Howard Florey (1898-1968) was an Australian pharmacologist. His notable contribution to medicine was finding a way to extract penicillin and mass produce it and use it to immunize the public against bacterial infection.  Apparently, he had read Alexander Fleming’s paper regarding the extraction of penicillin from penicillin and noted Fleming’s difficulties in extracting large enough quantities of penicillin to make it useful for immunizing the public. Fleming had given up on his efforts to extract large quantities of penicillin. Florey and his associate, Ernst Boris Chain, found a way to accomplish what Fleming could not. For his work along with…

Alexander Fleming (1881-1955) was a Scottish biologist and pharmacologist. His primary achievement was the discovery of the enzyme lysozyme in 1922, and with the Australian researcher Howard Florey the discovery of the antibiotic, in 1928, penicillin from the fungus Penicillum notatum. For this discovery they were awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology in 1945. Fleming had studied to become a medical doctor but somehow wound up a medical researcher. This was during the era when Louis Pasteur’s germ theory of diseases was in the air. The race was on to discover germs that caused diseases and figure out…

Joseph Lister (1827-1912) was an English surgeon. His primary accomplishment is his recognition that surgeons contributed to the death of those they operated on if they did not take measures to sterilize their hands and the instruments they employed in surgery. He introduced carbolic acid (phenol) to sterilize surgical instruments and clean wounds. Essentially, Lister discovered antiseptic means of treating wounds.  Lister contributed to the germ theory of diseases and helped prevent death by spreading diseases. Preventing germs from getting into wounds prevents infection and death. Sterile surgery, which Lister introduced, has done more for public health than any thing…

Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) was a French Chemist and microbiologist. He is best known for discovering the germ theory of disease. His germ theory of diseases and consequent efforts to kill the germs that cause diseases prevent diseases. Before Pasteur’s time, folk did not understand how diseases were caused in the human body and his studies showed how germs enter the human body and cause it to malfunction. Pasteur also made the seminal discovery of how to prevent milk from rotting (caused by germs) through what is now called pasteurization (initially heating the milk to kill potential germs and then ceiling…

Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) was a German, Augustinian priest who experimented with the inheritability of the traits of peas (and later of plants, crops, and by generalization, the inheritability of human traits).  He is called the father of genetic studies. His name, Mendel, is synonymous with genetic studies. Mendel cultivated pea plants and tried to mix different varieties of the pea plants to produce hybrids of them. In the process he identified key concepts in the study of genes, such as, dominant genes, recessive genes, and alleles. Clearly, plants can be hybridized. Many of the common fruits we now consume, such…

Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882) was an English biologist.  Darwin is known for his contribution of the notion of natural selection. Early in his career as a naturalist, Darwin sailed to the Galapagos Island in South America, an Island little disturbed by man, and cut off from mainland South America; animals there were left to evolve differently from their kinds on the South American mainland. Darwin observed the behavior of animals on the island and noted that they had made some changes to their kind on the mainland of South America, a place from which they were cut off. In 1859…

John Dalton (1766-1844) was an English Chemist.  His work was largely responsible for resurrecting the discarded Greek notion that the atom is the smallest, irreducible part of elements. He therefore contributed to our modern understanding of the elements, the atomic theory, and quantum mechanics. He also made some useful contributions in understanding color blindness in people. He said: “There can scarcely be a doubt entertained respecting the reducibility of all elastic fluids of whatever kind, into liquids; and we ought not to despair of affecting it in low temperatures and by strong pressure exerted upon the unmixed gases further.” Dalton…

Robert Boyle (1627-1691) was an Irish-English chemist and physicist. He developed what is now called Boyles law in Chemistry and is generally regarded as the father of modern Chemistry. In physics Boyle discovered the role of air in the propagation of sound, the forces involved in water becoming frozen, and studied, crystals, gems, hydrostatics and colors etc. In Chemistry Boyle advanced the view that elements (atoms) are the irreducible parts of matter; he contributed to the understanding of chemical mixtures and compounds. Boyle was one of the first persons to practice Francis Bacon’s empiricism, the insistence that knowledge should be…

Isaac Newton (1643-1727) was an English mathematician and physicist. He presented his physical findings in his Magnus opus, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687). In that book he described the laws of gravitation and the three laws of motion. Newton’s finding constituted that part of physics called mechanics and lasted until the twentieth century when Albert Einstein’s special and general relativity finally improved on it. Newton showed that the motions of objects on earth and elsewhere in the universe are governed by the same gravitational laws. He re-confirmed that the heliocentric view of our solar system is correct and laid to…