Alexander Borodin – Russian doctor and chemist

Alexander Porfiryevich Borodin (12 November 1833 – 27 February 1887) was born in Saint Petersburg, the illegitimate son of a Georgian noble, Luka Simonis dze Gedevanishvili, who had him registered instead as the son of one of his serfs, Porfiry Borodin.

Since a rather young age, Alexander Borodin was intelligent, with an innate gift for music. Young Borodin grew up becoming fluent in German, French and English, besides his native Russian. He later learned Italian and was able to write a technical essay in that language.

Borodin studied medicine at the Medico-Surgical Academy in St. Petersburg from 1850 to 1855 and defended his doctoral thesis on the similarity between arsenic and phosphoric acid in 1858.

During the first 2 years at the Academy, Borodin developed a deep interest in chemistry while attending the brilliant lectures given by Professor Nikolai N. Zinin.

Between 1859 and 1862 Borodin held a post-doctorate in Heidelberg. He worked on benzene derivatives in the laboratory of Emil Erlenmeyer. He also spent time in Pisa, working on organic halogens. One experiment published in 1862 described the first nucleophilic displacement of chlorine by fluorine in benzoyl chloride.

In 1864 he was appointed professor of chemistry at the Medico-Surgical Academy. In 1861, Borodin attended the first international congress of chemistry in Karlsruhe, and he was among the founders of the Russian Chemical Society in 1868.

He published 42 articles and was a friend of Dmitri Mendeleev, the scientist who described the periodic system. He is co-credited with discovering the Aldol Reaction which is, apparently, a way of forming carbon-to-carbon bonds.

Borodin played an active role in the administration of the Medico-Surgical Academy and, together

with Botkin. Sechenov, and other professors of the Academy, in 1872, Borodin started the first medical courses for women in Russia.

Borodin is also best known for his symphonies, his opera Prince Igor, and for later providing the musical inspiration for the musical Kismet. Borodin started the work on his first symphony in 1862, under the tutelage of Mily Balakirev and completed the work by 1869, when it was premiered under the baton of Mily Balakirev.
Alexander Borodin – Russian doctor and chemist

Sergei Korsakoff: Russian neuropsychiatris

Sergey Sergeevich Korsakoff (1854–1900) was the first Professor of Psychiatry in Russia and founder of the Moscow school of psychiatry.

He was born in a large village in central Russia in 1854 (now known as Gus‘-Khrustalny near Moscow). His father was a manager at the glass factory, his mother was a homemaker. On finishing school––the Moscow gymnasium––at the age of 16, he enrolled in the medical faculty of Moscow University.

While studying medicine at Moscow University, Korsakoff showed much interest in problems of natural science and philosophy, in addition to the regular curriculum. Later he wrote “of all medical sciences Psychiatry stands much closer to the philosophical questions.”

By 1875 he was a physician at the Moscow Preobrazhenskij mental hospital and 1 year later he joined the department of nervous and mental diseases, headed by Aleksey Yakovlevich Kozhevnikov.

Korsakoff is best known for his work detailing the cognitive and physical effects of chronic alcoholism. His thesis ‘‘About alcoholic paralysis’’ gained him his medical doctorate in 1887. He found that many alcoholics demonstrated evidence of polyneuritis (e.g., muscular weakness and pain, staggering gait) as well as profound memory impairments and confabulation. Although others had previously described some of these same symptoms, Korsakoff realized the cognitive and physical symptoms were characteristic of a single disease.

Later on, in 1889 he published his work “Several Cases of a Particular Cerebropathia and Polyneuritis.” This illness, he thought, was a form of acute alcoholic encephalopathy, usually developing after an atypical alcoholic delirium.

Korsakoff wrote a Course of Psychiatry published only a year after his death. After two heart attacks at the age of 44, he consulted a specialist in Vienna in 1898 who established the diagnosis hypertrophy of the heart, associated with obesity and myocarditis. He died in 1900 from heart failure, at the age of 46.
Sergei Korsakoff: Russian neuropsychiatris

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky was born on September 17th,1857 in the village of Izhevskaya in the province of Ryazan. He was the son of a Polish deportee to Siberia. The boy lost his hearing at age nine as a result of scarlet fever; four years later his mother died.

At 14, however, he took up mathematics and natural sciences and resumed his studies, making use of his father's library. The parents of the young Tsiolkovsky saw a great ability for science in their son, together with an inclination toward self-study and an unquestionable talent for invention. He was sent to Moscow to obtain an education and to study industry. He was accomplished in both science and mathematics and became a teacher at Kaluga, Russia. Even as a teacher, Tsiolkovsky found time to learn.

In his flat, he arranged a small laboratory, where 'electric lightning flashed and thunder rattled'. His most impressive display was that of an electric 'octopus'.

In 1894 Tsiolkovsky designed a monoplane that was not flown until 1915. He built the first Russian wind tunnel in 1897. He also was an insightful visionary who thought a great deal about the uses of his beloved rockets to explore and master space. He was the author of Investigations of Outer Space by Rocket Devices (1911) and Aims of Astronauts (1914).

Some of Tsiolkovsky’s solutions gave scientists in America and Russia ideas when they began to think about space travel. They also thought about airplanes they and other people had made, and even big bombs that could fly themselves very long distances.

At the end of the 19th century, Tsiolkovsky began research in the field of spaceship building in Russia, and made a great number of original designs for rockets. He showed that the most efficient way of launching rockets into space is to arrange them in packets or series of rockets, 'staging' as it is known today.

Tsiolkovsky is remembered for believing in the dominance of humanity throughout space, also known as anthropocosmism. He had grand ideas about space industrialization and the exploitation of its resources. Tsiolkovsky has been honored since his death in 1935. A far side moon crater is named in his honor. In 1989 he was invested in the International Aerospace Hall of Fame.
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

Georg Wilhelm Richmann (1711-1754)

Professor Georg Wilhelm Richmann, an eminent scientist born in Estonia. He then living in St. Petersburg, Russia, had become a member of the Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1741.

Richmann was one of the first to undertake systematic studies of atmospheric electricity. He had already made fundamental contributions to thermometry theory and believed, long before many others, that heat resulted from the motion of minute particles.

He had studied electrical phenomena a good deal, was evidently inspired by Dalibar’s experiment, and determined to give a try.

In his studies of physics he devoted his time especially to the observation of electrical phenomena during thunderstorms. He had set up a device called a gnomon or electrometer for measuring the strength of electrical currents in the air. The device consisted of a glass vessel containing brass filings attached to an iron rod that extended from the vessel to the roof of Richmann’s house.

When on July 26, 1763, he heard distant thunder, Richmann hurried to his apparatus to measure the atmospheric electricity. When he bent over the terminal of the metallic conductor leading from the roof to his room, a whitish-blue ball of fire jumped the distance of one foot from the wire to Richmann’s head and he fell to the gorund, dead. He was the first scientist killed studying artificially induced lighting.
Georg Wilhelm Richmann (1711-1754)

Traugott Gerber (1710 – 1743) – German naturalist

Gerbera daisies were discovered in South Africa in 1884. The genus Gerbera is named in honor of German naturalist Traugott Gerber. Traugott Gerber, a prefect of the Moscow Pharmaceutical Garden and its first trained botanist.

Traugott Gerber was baptized on January 16, 1710 in Zodel, Oberlausitz – Lower Silesia where he spent his childhood. On April 29, 1730, he registered for studies of medicine at the University of Leipzig a mere 250 kilometers from Zodel. All accounts indicate that Gerber was an excellent student in medicine as well as botany. On June 26, 1735 he applied to receive a doctorate from the medicine faculty.

Gerbera daisies

Gerber assumed his position in Moscow shortly after he finished his studies. From 1735 to 1742 he was a medical doctor in Russia, director of the oldest botanical garden in Moscow and also taught medicine at the university.

He was commissioned to create a medicinal garden in Moscow and to educate medical students in ‘herbology’. As well as creating an apothecary garden, he worked as a hospital doctor and taught anatomy and surgery at the hospital school.

From 1739-1741 he collected plants on several expeditions in Russia and in Jutland (Danish peninsular). In 1742 he became a doctor in the Russian Army and died early the following year in Finland.
Traugott Gerber (1710 – 1743) – German naturalist

Élie Metchnikoff

Élie Metchnikoff (15 May 1845 – 15 July 1916) Russian scientist won the 1908 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with Paul Ehrlich for their work on immunology.

Metchnikoff was born on May 16, 1845 in the Land of Panaskova, the steppe of Little Russia.

Élie Metchnikoff

Metchnikoff completed the four-year course of study at the University of Kharkov in two years graduating in 1864. In 1867 Metchnikoff received his doctorate from the University of St. Petersburg for his thesis on the embryonic development of fish and crustaceans. In 1884, Metchnikoff announced a novel theory of the protective role of inflammation.

In 1888 Louis Pasteur offered him a post at the Pasteur Institute and he succeeded Pasteur as director in 1895.

Working with starfish, he discovered amoeba-like cells in their systems that engulf foreign bodies such as bacteria. He established that phagocytes are the first line of defense against acute infection in most animals.
Élie Metchnikoff

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935)

Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky was an outstanding Russian scientist, an indefatigable student, a man of great talent.

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was born to a middleclass family on September 17, 1857 in the village of Izhevskoe, Russia.

Scarlet fever left him almost totally deaf at the age of nine and forced him to end his formal education.

Konstantin was fortunate to have an educated mother who inspired his lifelong learning since he was but one of seventeen brothers and sisters.

He furthers his self-education in math, physical sciences, engineering and philosophy at a number of libraries throughout Moscow.

Tsiolkovsky earned a teaching certificate and spent his life as a provincial schoolteacher in remote areas of Russia. Despite his isolation from major scientific research centres Tsiolkovsky made significant contributions to the field of chemistry, physicals and astronautics.

Tsiolkovsky’s early interest in aeronautics stimulated his more visionary work involving the theory of space travel.

Tsiolkovsky’s first original calculations of rocket flight were made at the end of the 19th century and published in 1903.

His published a scientific paper –Investigations of Space by Means of Rockets- which set out for the first time the correct theory of rocket power.

Tsiolkovsky was the first person to suggest the concepts of multistage rockets and liquid fuels and he developed wind tunnels to study aerodynamics.
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935)

Euler, Leonhard (1707-83)

Leonhard Euler, one of the most prolific mathematicians in history is considered one of the founders of pure mathematics and analysis.

Euler was born on April 15, 1707, in Basel Switzerland. His father, Paul Euler, a Calvinist minister, and his mother, Margaret Brucker, married the year before his birth.  His interest and talent for mathematics showed itself early, and he received special instruction from Johann Bernoulli.

In 1720 Euler entered the University of Basel at the age of 14; there he discussed mathematics with Daniel Bernoulli.

In 1720 he joined the Department of Arts of the University of Basel, where he received the prima laurea in 1722 and in 1723 he earned a master’s degree in philosophy. He joined the Department of Theology, but devoted most of his time to mathematics.

In 1731 Euler moved to the department of physics as a professor. In 1733 Euler succeeded Daniel Bernoulli as first chair of mathematics at St. Petersburg. Frederick the Great invited Euler to become a member of the Berlin Academy in 1741 and he held joint appointments in Berlin and in St. Petersburg until he was appointed the director of the St. Petersburg Academy of Science in 1766.

His book Mechanica (1736-1737) provided the most mathematically sophisticated treatment of Newtonian and post-Newtonian mechanics to date, putting mechanics in analytic rather than geometric terms.

He also set forth, in New Theory of Light and Color (1746), a theory of light as vibration, as opposed to the dominant Newtonian the theory of light as a particle.

Euler wrote several papers on the physical constitution of celestial bodies (mainly on comets) as well as on celestial and terrestrial phenomena related to the Earth’s atmosphere or its magnetic field.

Euler’s devotion to his work lasted until the day he died, September 18, 18783, in St. Petersburg, Russia, where he spent time formulating laws of ascent for the recently invented hot-air balloon.
Euler, Leonhard (1707-83)