Browse the index

Physician to gladiators and emperors whose anatomy ruled medicine for 1,400 years.

Proved that art and science are one act of looking.

Dissected humans himself and corrected Galen; founded modern anatomy.

Coined 'gas' and ran the first quantitative plant-growth experiment.

Ground lenses in a draper's shop and discovered the microbial world.

Binomial nomenclature: every species on Earth still carries his two-name system.

A poet who also did serious science, and defined what a modern European is.

Invented the idea that nature is a single connected web — and that we can wreck it.

Explained the whole of life with one mechanism: descent with modification.

Proved that invisible organisms cause disease — and that we can beat them.

Pea plants in a monastery garden gave the world genetics.

The silver stain that made neurons visible.

Founded neuroscience by drawing the neuron doctrine.

Crop rotation and peanut science that rescued Southern soil and farmers.

Described a disease, its parasite and its vector single-handedly.

Opened Britain's first birth-control clinic; the charity still operates in 37 countries.

Penicillin; antibiotics have saved an estimated 200 million lives.

Built the world's first seed bank; starved to death in Stalin's prison.

Wave mechanics and What Is Life?, which inspired the DNA hunters.

Acquired immune tolerance, the basis of transplantation.

Discovered jumping genes decades before the field caught up.

Silent Spring launched the environmental movement and got DDT banned.

Discovered nerve growth factor in a bedroom lab under fascist persecution.

Defined what a computer is, then was destroyed by the country he saved.

Explained the nerve impulse in mathematical terms.

Co-described the double helix and the central dogma of molecular biology.

Shared the DNA structure Nobel.

Photographed the shape of the molecule that makes us.

Mapped the ocean floor and proved continental drift.

Mapped the ribosome, the cell's protein factory and antibiotic target.

Green Belt Movement founder; 51 million trees and a democracy campaign.

Discovered telomerase, central to ageing and cancer research.

Demoted, defunded, and right: her mRNA work produced the COVID vaccines.

Biologist-novelist who reinvented Portuguese in Mozambican terms.

Reprogrammed adult cells into stem cells, remaking regenerative medicine.

CRISPR gene editing, now in approved sickle-cell therapy.