he devised the ‘Archimedean Screw’, still used today in Middle Eastern countries for pumping water.

He also built an astronomical instrument to demonstrate the movements of the heavenly bodies, a form of orrery.

He was General of Ordnance to Heiron and when the Romans besieged Syracuse, a legionary came across Archimedes geometrical diagrams in he sand.

Archimedes immediately told him to ‘Keep off’ and the soldier killed him.

He also experimented with burning glasses and mirrors or setting for to wooden ships.
Archimedes of Syracuse

Bertram Brockhouse

2009-04-08T01:55:00.001-07:00

Bertram Brockhouse
Bertram Brockhouse was “awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physics for pioneering contributions to the development of neutron scattering techniques for studies of condensed matter and particularly for the development of neutron spectroscopy.”

The work for which he was recognized was carried out in the 1950s and 1960s and it helped answer “the question of what atoms do!”

Bertram Brockhouse was born in Lethbridge, Alberta, in 1918 and briefly attended a one room prairie schoolhouse before the family moved to Vancouver, but the family was uprooted again in 1935 in the middle of the Great Depression.

They went to Chicago for three years to try to improve their precarious financial situation.

While in Chicago, Bertram began to design and repair radios, which probably sparked his later interest in physics and electronic equipment.

The family returned to Vancouver in 1938 and when war broke out, Brockhouse enlisted in the Royal Canadian navy.

In1944, he spent 6 months at the Nova Scotia technical College in an electrical engineering course and then he was assigned to the National Research Council in Ottawa.

Canada had made a commitment on nuclear energy in the late 1940s and 1950s and the Atomic Energy Project of the National Research Council was strongly supported by the Government both politically and financially.

Hr solved one problem after another and eventually came up with his own design for a triple-axis spectrometer.

The instrument enabled him to bombard solid materials with slow moving neutrons produced in the reactor.

That, in turn, allowed him to calculate the strength of the forces that bond atoms together.

His neutrons spectrometer was so successful that it is now used worldwide.

A special feature of hi spectrometer was its ability to vary three angles: the direction of the neutron beam, the position o the specimen and the angle of the detector.

With access to one of the world’s best nuclear reactor facilities and his new spectrometer, Brockhouse was able to explore the tiny inner-world of the atom for the next twelve years.

It was during this period that he and his neutron spectrometer accomplished the work that led to his Nobel Prize.

He was appointed professor of physics at McMaster University in Hamilton which had the only university-sited nuclear reactor in Canada at the time.

When Brockhouse was named as the recipient of the 1994 Nobel prize in Physics, he had already been retired since 1984.
Bertram Brockhouse

Geiger, Hans Wilhelm (1882 – 1945)

2009-03-11T12:33:00.000-07:00

Geiger, Hans Wilhelm (1882 – 1945)
He was German physicist, who invented the Geiger counter.

The son of philologist, Geiger was educated in the Universities of Munich and Erlangen where he obtained his PhD in 1906.

His first academic appointment took him to Manchester University as assistant to Professor Arthur Schuster (1851 – 1934).

In the following year Schuster was succeeded by Ernest Rutherford. In 1908, in cooperation with Rutherford, Geiger investigated the nature of the alpha particle, showing that it had a double positive charge.

Geiger also designed instrument capable of detecting and counting alpha particles.

These were the prototype of the counter Geiger developed in the 1920s with W. Muller, which has since become widely known as the Geiger counter (or Geiger Muller counter).

Geiger returned to Germany in 1912 to direct the Physikalisch-Technische Reichanstalt in Berlin.

He later held chairs of physics at the Universities of Kiel (1925-29) and Tubingen (1929-36).

In 1936, he was appointed head of physics at the technical University, Charlottenburg.
Geiger, Hans Wilhelm (1882 – 1945)

Sidney Altman

2009-02-11T01:44:00.001-08:00

Sidney Altman
Sidney Altman received his Nobel price for Chemistry in 1989 for “his discovery that RNA in living cells is not only a molecule of hereditary, but also can function as a bio catalyst.”

As the Royal Swedish of Sciences said in the press release announcing Altman’s Nobel Price; “This discovery which came as a complete surprise to scientists, concerns a fundamentals aspect of the molecular basis of life. Many chapters in our textbooks will have to be revised.”

Sidney Altman was born in the Montreal suburb of Notre Dame-de-Grace of Polish-Russian immigrant parents in 1939. While he was still in high school, Sid and a friend decided on a whim to write the American Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) at McGill.

Both friends applied to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, and as luck would have it, Sid was accepted, but his friend was not. He earned his B.Sc. in 1960.

He then spends eighteen months in graduate school at Columbia University in New York.

He decided to enroll as a graduate student in biophysics at the University of Colorado, where he obtained his Ph.D. in molecular biology.

After a year of research at Harvard, Altman had the great privilege of joining Cambridge. Altman made his initial discovery that eventually led to his Nobel Price.

At the end of his term in Cambridge, he was offered the post of assistant professor at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut which he accepted.

At Yale he progressed to full professor on 1980. At Yale, he continues to work on aspects of the same RNA molecular for which he won the Nobel Price.
Sidney Altman

Stephen William Hawking

2009-01-17T20:21:00.000-08:00

Stephen William Hawking
Stephen William hawking was born on January 8, 1942. His parent, Frank and Isobel, lived in London but went to Oxford for his birth to avoid the London of World War II.

Both Frank and Isobel Hawking had studied at Oxford University. Frank studied medicine and became a specialist in topical disease. Isobel became a secretary and met Frank, and they married in early days of war.

Stephen went to the private St. Albans School, beginning his studies in September 1952. He had two younger sisters, Mary and Philippa, and a brother, Edward.

Stephen soon discovered his great gift for mathematics and an intuitive capacity of good ideas, nevertheless, he did not excel as an undergraduate at Oxford University. He got scholarship to University College, which had also been his father’s college.

During his last year at Oxford, physical difficulties emerges, he did nothing about it, but when he went home for Christmas his mother had him examined in the hospital. He soon got report that he had ALS, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis also known as motor neuron disease or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

At Cambridge Hawking was a student at Trinity Hall. Hawking’s fame began with work developed by Fred Hoyle, well known for working with Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold on the “steady state” theory of the universe.

Hawking the Oxford undergraduate had shown little promise of becoming a great genius, but when the devastating consequences of his disease appeared in Cambridge, he began to shine with his own light, like a new star igniting into a bright nova.

Through his work on black holes Hawking is widely known. In 1971 he argued that black holes could be formed other than by a star’s gravitational collapse. They could have been produced, in the form of mini-black-holes, in the original big-bang.

These objects, if they exist, still wait discovery. Hawking went on in 1974 to describe a process by which black holes could quite unexpectedly emit radiation at a steady rate; this is known ‘Hawking radiation’.

Hawking has also considered the problem of the quantization of gravity, although he has not yet reached any generally accepted conclusions. He explained his scientific theories in a, popular book, A Brief History of Time (1987), which has been in bestseller list for nearly four years.
Stephen William Hawking

Fisher, Sir Ronald Aylmer (1890 – 1962)

2008-12-31T23:45:00.000-08:00

Fisher, Sir Ronald Aylmer (1890 – 1962)
Fisher, Sir Ronald Aylmer, British statistician and geneticist whose development of experimental design and statistical techniques facilitated the investigation of biological materials. He received a knighthood in 1952.

Born in London and educated at Gonville and Caius College Cambridge, Fisher graduated in mathematics in 1913 and spent two years as a statistician with an investment company.

Too short sighted for military services, he taught at Rugby School for the duration of World War 1.

In 1919, he joined Rothamsted Experimental Station as head of the statistics department. In 1918 Fisher published the results of his statistical analysis of characters that show continuous variation, such as human stature.

By his treatment (partition) of the statistical variance, he was able to distinguish between variation due to environmental factors and that due to genetic factors; the latter were confirmed as being largely determined by the cumulative effects of many separate genes, each inherited according to Mendelian principle.

Fisher subsequently did much to improve experimental methodology by introducing the concepts of random sampling and the technique of analysis of variance, which qualifies sources of variations in an experiment.

His books notably Statistical Methods for Research Workers (1925), The Design of Experiment (1935), and Statistical Tables (1938), form the foundation of statistical analysis in modern biological experimentation.

Fisher’s mathematical study of genes and their mutations populations demonstrated how Mendelian genetics is consistent with the Darwinian view of evolution by natural selection, making The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (1930) one of the seminal works of neo-Darwinism.

Fisher became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1929. In 1933 he was appointed Galton Professor of Eugenics at University Collage, London, and thereafter professor of genetics at Cambridge University (1943 – 57) until his retirement.

From 1960 he spent the remainder of his life working for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO)in Adelaide, Australia.
Fisher, Sir Ronald Aylmer (1890 – 1962)

John Desmond Bernal (1901 – 71)

2008-12-22T06:06:00.001-08:00

John Desmond Bernal (1901 – 71)
John Desmond Bernal, British physicist. His pioneering work in the field of X-ray crystallography enabled the structure of many complex molecules to be elucidated.

Bernal came from an Irish farming family. Brought up as a Catholic, he was educated at Stonyhurst and Cambridge, where he abandoned Catholicism and became (1923) an active member of the Communist Party. After Cambridge, Bernal spent four years at the Royal Institution in London learning the practical details of X-ray crystallography from Sir William Bragg.

When he returned to Cambridge in 1927 he planned a research program to reveal the complete three-dimensional structure of complex molecules, including those found exclusively in living organisms, by the techniques of X-ray crystallography.

In 1933 Bernal succeeded in obtaining photographs of single crystal proteins and went on to study the tobacco mosaic virus. It was not, however, Bernal’s own achievements in crystallography, as much as those of his pupils and colleagues, such as Dorothy Hodgkin and Max Perutz, that brought about the revolution in biochemistry and launched the subject of molecular biology.

In 1937 Bernal was appointed professor of physics at Birkbeck College, London. His attempts to develop the department were interrupted by the outbreak of World War II. Despite his known membership of the Communist party and against the advice of the security forces, Bernal spent much of the war as adviser to Earl Mountbatten.

In 1945 he returned to Birkbeck College and in 1963 was appointed to a chair of crystallography. In the same year he suffered a stroke and although he continued to work for some time, a second and more severe stroke in 1965 paralyzed him down one side and virtually ended Bernal’s scientific life.

His books include The Social Function of Science (1939), Science In History (1958), and the Origin of Life (1967).
John Desmond Bernal (1901 – 71)

Albert Einstein

2008-12-11T17:02:00.000-08:00

Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879 in Ulm, Wurttemberg, Germany. Einstein contributed more than any other scientist since Sir Isaac Newton to our understanding of physical reality.

Einstein worked at the patent office in Bern, Switzerland from 1902 to 1909. During this period he completed an astonishing range of theoretical physics publications, written in his spare time, without the benefit of close contact with scientific literature or colleagues.

The most well known of these works is Einstein's 1905 paper proposing "the special theory of relativity." He based his new theory on the principle that the laws of physics are in the same form in any frame of reference. As a second fundamental hypothesis, Einstein assumed that the speed of light remained constant in all frames of reference.

Later in 1905 Einstein showed how mass and energy were equivalent expressing it in the famous equation: E=mc2 (energy equals mass times the velocity of light squared). This equation became a cornerstone in the development of nuclear energy.

Einstein received the Nobel Prize in 1921 but not for relativity, rather for his 1905 work on the photoelectric effect. He worked on at Princeton until the end of his life on an attempt to unify the laws of physics.
Albert Einstein

Enrico Fermi

2008-11-26T08:00:00.000-08:00

Enrico Fermi
Enrico Fermi (September 29, 1901 – November 28, 1954) was an Italian physicist most noted for his work on the development of the first nuclear reactor, and for his contributions to the development of quantum theory, nuclear and particle physics, and statistical mechanics.

Enrico Fermi was born in Rome, Italy. His father was Alberto Fermi, a Chief Inspector of the Ministry of Communications, and his mother was Ida de Gattis, an elementary school teacher. As a young boy he attended local grammar school and enjoyed learning physics and mathematics and shared his interests with his older brother, Giulio.

In 1918 Fermi enrolled at the prestigious Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, where he was later to receive his undergraduate and doctoral degree. In order to enter the Institute, candidates had to take an entrance exam which included an essay. For his essay on the given theme Characteristics of Sound, 17-year-old Fermi chose to derive and solve the Fourier analysis based partial differential equation for waves on a string.

In 1921, his third year at the university, he published his first scientific works on the Italian magazine Nuovo Cimento: the first was entitled: "On the dynamic of a solid system of electrical charges in transient conditions"; the second: "On the electrostatic of a uniform gravitational field of electromagnetic charges and on the weight of electromagnetic charges".

In 1923, he was awarded a scholarship from Italian Government and spent some month with Professor Max Born in Gottingen. With a Rockefeller Fellowship, in 1924, he move to Leyden to work with P. Ehrenfest, later return to Italy for the post of lecturer in mathematical Physics and mechanics at the University of Florence.

When he was only 24 years old, Fermi took a professorship at the University of Rome (first in atomic physics in Italy) which he won in a competition held by Professor Orso Mario Corbino, director of the Institute of Physics.

In 1938, Fermi won the Nobel Prize in Physics at the age of 37 for his work on nuclear processes.

After Fermi received the Nobel Prize in Stockholm, he, his wife Laura, and their children immigrated to New York and began working with Columbia University.

After became American citizen and at the end of the war Fermi then went to the University of Chicago and began studies that led to the construction of the first nuclear pile Chicago Pile-1.

Fermi was widely regarded as the only physicist of the twentieth century who excelled both theoretically and experimentally.

He died of cancer at the University of Chicago on November 28, 1954. Fermi is remembered as the "father of the atomic bomb."
Enrico Fermi

Francis Peyton Rous MD (1879 – 1970)

2008-11-08T05:53:00.000-08:00

Francis Peyton Rous MD (1879 – 1970)
Francis Peyton Rous, US pathologist who pioneered cancer research and discovered that cancer can be caused by a virus, though his work was not recognized until fifty six later when he was awarded the 1966 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.

Rous qualified at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore (1900), and became an instructor in pathology at the University of Michigan. In 1909 he began work on a programme of cancer research at the Rockefeller Institute and after only a few weeks, he managed to transplant a naturally occurring connective tissue tumor (Rous sarcoma) from one hen to another by grafting tumor cells. More significantly, he showed that an injection of a free cells filtrate of the tumor could still cause cancer, suggesting a viral cause. This discovery was regarded with suspicion for many years although Rous and his co-workers were able to show the nature of the growth and the causal agent (caused the Rous sarcoma virus). Disheartened, Rous abandoned cancer research and carried out important work on the functions of the gall; bladder and the difference in acidity of animal tissue; during World War I he devised methods of preserving blood for several weeks.

In 1933, after R. E Shope discovered a growth in rabbits that often progressed to cancer, Rous took up his studies again and demonstrated several ways in which carcinogenic chemicals and tumor-inducing-viruses act together to speed up tumor production. He also discovered that carcinogenic action consists of two phases – initiation, which gives a cell malignant potential; and promotion, in which the potential is realized as an actively growing cancer. In his later years Rous was awarded many honors, including the Nobel Prize, which he shared with Charles B. Higgins.
Francis Peyton Rous MD (1879 – 1970)

Jacobus Henricus Van 't Hoff

2008-10-25T18:35:00.000-07:00

Jacobus Henricus Van 't Hoff
Van 't Hoff was born at Rotterdam in the Netherlands, the son of a physician. From a young age he was interested in science and nature; he frequently took part in botanical excursions, and his receptiveness for philosophy and his predilection for poetry were already apparent in his early school years. He studied at Delft Polytechnic and the University of Leiden. He finally received his doctorate at the University of Utrecht in 1874.

In 1874 van ‘t Hoff published a paper entitled A Suggestion Looking to the Extension into Space of the Structural Formulas at Present Used in Chemistry, which effectively created a new branch of science – stereochemistry. Van ‘t Hoff helped to found the discipline of physical chemistry as many people known it today.

Van ‘t Hoff became a lecturer in chemistry and physics at the Veterinary College in Utrecht. He then became a professor of chemistry, mineralogy and geology at the University of Amsterdam for almost 18 years before eventually becoming the chairman and the chemistry department. In 1896 van ‘t Hoff moved to Germany where he finished his career at the University of Berlin in 1911.
In 1901 van 't Hoff was awarded the first Nobel Prize for chemistry.

Andrew Schally

2008-09-21T20:10:00.000-07:00

Andrew Schally
Andrew Schally, the Polish American biochemist who won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1977 for his discoveries concerning the peptide hormone production of the brain, spent five years (1952 to 1957) in Montreal at McGill University studying endocrinology and carrying out research. Endocrinology is the branch of medicine concerned with endocrine gland s which includes the pituitary, thyroid and adrenal glands as well as the pancreas, ovaries and testicles. He received his PhD from McGill in 1957 and moved that same year to the United States where he has remained ever since, Schally became an American citizen in 1962.

Born in Wilno, Poland, in 1926, Schally survived the years of World War II in the Polish Jewish community in Romania. After the war, he continued his studies in Scotland and at the University of London where he also played some British cub football. He was employed as junior researcher at the national Institute of Medical Research for two years.

He immigrated to Canada in 1952 then became citizen during his five years in Canada. His work began in Montreal and continued in the United States, he investigated hormonal secretions of the pituitary gland and the closely related hypothalamus in the brain, and how the two interrelated. Very little was known about the hypothalamus hormones Schally’s work. He also pioneered the potential application of these hormones in the field of cancer treatment, and he continues to explore the field of hormone-dependent tumors.

He was the recipient of many international awards and honorary degrees including the Charles Mickle Award of the University of Toronto and Gairdner Foundation International Award of Canada.
Andrew Schally

Aleksandrov, Pavel Sergeevich

2008-09-07T03:29:00.000-07:00

Aleksandrov, Pavel Sergeevich
Aleksandrov, Pavel Sergeevich (1896-1982) was a Russian mathematician, who was a leading member of the Moscow school of topology. Born in Bodorodska, Aleksandrov graduated from Moscow University in 1917. He joined the faculty in 1921 an in 1929 was appointed to the chair of mathematics.

He planned, in collaboration with the Swiss mathematician H.Hopf, to produce a definitive multi-volume topological treatise. Only the first volume, Topologie 1 (1935), was published. It was nonetheless extremely influential and did much to encourage the development of the Moscow school of topology. Aleksandrov’s own work, initially in set-theoretic topology, later moved into the field of algebratic topology.

During his life, he wrote about three hundred papers, making important contributions to set theory and topology.
Aleksandrov, Pavel Sergeevich

Fuchs, (Emil Julius) Klaus (1911-1988)

2008-08-17T21:19:00.000-07:00

Fuchs, (Emil Julius) Klaus (1911-1988)
Fuchs was a German Born British physicist who, in the 1940s, conveyed important details of the Anglo-US atom bomb programme to the Soviet Union.

Fuchs arrived in Britain from Germany in 1933 and continued his studies in theoretical physics at Bristol and Edinburgh, proving himself to be a brilliant mathematicians. He was interned in 1940 and spent some time in a Canadian detention camp but, at the urging of prominent scientists in Britain he returned in 1941 to work on the atom bomb project at Birmingham University. Fuchs had made no secret of his communists sympathies while in Germany, but he was given security clearance by the British authorities and in August 1942 was granted British cit6izenship.

Taking full advantage of his access to top secret information, Fuchs began to pass vital technical information to Soviet agents almost immediately and continued to do so in the USA after he joined the research team working on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos in November 1943. He returned to Britain in June 1946 and was appointed head of theoretical physics at the Harwell Atomic Energy Establishment. The following year he began passing secrets to the Soviets. Not until 1949 did Fuchs fall under suspicion, when US cipher experts managed to break Soviet intelligence codes, Fuchs eventually confessed to senior M15 officer and was sentenced to fourteens years in prison. His evidence was used to incriminate his contact in the USA. Fuchs was released in 1959 and went to East Germany, where he became deputy director of the Central Institute of Nuclear Research at Rossendorf, near Dresden.
Fuchs, (Emil Julius) Klaus (1911-1988)

Hevesy, George Charles von (1885-1966) – Chemist with Nobel Prize

2008-07-29T06:43:00.000-07:00

Hevesy, George Charles von (1885-1966) – Chemist with Nobel Prize
Hevesy George Charles von was a Hungarian born Swedish chemist who was awarded the 1943 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work on radioactive tracers.

The son of a wealthy industrialist, Hevesy was educated at the University of Freiburg, where he obtained his PhD in 1908. Thereafter, in a career much interrupted by war and politics, Hevesy worked in seven different countries. After brief periods in Zurich and Karlsruhe, Hevesy joined Rutherford in Manchester. There he was given the task of separating radioactive radium D from lead. As radium D is an isotope of lead, the chemical methods used by Hevesy proved unsuccessful.

However, Hevesy realized that his apparent failure could be utilized to make an entirely new type tracer. If radioactive lead and ordinary lead could not be distinguished chemically, the radioisotope could be used to monitor the path of lead through a complex system. By 1923 he had shown how radioactive lead could be used to label salts taken up by plants in solution; in 1934, using radioactive phosphorus, Hevesy applied his tracer technique for the first time to animals. This use of artificial radioisotopes enabled the technique to find very wide applications.

Hevesy left Manchester in 1913 for the University of Vienna but, with the outbreak of World War I in 1914, he returned to his native Budapest. After war he worked in Copenhagen from 1920 to 1926, where he accepted the chair in physical chemistry at the University of Freiburg. Hevesy however, abandoned Germany with the rise of Hitler and return in 1934 to Denmark. Several years later the Germans caught up with him once again and in 1942 Hevesy left Denmark for the safety of Sweden, where he completed his academic career. Hevesy is also known for his discovery, in 1923, in collaboration with Dirk Coster (1889 – 1950), of the new element hafnium.
Hevesy, George Charles von (1885-1966) – Chemist with Nobel Prize

Kolff, Willem Johan

2008-07-10T21:30:00.000-07:00

Kolff, Willem Johan
United States physician, born in the Netherlands, who pioneered the science of biomedical engineering. During World War II he invented the kidney dialysis machine and in 1982 he and his colleagues performed the first heart transplant using an artificial heart.

Born in Leiden, the son of a doctor, Kolff was educated at the University of Leiden Medical School. He did postgraduate research at Groningen University and worked there until the German occupation of the Netherlands, when he moved to Kampen rather than work under Nazi director. During this time he developed crude version of his kidney dialysis machine and later supplied researchers in Britain, Canada, and the United States with his successful design.

Kolff emigrated to the United States in 1950 to join the staff of the Cleveland Clinic Foundation (1950-1967), where he studied cardiovascular problems. In collaboration with a student he designed a successful artificial heart lung machine that made open heart surgery possible; he also invented the intra-aortic balloon pump to help circulation during heart attack (1961).His most ambitious idea was to design an artificial heart and in 1957 he implanted one in a dog, which survived for ninety minutes.

In 1967 Kolff moved to the University of Utah as director of the Institute for Biomedical Engineering and Head of the Division of Artificial Organs, heading a team developing new prostheses and artificial organs. He has championed the trend towards home dialysis and in 1975 produced the wearable artificial kidney. In 1982, twenty-five years after his operation on the dog, Kolff and his colleagues used an aluminum and plastic heart to replace the diseased heart of Dr Barney Clark, who survived for 112 days.
Kolff, Willem Johan

Sir Julian Sorell Huxley (1887 – 1975)

2008-06-12T10:09:00.000-07:00

Sir Julian Sorell Huxley (1887 – 1975)
He is British biologist and scientific administrator who contributed much to the beneficial use science in society. He was knighted in 1958.

The grandson of the famous biologist T.H Huxley (1825 – 95), and his brother of the writer Aldous Huxley, Julian Huxley studied at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, receiving his zoology degree in 1909. He spent some time studying marine sponges at the Naples Zoological Station before returning to Oxford in 1910 as a zoology lecturer. Two years later he moved to the Rice Institute, Houston, Texas, as a research associate to establish the biology department. In 1916 he returned home to enlist in the Intelligence Corps. After the war he was made a fellow of New College, Oxford during which time he organized the University expedition to Spitsbergen (1921).

Huxley was appointed professor of zoology at King’s College, London, in 1925 but resigned two years later to allow more time to research His notable studies of the differential growth of different body parts, Problem of Relative Growth (1932), were but one facet of his wide ranging interests he wrote many popular articles, essays, especially on ornithology and evolution, and co-produced several history films, including the Private Life of the Gannet (1934). He adopted a firmly humanistic philosophical stance, as evidenced by Religion Without Revelation.

Huxley served (1935 – 42), as secretary of the Zoological Society of London and instigated an ambitious programme rebuilding, unfortunately he never realized because of the war. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1938. He became widely known through his appearances on the BBC programme Brains Trust.

In 1946 Huxley was appointed as the first director general of the newly founded United Nations Economic and Scientific Organization (UNESCO), during which time he traveled widely and identified the growing problem population expansion and environmental destruction. No stranger to controversy, Huxley supported the contentious view that the human race could benefit from planned parent hood using artificial insemination by donors of ‘superior characteristics’.
Sir Julian Sorell Huxley (1887 – 1975)

Domagk, Gerhard (1895 – 1964)

2008-05-08T18:42:00.000-07:00

Domagk, Gerhard (1895 – 1964)
German bacteriologist awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1939 for his discovery of the antibacterial effects of Prontosil, the first sulphonamide drug.

Domagk was born in Brandenburg (now in Poland) and trained in medicine at the University of Kiel. After postgraduate work at the universities of Greifswald (1924) and Munster (1925) he become director of the Bayer Laboratory for Experimental Pathology and Bacteriology at Wuppertal-Elberfeld and in 1928 was made professor of medicine at the University of Muster. Following the lead of Paul Ehrlich, he spent his career searching for chemotherapeutic agents against infections and cancer.

At the Bayer works he searched systematically for new dyes and drugs that might destroy infecting organisms without harming the patient. His first major success was the discovery of germanin, which was the most effective drug against sleeping sickness. His prize- winning work was the discovery that the dye Prontosil was effective against streptococcal bacterial in mice.

The active part of the dye was the sulphonamide group and modifications led to the development of drugs drastically reduced the mortality of pneumonia, puerperal sepsis, and cerebrospinal fever. Domagk was unable to accept his prize because of the policy of the Nazi government in Germany; he was arrested and forced to renounce the ward. In 1947 he was given the Gold Medal and Diploma but his achievement had since been eclipsed by the discovery of penicillin and other more potent antibiotics.
Domagk, Gerhard (1895 – 1964)

Bosch, Carl (1874-1940)

2008-04-11T03:34:00.000-07:00

Bosch, Carl (1874-1940)
Bosch was a German industrial chemist. His development of high pressure chemical plant enabled the laboratory Haber process to be translated into the immensely important industrial Haber-Bosch process. He was awarded the 1931 Nobel Price for Chemistry.

The son of engineer, Bosch began his career in a foundry, before being allowed by his father to pursue a formal education at the University of Leipzig. After gaining his PhD in 1898, Bosch joined the research staff of Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik (BASF) in Ludwigshafen. There he became involved in the major task facing German industry: the synthetic of ammonia, for use in both agriculture and the armaments industry.

In 1907, Fritz Haber had demonstrated that, with high temperature and pressures and appropriate catalysts, ammonia could be synthesized from atmospheric nitrogen and nitrogen. The Haber process, however, then was restricted to the laboratory. Bosch was assigned the task of transforming the process into an industrial plant: he did this at Oppau, where BASF’s first high pressure ammonia plant opened in 1909. By 1930 well over 2 million tons of ammonia were being produce annually. Remaining at BASF, Bosch rose to become chairman of its successor, IG Farben, and continued to hold the position until his death.
Bosch, Carl (1874-1940)

Baekeland, Leo Hendrick (1863 - 1944)

2008-02-20T18:07:00.000-08:00

He was Belgian born US chemist who discovered Bakelite. Born in Ghent and educated at the University of Ghent, Baekeland gained his doctorate in 1884. He was appointed shortly afterwards to the chair of chemistry at Brugers University, but after a honey moon trip the USA chose in 1889 to leave Belgium permanently. Baekeland initially worked in the field of photography, inventing Velos, a special photographic paper that permitted pictures to be printed in artificial light. He opted to sell discovery to Eastman Kodak for $25,000. However, before he could begin the negotiation George Eastman offered him one million dollars, for the invention. With this totally unexpected fortune Baekeland retired to Yonkers, New York, to work in his private laboratory.

Here Baekeland dedicated himself to finding a substitute for shellac. As it takes 150000 insects and six months to produce one pound of shellac, there was clearly a great fortune to be made for anyone who could produce the substance artificially. Baekeland was aware, as indeed most of the chemist, of the sticky resin that forms when phenols and aldehydes are heated together; with no apparent use, it merely clogged up valuable equipment. He found that when subjected to prolonged heating under pressure, the resin turned out to have a surprising number of useful properties. It was hard, insoluble, could be machined, molded, colored , dyed and , though light, was remarkably strong. It was in fact, the first thermosetting plastic, name Bakelite in 1909.As president of Bakelite Corporation (1910-39), Baekeland saw that his product gained worldwide use in both industry and the home.

Sir Edward Victor Appleton (1892-1965)

2007-12-03T06:34:00.000-08:00

Born in Bradford, he studied physics at Cambridge and spent World War 1 in the Royal engineers. Much concerned with persistent problem of the fading radio signal during the war, Appleton turned after the war to the study of the propagation of electromagnetic wave. It had been proposed by Oliver Heaviside and Arthur Kennelly in 1902 that some waves (known as sky waves) were reflected back to the earth by an electrical layer in the upper atmosphere. Appleton set out to confirm the suggestion experimentally and to explore the nature of the layer, which eventually became known as the ionosphere.

Suspecting that the fading was cause by interference, Appleton arranged for the BBC to vary the frequency of their transmitter while he recorded the strength the signal received some miles away in Cambridge. He found that a strengthening of the signal when the ground wave interfered constructively with the sky waves. Appleton calculated the height of the reflecting layer to be about 95 km and went on to show that it had been a complex structure. The top layer (F-region) of the ionosphere is often known as the Appleton layer.

From 1924 to 1936 Appleton was Wheatstone Professor of Experimental Physics at King’s College, London. After a spell as Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy at Cambridge, he was appointed secretary to the department of Scientific and Industrial Research (1939-49). In 1944 he moved to Edinburgh University, where was vice chancellor until his death.

Erlanger, Joseph (1874-1965)

2007-09-29T21:21:00.000-07:00

Erlanger is a US physiologist who, in collaboration with Herbert Gasser, developed techniques for recording nerve impulses using a cathode ray oscilloscope. In 1944 they shared the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine for demonstrating that different fibers in the same nerve cord can have different functions.

Erlanger qualified at the University of California and the John Hopkins Medical School (1899), where he worked for a seven years. He was appointed professor of physiology at the University of Wisconsin (1906-1910) and there began a successful collaboration with his student Gasser. Erlanger moved to the Washington University, St. Louis (1910-46), and Gasser joined him soon after.

There they studied various means of applying electronics to physiological research. They devised a method of applying electric responses occurring in an individual nerve fiber and were able to record them using the oscilloscope.

An amplified impulse produced a characteristics wave form on the screen, which could then be studied. In 1932 Erlanger and Gasser found that the fibers within a nerve conduct impulses at different rate, depending on fibers thickness, and that each fiber has a different threshold of excitability. Different fibers produced different wave forms on the screen, indicating that different types of impulses were being passed.