field list
A course in Chemistry
The people who built chemistry as we practise it, in the order they arrived.
Al-Razi (Rhazes)
854 – 925Distinguished smallpox from measles and pioneered clinical case records.
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.
George Washington Carver
1864 – 1943Crop rotation and peanut science that rescued Southern soil and farmers.
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.
Ernest Rutherford
1871 – 1937Found the atomic nucleus and split the atom.
Lise Meitner
1878 – 1968Explained nuclear fission; passed over by the Nobel committee. Element 109 is meitnerium.
Roger J. Williams
1893 – 1988Discovered pantothenic acid and argued for biochemical individuality — the idea beneath functional medicine.
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.
César Milstein
1927 – 2002Monoclonal antibodies — now a $200bn class of medicines.
Alan MacDiarmid
1927 – 2007Conductive polymers — flexible screens and printed electronics.
Tu Youyou
b. 1930Extracted artemisinin from ancient texts; millions of malaria deaths averted.
Ada Yonath
b. 1939Mapped the ribosome, the cell's protein factory and antibiotic target.
Mario Molina
1943 – 2020Proved CFCs destroy ozone; his work produced the Montreal Protocol.
Ahmed Zewail
1946 – 2016Founded femtochemistry, filming chemical bonds as they break.
Jeffrey Bland
b. 1946Coined and codified functional medicine; founded the Institute for Functional Medicine in 1991.
Katalin Karikó
b. 1955Demoted, defunded, and right: her mRNA work produced the COVID vaccines.
Jennifer Doudna
b. 1964CRISPR gene editing, now in approved sickle-cell therapy.