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Category
Disciplines in Natural Sciences
Physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy and the sciences of the earth and brain.
Era
Countries (85)
13 figures
Isaac Newton
1643 – 1727Showed that one law governs the apple and the Moon alike.
Michael Faraday
1791 – 1867A bookbinder's apprentice who gave humanity electricity on demand.
Charles Darwin
1809 – 1882Explained the whole of life with one mechanism: descent with modification.
James Clerk Maxwell
1831 – 1879Four equations that unified electricity, magnetism and light — hence radio and Wi-Fi.
Marie Stopes
1880 – 1958Opened Britain's first birth-control clinic; the charity still operates in 37 countries.
Alexander Fleming
1881 – 1955Penicillin; antibiotics have saved an estimated 200 million lives.
Dorothy Hodgkin
1910 – 1994Solved the structures of penicillin, vitamin B12 and insulin by X-ray.
Alan Turing
1912 – 1954Defined what a computer is, then was destroyed by the country he saved.
Alan Hodgkin & Andrew Huxley
1914 – 1998Explained the nerve impulse in mathematical terms.
Francis Crick
1916 – 2004Co-described the double helix and the central dogma of molecular biology.
Rosalind Franklin
1920 – 1958Photographed the shape of the molecule that makes us.
Peter Higgs
1929 – 2024Predicted the boson that gives particles mass, found 48 years later.
Stephen Hawking
1942 – 2018Hawking radiation and A Brief History of Time.