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Category
Disciplines in Natural Sciences
Physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy and the sciences of the earth and brain.
Era
14 figures
Jan Baptist van Helmont
1580 – 1644Coined 'gas' and ran the first quantitative plant-growth experiment.
Antoine Lavoisier
1743 – 1794Named oxygen, killed phlogiston, founded modern chemistry; guillotined at 50.
Alessandro Volta
1745 – 1827Built the first battery; the volt is his.
Michael Faraday
1791 – 1867A bookbinder's apprentice who gave humanity electricity on demand.
Louis Pasteur
1822 – 1895Proved that invisible organisms cause disease — and that we can beat them.
Alfred Nobel
1833 – 1896Invented dynamite, then endowed the prizes to redeem the legacy.
Dmitri Mendeleev
1834 – 1907Arranged the elements so precisely that he could describe ones nobody had found.
Marie Skłodowska-Curie
1867 – 1934The only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.
Fritz Haber
1868 – 1934Ammonia synthesis feeds around half of humanity; also weaponised chlorine gas.
Lise Meitner
1878 – 1968Explained nuclear fission; passed over by the Nobel committee. Element 109 is meitnerium.
Dorothy Hodgkin
1910 – 1994Solved the structures of penicillin, vitamin B12 and insulin by X-ray.
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.
Katalin Karikó
b. 1955Demoted, defunded, and right: her mRNA work produced the COVID vaccines.