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Category
Disciplines in Natural Sciences
Physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy and the sciences of the earth and brain.
Era
11 figures
Werner Heisenberg
1901 – 1976The uncertainty principle.
Rita Levi-Montalcini
1909 – 2012Discovered nerve growth factor in a bedroom lab under fascist persecution.
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.
Primo Levi
1919 – 1987Chemist whose Auschwitz testimony is the standard of moral witness.
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.
Katalin Karikó
b. 1955Demoted, defunded, and right: her mRNA work produced the COVID vaccines.