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Category
Era
Countries (85)
16 figures
Barbara McClintock
1902 – 1992Discovered jumping genes decades before the field caught up.
Rachel Carson
1907 – 1964Silent Spring launched the environmental movement and got DDT banned.
Rita Levi-Montalcini
1909 – 2012Discovered nerve growth factor in a bedroom lab under fascist persecution.
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.
Maurice Wilkins
1916 – 2004Shared the DNA structure Nobel.
Rosalind Franklin
1920 – 1958Photographed the shape of the molecule that makes us.
Marie Tharp
1920 – 2006Mapped the ocean floor and proved continental drift.
Ada Yonath
b. 1939Mapped the ribosome, the cell's protein factory and antibiotic target.
Wangari Maathai
1940 – 2011Green Belt Movement founder; 51 million trees and a democracy campaign.
Elizabeth Blackburn
b. 1948Discovered telomerase, central to ageing and cancer research.
Katalin Karikó
b. 1955Demoted, defunded, and right: her mRNA work produced the COVID vaccines.
Mia Couto
b. 1955Biologist-novelist who reinvented Portuguese in Mozambican terms.
Shinya Yamanaka
b. 1962Reprogrammed adult cells into stem cells, remaking regenerative medicine.
Jennifer Doudna
b. 1964CRISPR gene editing, now in approved sickle-cell therapy.