April 2014 | World's Scientists

Alfred Nobel

About Alfred Nobel

Alfred Bernhard Nobel (Swedish pronunciation: [ˈalfrɛd noˈbɛl] About this sound listen (help·info); 21 October 1833 – 10 December 1896) was a Swedish chemist, engineer, innovator, and armaments manufacturer.

He was the inventor of dynamite. Nobel also owned Bofors, which he had redirected from its previous role as primarily an iron and steel producer to a major manufacturer of cannon and other armaments. Nobel held 350 different patents, dynamite being the most famous. His fortune was used posthumously to institute the Nobel Prizes. The synthetic element nobelium was named after him. His name also survives in modern-day companies such as Dynamit Nobel and AkzoNobel, which are descendants of or mergers with companies Nobel himself established.

Life and career

Born in Stockholm, Alfred Nobel was the fourth son of Immanuel Nobel (1801–1872), an inventor and engineer, and Karolina Andriette (Ahlsell) Nobel (1805–1889). The couple married in 1827 and had eight children. The family was impoverished, and only Alfred and his three brothers survived past childhood. Through his father, Alfred Nobel was a descendant of the Swedish scientist Olaus Rudbeck (1630–1702), and in his turn the boy was interested in engineering, particularly explosives, learning the basic principles from his father at a young age. His interest in technology was inherited from his father, an alumnus of Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

Following various business failures, Nobel's father moved to Saint Petersburg in 1837 and grew successful there as a manufacturer of machine tools and explosives. He invented modern plywood and started work on the "torpedo". In 1842, the family joined him in the city. Now prosperous, his parents were able to send Nobel to private tutors and the boy excelled in his studies, particularly in chemistry and languages, achieving fluency in English, French, German, and Russian. For 18 months, from 1841 to 1842, Nobel went to the only school he ever attended as a child, the Jacobs Apologistic School in Stockholm.

As a young man, Nobel studied with chemist Nikolai Zinin; then, in 1850, went to Paris to further the work; and, at 18, he went to the United States for four years to study chemistry, collaborating for a short period under inventor John Ericsson, who designed the American Civil War ironclad USS Monitor. Nobel filed his first patent, for a gas meter, in 1857.

The family factory produced armaments for the Crimean War (1853–1856); but, had difficulty switching back to regular domestic production when the fighting ended and they filed for bankruptcy. In 1859, Nobel's father left his factory in the care of the second son, Ludvig Nobel (1831–1888), who greatly improved the business. Nobel and his parents returned to Sweden from Russia and Nobel devoted himself to the study of explosives, and especially to the safe manufacture and use of nitroglycerine (discovered in 1847 by Ascanio Sobrero, one of his fellow students under Théophile-Jules Pelouze at the University of Turin). Nobel invented a detonator in 1863; and, in 1865, he designed the blasting cap.

On 3 September 1864, a shed, used for the preparation of nitroglycerin, exploded at the factory in Heleneborg Stockholm, killing five people, including Nobel's younger brother Emil. Dogged by more minor accidents but unfazed, Nobel went on to build further factories, focusing on improving the stability of the explosives he was developing. Nobel invented dynamite in 1867, a substance easier and safer to handle than the more unstable nitroglycerin. Dynamite was patented in the US and the UK and was used extensively in mining and the building of transport networks internationally. In 1875 Nobel invented gelignite, more stable and powerful than dynamite, and in 1887 patented ballistite, a forerunner of cordite.

Nobel was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1884, the same institution that would later select laureates for two of the Nobel prizes, and he received an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University in 1893.

Nobel's brothers Ludvig and Robert exploited oilfields along the Caspian Sea and became hugely rich in their own right. Nobel invested in these and amassed great wealth through the development of these new oil regions. During his life Nobel issued 350 patents internationally and by his death had established 90 armaments factories, despite his belief in pacifism.

In 1888, the death of his brother Ludvig caused several newspapers to publish obituaries of Alfred in error. A French obituary stated "Le marchand de la mort est mort" ("The merchant of death is dead").

In 1891, following the death of his mother and his brother Ludvig and the end of a longstanding relationship, Nobel moved from Paris to San Remo, Italy. Suffering from angina, Nobel died at home, of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1896. Unbeknownst to his family, friends or colleagues, he had left most of his wealth in trust, in order to fund the awards that would become known as the Nobel Prizes. He is buried in Norra begravningsplatsen in Stockholm.

About Alfred Kinsey

Alfred Charles Kinsey (June 23, 1894 – August 25, 1956) was an American biologist, professor of entomology and zoology, and sexologist who in 1947 founded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University,[1] now known as the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. He is best known for writing Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), also known as the Kinsey Reports, as well as the Kinsey scale. Kinsey's research on human sexuality, foundational to the field of sexology, provoked controversy in the 1940s and 1950s. His work has influenced social and cultural values in the United States, as well as internationally.

Early life and education

Kinsey was born on June 23, 1894, in Hoboken, New Jersey, the son of Sarah Ann (née Charles) and Alfred Seguine Kinsey. Kinsey was the eldest of three children. His mother received little formal education; his father was a professor at Stevens Institute of Technology.

Kinsey's parents were poor for most of his childhood, often unable to afford proper medical care. This may have led to a young Kinsey receiving inadequate treatment for a variety of diseases including rickets, rheumatic fever, and typhoid fever. His health records indicate that Kinsey received suboptimal exposure to sunlight (often the cause of rickets, before milk and other foods were fortified with vitamin D) and lived in unsanitary conditions for at least part of his childhood. Rickets led to a curvature of the spine, which resulted in a slight stoop that prevented Kinsey from being drafted in 1917 for World War I.

Kinsey's parents were devout Christians. His father was known as one of the most devout members of the local Methodist church. Most of Kinsey's social interactions were with other members of the church, often as a silent observer, while his parents discussed religion. Kinsey's father imposed strict rules on the household, including mandating Sunday as a day of prayer and little else.

At the age of 10, he moved with his family to South Orange, New Jersey.

At a young age, Kinsey showed great interest in nature and camping. He worked and camped with the local YMCA throughout his early years. He enjoyed these activities to such an extent that he intended to work professionally for the YMCA after completing his education. Kinsey's senior undergraduate thesis for psychology, a dissertation on the group dynamics of young boys, echoed this interest. He joined the Boy Scouts when a troop was formed in his community. His parents strongly supported this (and joined as well) because the Boy Scouts was an organization that was based on the principles of Christianity. Kinsey worked his way up through the Scouting ranks to earn Eagle Scout in 1913, making him one of the earliest Eagle Scouts. Despite earlier disease having weakened his heart, Kinsey followed an intense sequence of difficult hikes and camping expeditions throughout his early life.

In high school, Kinsey was a quiet but hard-working student. While attending Columbia High School, he devoted his energy to academic work and playing the piano. At one time, Kinsey had hoped to become a concert pianist, but decided to concentrate on his scientific pursuits instead. Kinsey's ability to spend immense amounts of time deeply focused on study was a trait that would serve him well in college and during his professional career. He seems not to have formed strong social relationships during high school, but earned respect for his academic ability. While there, Kinsey became interested in biology, botany and zoology. Kinsey was later to claim that his high school biology teacher, Natalie Roeth, was the most important influence on his decision to become a scientist. Kinsey approached his father with plans to study botany at college. His father demanded that he study engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology instead. Kinsey was unhappy at Stevens, and later remarked that his time there was one of the most wasteful periods of his life.

Regardless, he resumed his commitment to study. At Stevens, he primarily took courses related to English and engineering, but was unable to satisfy his interest in biology. At the end of two years at Stevens, Kinsey gathered the courage to confront his father about his interest in biology and his intent to continue studying at Bowdoin College in Maine.

In the fall of 1914, Kinsey entered Bowdoin College, where he studied entomology under Manton Copeland, and was admitted to the Zeta Psi fraternity, in whose house he lived for much of his time at college. In 1916 Kinsey was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa society and graduated magna cum laude, with degrees in biology and psychology. Alfred Seguine didn't attend his son's graduation ceremony from Bowdoin, possibly as another sign of disapproval of his son's choice of career and studies. He continued his graduate studies at Harvard University's Bussey Institute, which had one of the most highly regarded biology programs in the United States. It was there that Kinsey studied applied biology under William Morton Wheeler, a scientist who made outstanding contributions to entomology. Under Wheeler, Kinsey worked almost completely autonomously, which suited both men quite well.

Kinsey chose to do his doctoral thesis on gall wasps, and began zealously collecting samples of the species. He traveled widely and took 26 detailed measurements of hundreds of thousands of gall wasps; his methodology was itself an important contribution to entomology as a science. Kinsey was granted a Sc.D. degree in 1919 by Harvard University, and published several papers in 1920 under the auspices of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, introducing the gall wasp to the scientific community and describing its phylogeny. Of the more than 18 million insects in the museum's collection, some 5 million are gall wasps collected by Kinsey.

Kinsey wrote a widely used high-school textbook, An Introduction to Biology, which was published in October 1926. The book endorsed evolution and unified, at the introductory level, the previously separate fields of zoology and botany. Kinsey also co-wrote Edible Wild Plants of Eastern North America with Merritt Lyndon Fernald, published in 1943. The original draft of the book was written in 1919–1920, while Kinsey was still a doctoral student at the Bussey Institute and Fernald was working at the Arnold Arboretum.

About Alfred Binet

Alfred Binet (July 8, 1857 – October 18, 1911) was a French psychologist who invented the first practical intelligence test, the Binet-Simon scale. His principal goal was to identify students who needed special help in coping with the school curriculum. Along with his collaborator Théodore Simon, Binet published revisions of his intelligence scale in 1908 and 1911, the last appearing just before his death.

Early years

Binet was born as Alfredo Binetti in Nice, then part of the Kingdom of Sardinia. He was the only child of a physician father and an artist mother. His parents separated when he was young, and Binet then moved to Paris with his mother. He attended law school, and earned his degree in 1878. He planned on going to medical school, but decided that his interest in psychology was more important. From reading books by Ilona Gheorghiesh, Symeon Vouteros and John Stuart Mill, Binet became a somewhat self-educated psychologist. Introverted and a loner, this self-educating suited him.

Education and early career

Binet attended law school in Paris, and received his degree in 1878. He also studied Natural Sciences at the Sorbonne. His first formal position was as a researcher at a neurological clinic, Salpêtrière Hospital, in Paris from 1883–1889. From there, Binet went on to being a researcher and associate director of the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology at the Sorbonne from 1891–1894. In 1894, he was promoted to being the director of the laboratory until 1911 (his death). After receiving his law degree in 1878, Alfred Binet began to study science at the Sorbonne. However, he was not overly interested in his formal schooling, and started educating himself by reading psychology texts at the National Library in Paris. He soon became fascinated with the ideas of John Stuart Mill, who believed that the operations of intelligence could be explained by the laws of associationism. Binet eventually realized the limitations of this theory, but Mill's ideas continued to influence his work.

In 1883, years of unaccompanied study ended when Binet was introduced to Charles Fere, who introduced him to Jean-Martin Charcot, the director of a clinic called La Salpêtrière, Paris. Charcot became his mentor and in turn, Binet accepted a job offer at the clinic, working in his neurological laboratory. At the time of Binet's tenure, Charcot was experimenting with hypnotism. Binet was strongly influenced by this great man, and published four articles about his work in this area. Unfortunately, Charcot's conclusions did not hold up under professional scrutiny, and Binet was forced to make an embarrassing public admission that he had been wrong in supporting his teacher. Nevertheless he had established his name internationally in the field, Morton Prince for example stating in 1904 that "certain problems in subconscious automatism will always be associated with the names of Breuer and Freud in Germany, Janet and Alfred Binet in France"

When his involvement with hypnosis waned as a result of failure to establish professional acceptance, he turned to the study of development spurred on by the birth of his two daughters, Marguerite and Armande (born in 1885 and 1887, respectively), calling Armande a subjectivist and Marguerite an objectivist, and developing the concepts of introspection and externospection in an anticipation of Carl Jung's psychological types. In the 21 year period following his shift in career interests, Binet "published more than 200 books, articles, and reviews in what now would be called experimental, developmental, educational, social, and differential psychology" (Siegler, 1992). Bergin and Cizek (2001) suggest that this work may have influenced Jean Piaget, who later studied with Binet's collaborator Théodore Simon in 1920. Binet's research with his daughters helped him to further refine his developing conception of intelligence, especially the importance of attention span and suggestibility in intellectual development.

Despite Binet's extensive research interests and wide breadth of publications, today he is most widely known for his contributions to intelligence. Wolf (1973) postulates that this is the result of his not being affiliated with a major university. Because Binet did not have any formalized graduate study in psychology, he did not hold a professorship with a prestigious institution where students and funds would be sure to perpetuate his work (Siegler, 1992). Additionally, his more progressive theories did not provide the practical utility that his intelligence scale would evoke.

Binet and his coworker Fere discovered what they called transfer and they also recognized perceptual and emotional polarization. Binet and Fere thought their findings were a phenomenon and of utmost importance. After investigations by many, the two men were forced to admit that they were wrong about their concepts of transfer and polarization. Basically, their patients had known what was expected, what was supposed to happen, and so they simply assented. Binet had risked everything on his experiment and its results, and this failure took a toll on him.

In 1890, Binet resigned from La Salpêtrière and never mentioned the place or its director again. His interests then turned toward the development of his children, Madeleine and Armande, who were two years apart. This research presages that done by Jean Piaget just a short time later, regarding the development of cognition in children.

A job presented itself for Binet in 1891 at the Laboratory of Physiological Psychology at the Sorbonne. He worked for a year without pay and by 1894, he took over as the director. This was a position that Binet held until his death, and it enabled him to pursue his studies on mental processes. While directing the Laboratory, Theodore Simon applied to do doctoral research under Binet's supervision. This was the beginning of their long, fruitful collaboration. During this time he also co-founded the French journal of psychology, L'Annee psychologique, serving as the director and editor-in-chief.

Later career and the Binet-Simon Test

In 1899, Binet was asked to be a member of the Free Society for the Psychological Study of the Child. French education changed greatly during the end of the nineteenth century, because of a law that passed which made it mandatory for children ages six to fourteen to attend school. This group to which Binet became a member hoped to begin studying children in a scientific manner. Binet and many other members of the society were appointed to the Commission for the Retarded. The question became "What should be the test given to children thought to possibly have learning disabilities, that might place them in a special classroom?" Binet made it his problem to establish the differences that separate the normal child from the abnormal, and to measure such differences. L'Etude experimentale de l'intelligence (Experimental Studies of Intelligence) was the book he used to describe his methods and it was published in 1903.

Development of more tests and investigations began soon after the book, with the help of a young medical student named Theodore Simon. Simon had nominated himself a few years before as Binet's research assistant and worked with him on the intelligence tests that Binet is known for, which share Simon's name as well. In 1905, a new test for measuring intelligence was introduced and simply called the Binet–Simon scale. In 1908, they revised the scale, dropping, modifying, and adding tests and also arranging them according to age levels from three to thirteen.

In 1904 a French professional group for child psychology, La Société Libre pour l'Etude Psychologique de l'Enfant, was called upon by the French government to appoint a commission on the education of retarded children. The commission was asked to create a mechanism for identifying students in need of alternative education. Binet, being an active member of this group, found the impetus for the development of his mental scale.

Binet and Simon, in creating what historically is known as the Binet-Simon Scale, comprised a variety of tasks they thought were representative of typical children's abilities at various ages. This task-selection process was based on their many years of observing children in natural settings. They then tested their measurement on a sample of fifty children, ten children per five age groups. The children selected for their study were identified by their school teachers as being average for their age. The purpose of this scale of normal functioning, which would later be revised twice using more stringent standards, was to compare children's mental abilities relative to those of their normal peers (Siegler, 1992).

The scale consisted of thirty tasks of increasing difficulty. The easier ones could be done by everyone. Some of the simplest test items assessed whether or not a child could follow a beam of light or talk back to the examiner. Slightly harder tasks required children to point to various named body parts, repeat back a series of 2 digits, repeat simple sentences, and to define words like house, fork or mama. More difficult test items required children to state the difference between pairs of things, reproduce drawings from memory or to construct sentences from three given words such as "Paris, river and fortune." The hardest test items included asking children to repeat back 7 random digits, find three rhymes for the French word "obéisance" and to answer questions such as "My neighbor has been receiving strange visitors. He has received in turn a doctor, a lawyer, and then a priest. What is taking place?" (Fancher, 1985).

For the practical use of determining educational placement, the score on the Binet-Simon scale would reveal the child's mental age. For example, a 6 year-old child who passed all the tasks usually passed by 6 year-olds—but nothing beyond—would have a mental age that exactly matched his chronological age, 6.0. (Fancher, 1985).

Binet was forthright about the limitations of his scale. He stressed the remarkable diversity of intelligence and the subsequent need to study it using qualitative, as opposed to quantitative, measures. Binet also stressed that intellectual development progressed at variable rates and could be influenced by the environment; therefore, intelligence was not based solely on genetics, was malleable rather than fixed, and could only be found in children with comparable backgrounds (Siegler, 1992). Given Binet's stance that intelligence testing was subject to variability and was not generalizable, it is important to look at the metamorphosis that mental testing took on as it made its way to the U.S.

While Binet was developing his mental scale, the business, civic, and educational leaders in the U.S. were facing issues of how to accommodate the needs of a diversifying population, while continuing to meet the demands of society. There arose the call to form a society based on meritocracy (Siegler,1992) while continuing to underline the ideals of the upper class. In 1908, H.H. Goddard, a champion of the eugenics movement, found utility in mental testing as a way to evidence the superiority of the white race. After studying abroad, Goddard brought the Binet-Simon Scale to the United States and translated it into English.

Following Goddard in the U.S. mental testing movement was Lewis Terman, who took the Simon-Binet Scale and standardized it using a large American sample. The new Standford-Binet scale was no longer used solely for advocating education for all children, as was Binet's objective. A new objective of intelligence testing was illustrated in the Stanford-Binet manual with testing ultimately resulting in "curtailing the reproduction of feeble-mindedness and in the elimination of an enormous amount of crime, pauperism, and industrial inefficiency (p.7)" Terman, L., Lyman, G., Ordahl, G., Ordahl, L., Galbreath, N., & Talbert, W. (1916). The Stanford Revision and Extension of the Binet-Simon Scale for Measuring Intelligence. Baltimore: Warwick & York.(White, 2000).

It follows that we should question why Binet did not speak out concerning the newfound uses of his measure. Siegler (1992) pointed out that Binet was somewhat of an isolationist in that he never traveled outside of France and he barely participated in professional organizations. Additionally, his mental scale was not adopted in his own country during his lifetime and therefore was not subjected to the same fate. Finally, when Binet did become aware of the "foreign ideas being grafted on his instrument" he condemned those who with 'brutal pessimism' and 'deplorable verdicts' were promoting the concept of intelligence as a single, unitary construct (White, 2000).

He did many studies of children. His experimental subjects ranged from 3 to 18 years old. Binet published the third version of the Binet-Simon scale shortly before his death in 1911. The Binet-Simon scale was and is hugely popular around the world, mainly because of the vast literature it has fostered, as well as its relative ease of administration.

Since his death, many people in many ways have honored Binet, but two of these stand out. In 1917, the Free Society for the Psychological Study of the Child, to whom Binet became a member in 1899 and which prompted his development of the intelligence tests, changed their name to La Societe Alfred Binet, in memory of the renowned psychologist. The second honor was not until 1984, when the journal Science 84 picked the Binet-Simon scale, as one of twenty of this century's most significant developments or discoveries.

He studied sexual behavior, coining the term erotic fetishism to describe individuals whose sexual interests in nonhuman objects, such as articles of clothing, and linking this to the after-effects of early impressions in an anticipation of Freud.

He also studied abilities of Valentine Dencausse, the most famous chiromancer in Paris in those days.

About Alexander Graham Bell

Alexander Graham Bell (March 3, 1847 – August 2, 1922) was an eminent scientist, inventor, engineer and innovator who is credited with inventing the first practical telephone.

Bell's father, grandfather, and brother had all been associated with work on elocution and speech, and both his mother and wife were deaf, profoundly influencing Bell's life's work. His research on hearing and speech further led him to experiment with hearing devices which eventually culminated in Bell being awarded the first US patent for the telephone in 1876. In retrospect, Bell considered his most famous invention an intrusion on his real work as a scientist and refused to have a telephone in his study.

Many other inventions marked Bell's later life, including groundbreaking work in optical telecommunications, hydrofoils and aeronautics. In 1888, Bell became one of the founding members of the National Geographic Society.

Early life

Alexander Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on March 3, 1847. The family home was at 16 South Charlotte Street, and has a stone inscription, marking it as Alexander Graham Bell's birthplace. He had two brothers: Melville James Bell (1845–70) and Edward Charles Bell (1848–67). Both of his brothers died of tuberculosis. His father was Professor Alexander Melville Bell, and his mother was Eliza Grace (née Symonds). Although he was born "Alexander", at age 10, he made a plea to his father to have a middle name like his two brothers. For his 11th birthday, his father acquiesced and allowed him to adopt the middle name "Graham", chosen out of admiration for Alexander Graham, a Canadian being treated by his father and boarder who had become a family friend. To close relatives and friends he remained "Aleck" which his father continued to call him into later life.

First invention

As a child, young Alexander displayed a natural curiosity about his world, resulting in gathering botanical specimens as well as experimenting even at an early age. His best friend was Ben Herdman, a neighbor whose family operated a flour mill, the scene of many forays. Young Aleck asked what needed to be done at the mill. He was told wheat had to be dehusked through a laborious process and at the age of 12, Bell built a homemade device that combined rotating paddles with sets of nail brushes, creating a simple dehusking machine that was put into operation and used steadily for a number of years. In return, John Herdman gave both boys the run of a small workshop in which to "invent"

From his early years, Bell showed a sensitive nature and a talent for art, poetry and music that was encouraged by his mother. With no formal training, he mastered the piano and became the family's pianist. Despite being normally quiet and introspective, he reveled in mimicry and "voice tricks" akin to ventriloquism that continually entertained family guests during their occasional visits. Bell was also deeply affected by his mother's gradual deafness, (she began to lose her hearing when he was 12) and learned a manual finger language so he could sit at her side and tap out silently the conversations swirling around the family parlour. He also developed a technique of speaking in clear, modulated tones directly into his mother's forehead wherein she would hear him with reasonable clarity. Bell's preoccupation with his mother's deafness led him to study acoustics.

His family was long associated with the teaching of elocution: his grandfather, Alexander Bell, in London, his uncle in Dublin, and his father, in Edinburgh, were all elocutionists. His father published a variety of works on the subject, several of which are still well known, especially his The Standard Elocutionist (1860), which appeared in Edinburgh in 1868. The Standard Elocutionist appeared in 168 British editions and sold over a quarter of a million copies in the United States alone. In this treatise, his father explains his methods of how to instruct deaf-mutes (as they were then known) to articulate words and read other people's lip movements to decipher meaning. Aleck's father taught him and his brothers not only to write Visible Speech but to identify any symbol and its accompanying sound. Aleck became so proficient that he became a part of his father's public demonstrations and astounded audiences with his abilities. He could decipher Visible Speech representing virtually every language, including Latin, Scottish Gaelic and even Sanskrit, accurately reciting written tracts without any prior knowledge of their pronunciation.

About Alexander Fleming

Sir Alexander Fleming, FRSE, FRS, FRCS(Eng) (6 August 1881 – 11 March 1955) was a Scottish biologist, pharmacologist and botanist. He wrote many articles on bacteriology, immunology, and chemotherapy. His best-known discoveries are the enzyme lysozyme in 1923 and the antibiotic substance penicillin from the mould Penicillium notatum in 1928, for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945 with Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain.

Biography

Fleming was born on 6 August 1881 at Lochfield farm near Darvel, in Ayrshire, Scotland. He was the third of the four children of farmer Hugh Fleming (1816–1888) from his second marriage to Grace Stirling Morton (1848–1928), the daughter of a neighbouring farmer. Hugh Fleming had four surviving children from his first marriage. He was 59 at the time of his second marriage, and died when Alexander (known as Alec) was seven.

Fleming went to Loudoun Moor School and Darvel School, and earned a two-year scholarship to Kilmarnock Academy before moving to London, where he attended the Royal Polytechnic Institution. After working in a shipping office for four years, the twenty-year-old Fleming inherited some money from an uncle, John Fleming. His elder brother, Tom, was already a physician and suggested to his younger sibling that he should follow the same career, and so in 1903, the younger Alexander enrolled at St Mary's Hospital Medical School in Paddington; he qualified with an MBBS degree from the school with distinction in 1906.

Fleming had been a private in the London Scottish Regiment of the Volunteer Force since 1900, and had been a member of the rifle club at the medical school. The captain of the club, wishing to retain Fleming in the team suggested that he join the research department at St Mary's, where he became assistant bacteriologist to Sir Almroth Wright, a pioneer in vaccine therapy and immunology. In 1908, he gained a BSc degree with Gold Medal in Bacteriology, and became a lecturer at St Mary's until 1914. On 23 December 1915, Fleming married a trained nurse, Sarah Marion McElroy of Killala, County Mayo, Ireland.

Fleming served throughout World War I as a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps, and was Mentioned in Dispatches. He and many of his colleagues worked in battlefield hospitals at the Western Front in France. In 1918 he returned to St Mary's Hospital, where he was elected Professor of Bacteriology of the University of London in 1928.

Research

Following World War I, Fleming actively searched for anti-bacterial agents, having witnessed the death of many soldiers from sepsis resulting from infected wounds. Antiseptics killed the patients' immunological defences more effectively than they killed the invading bacteria. In an article he submitted for the medical journal The Lancet during World War I, Fleming described an ingenious experiment, which he was able to conduct as a result of his own glass blowing skills, in which he explained why antiseptics were killing more soldiers than infection itself during World War I. Antiseptics worked well on the surface, but deep wounds tended to shelter anaerobic bacteria from the antiseptic agent, and antiseptics seemed to remove beneficial agents produced that protected the patients in these cases at least as well as they removed bacteria, and did nothing to remove the bacteria that were out of reach. Sir Almroth Wright strongly supported Fleming's findings, but despite this, most army physicians over the course of the war continued to use antiseptics even in cases where this worsened the condition of the patients.

About Alessandro Volta

Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta (February 18, 1745 – March 5, 1827) was an Italian physicist known for the invention of the battery in the 1800s.

Early life and works

Volta was born in Como, a town in present-day northern Italy (near the Swiss border) on February 18, 1745. In 1774, he became a professor of physics at the Royal School in Como. A year later, he improved and popularized the electrophorus, a device that produced static electricity. His promotion of it was so extensive that he is often credited with its invention, even though a machine operating on the same principle was described in 1762 by the Swedish experimenter Johan Wilcke.

In the years between 1776–78, Volta studied the chemistry of gases. He discovered methane after reading a paper by Benjamin Franklin of America on "flammable air", and Volta searched for it carefully in Italy. In November 1776, he found methane at Lake Maggiore, and by 1778 he managed to isolate methane. He devised experiments such as the ignition of methane by an electric spark in a closed vessel. Volta also studied what we now call electrical capacitance, developing separate means to study both electrical potential (V ) and charge (Q ), and discovering that for a given object, they are proportional. This may be called Volta's Law of capacitance, and it was for this work the unit of electrical potential has been named the volt.

In 1779 he became a professor of experimental physics at the University of Pavia, a chair that he occupied for almost 40 years. In 1794, Volta married an aristocratic lady also from Como, Teresa Peregrini, with whom he raised three sons: Giovanni, Flaminio and Zanino.

About Albrecht von Haller

Albrecht von Haller (16 October 1708 – 12 December 1777) was a Swiss anatomist, physiologist, naturalist and poet.

Early life

He was born of an old Swiss family at Bern. Prevented by long-continued ill-health from taking part in boyish sports, he had the more opportunity for the development of his precocious mind. At the age of four, it is said, he used to read and expound the Bible to his father’s servants; before he was ten he had sketched a Chaldee grammar, prepared a Greek and a Hebrew vocabulary, compiled a collection of two thousand biographies of famous men and women on the model of the great works of Bayle and Moréri, and written in Latin verse a satire on his tutor, who had warned him against a too great excursiveness. When still hardly fifteen he was already the author of numerous metrical translations from Ovid, Horace and Virgil, as well as of original lyrics, dramas, and an epic of four thousand lines on the origin of the Swiss confederations, writings which he is said on one occasion to have rescued from a fire at the risk of his life, only, however, to burn them a little later (1729) with his own hand.

Medicine

Haller's attention had been directed to the profession of medicine while he was residing in the house of a physician at Biel after his father's death in 1721. While still a sickly and excessively shy youth, he went in his sixteenth year to the University of Tübingen (December 1723), where he studied under Elias Rudolph Camerarius Jr. and Johann Duvernoy. Dissatisfied with his progress, he in 1725 exchanged Tübingen for Leiden, where Boerhaave was in the zenith of his fame, and where Albinus had already begun to lecture in anatomy. At that university he graduated in May 1727, undertaking successfully in his thesis to prove that the so-called salivary duct, claimed as a recent discovery by Georg Daniel Coschwitz (1679–1729), was nothing more than a blood-vessel.

Haller then visited London, making the acquaintance of Sir Hans Sloane, William Cheselden, John Pringle, James Douglas and other scientific men; next, after a short stay in Oxford, he visited Paris, where he studied under Henri François Le Dran and Jacob Winslow; and in 1728 he proceeded to Basel, where he devoted himself to the study of higher mathematics under John Bernoulli. It was during his stay there also that his interest in botany was awakened; and, in the course of a tour (July/August, 1728), through Savoy, Baden and several of the cantons of Switzerland, he began a collection of plants which was afterwards the basis of his great work on the flora of Switzerland. From a literary point of view the main result of this, the first of his many journeys through the Alps, was his poem entitled Die Alpen, which was finished in March 1729, and appeared in the first edition (1732) of his Gedichte. This poem of 490 hexameters is historically important as one of the earliest signs of the awakening appreciation of the mountains, though it is chiefly designed to contrast the simple and idyllic life of the inhabitants of the Alps with the corrupt and decadent existence of the dwellers in the plains.

In 1729 he returned to Bern and began to practise as a physician; his best energies, however, were devoted to the botanical and anatomical researches which rapidly gave him a European reputation, and procured for him from George II in 1736 a call to the chair of medicine, anatomy, botany and surgery in the newly founded University of Göttingen. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1743, a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1747, and was ennobled in 1749.

The quantity of work achieved by Haller in the seventeen years during which he occupied his Göttingen professorship was immense. Apart from the ordinary work of his classes, which entailed the task of newly organizing a botanical garden (the Alte Botanische Garten der Universität Göttingen), an anatomical theatre and museum, an obstetrical school, and similar institutions, he carried on without interruption those original investigations in botany and physiology, the results of which are preserved in the numerous works associated with his name; he continued also to persevere in his youthful habit of poetical composition, while at the same time he conducted a monthly journal (the Göttingische gelehrte Anzeigen), to which he is said to have contributed twelve thousand articles relating to almost every branch of human knowledge. He also warmly interested himself in most of the religious questions, both ephemeral and permanent, of his day; and the erection of the Reformed church in Göttingen was mainly due to his unwearied energy.

Not withstanding all this variety of absorbing interests he never felt at home in Göttingen; his untravelled heart kept ever turning towards his native Bern (where he had been elected a member of the great council in 1745), and in 1753 he resolved to resign his chair and return to Switzerland.

About Albert Abraham Michelson

Albert Abraham Michelson (surname pronunciation anglicized as "Michael-son", December 19, 1852 – May 9, 1931) was an American physicist known for his work on the measurement of the speed of light and especially for the Michelson–Morley experiment. In 1907 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics. He became the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in sciences.

Biography

Michelson was born in Strzelno, Province of Posen in the Kingdom of Prussia (now Poland) into a Jewish family. He moved to the US with his parents in 1855, at the age of two. He grew up in the mining towns of Murphy's Camp, California and Virginia City, Nevada, where his father was a merchant. His family was Jewish by birth but non-religious, and Michelson himself was a lifelong agnostic. He spent his high school years in San Francisco in the home of his aunt, Henriette Levy (née Michelson), who was the mother of author Harriet Lane Levy.

President Ulysses S. Grant awarded Michelson a special appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy in 1869.[6] During his four years as a midshipman at the Academy, Michelson excelled in optics, heat, climatology and drawing. After graduating in 1873 and two years at sea, he returned to the Naval Academy in 1875 to become an instructor in physics and chemistry until 1879. In 1879, he was posted to the Nautical Almanac Office, Washington (part of the United States Naval Observatory), to work with Simon Newcomb. In the following year he obtained leave of absence to continue his studies in Europe. He visited the Universities of Berlin and Heidelberg, and the Collège de France and École Polytechnique in Paris.

In 1877, he married Margaret Hemingway, daughter of a wealthy New York stockbroker and lawyer. They had two sons and a daughter.

Michelson was fascinated with the sciences, and the problem of measuring the speed of light in particular. While at Annapolis, he conducted his first experiments of the speed of light, as part of a class demonstration in 1877. His Annapolis experiment was refined, and in 1879, he measured the speed of light in air to be 299,864±51 kilometres per second, and estimated the speed of light in vacuum as 299,940 km/s, or 186,380 mi/s. After two years of studies in Europe, he resigned from the Navy in 1881. In 1883 he accepted a position as professor of physics at the Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland, Ohio and concentrated on developing an improved interferometer. In 1887 he and Edward Morley carried out the famous Michelson–Morley experiment which seemed to rule out the existence of the aether. He later moved on to use astronomical interferometers in the measurement of stellar diameters and in measuring the separations of binary stars.

In 1889 Michelson became a professor at Clark University at Worcester, Massachusetts and in 1892 was appointed professor and the first head of the department of physics at the newly organized University of Chicago.

In 1899, he married Edna Stanton. They raised one son and three daughters.

In 1907, Michelson had the honor of being the first American to receive a Nobel Prize in Physics "for his optical precision instruments and the spectroscopic and metrological investigations carried out with their aid". He also won the Copley Medal in 1907, the Henry Draper Medal in 1916 and the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1923. A crater on the Moon is named after him.

Michelson died in Pasadena, California at the age of 78. The University of Chicago Residence Halls remembered Michelson and his achievements by dedicating 'Michelson House' in his honor. Case Western Reserve has dedicated a Michelson House to him, and Michelson Hall (an academic building of science classrooms, laboratories and offices) at the United States Naval Academy also bears his name. Clark University named a theatre after him. Michelson Laboratory at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake in Ridgecrest, California is named for him. There is a display in the publicly accessible area of the Lab which includes facsimiles of Michelson's Nobel Prize medal, the prize document, and examples of his diffraction gratings.

About Alan Turing

Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS (23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was a British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, computer scientist and philosopher. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of "algorithm" and "computation" with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general purpose computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.

During World War II, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park, Britain's codebreaking centre. For a time he led Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, including improvements to the pre-war Polish bombe method, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine.

After the war, he worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he designed the ACE, among the first designs for a stored-program computer. In 1948 Turing joined Max Newman's Computing Laboratory at Manchester University, where he assisted development of the Manchester computers and became interested in mathematical biology. He wrote a paper on the chemical basis of morphogenesis, and predicted oscillating chemical reactions such as the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction, first observed in the 1960s.

Turing was prosecuted for homosexuality in 1952, when such acts were still criminalised in the UK. He accepted treatment with estrogen injections (chemical castration) as an alternative to prison. Turing died in 1954, 16 days before his 42nd birthday, from cyanide poisoning. An inquest determined his death a suicide; his mother and some others believed it was accidental. On 10 September 2009, following an Internet campaign, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for "the appalling way he was treated." The Queen granted him a posthumous pardon on 24 December 2013.

Early life and career

Turing was born in Paddington, London, while his father was on leave from his position with the Indian Civil Service (ICS) at Chhatrapur, Bihar and Orissa Province, in British India. Turing's father, Julius Mathison Turing (1873–1947), was the son of a clergyman from a Scottish family of merchants which had been based in the Netherlands and included a baronet. Julius's wife, Alan's mother, was Ethel Sara (née Stoney; 1881–1976), daughter of Edward Waller Stoney, chief engineer of the Madras Railways. The Stoneys were a Protestant Anglo-Irish gentry family from both County Tipperary and County Longford, while Ethel herself had spent much of her childhood in County Clare. Julius' work with the ICS brought the family to British India, where his grandfather had been a general in the Bengal Army. However, both Julius and Ethel wanted their children to be brought up in England, so they moved to Maida Vale, London, where Turing was born on 23 June 1912, as recorded by a blue plaque on the outside of the house of his birth, later the Colonnade Hotel.[10][16] He had an elder brother, John (the father of Sir John Dermot Turing, 12th Baronet of the Turing baronets). His father's civil service commission was still active, and during Turing's childhood years his parents travelled between Hastings in England and India, leaving their two sons to stay with a retired Army couple. Very early in life, Turing showed signs of the genius he was later to display prominently.[18] His parents purchased a house in Guildford in 1927, and Turing lived there during school holidays. The location is also marked with a blue plaque.

His parents enrolled him at St Michael's, a day school at 20 Charles Road, St Leonards-on-Sea, at the age of six. The headmistress recognised his talent early on, as did many of his subsequent educators. In 1926, at the age of 13, he went on to Sherborne School, a well known independent school in the market town of Sherborne in Dorset. The first day of term coincided with the 1926 General Strike in Britain, but so determined was he to attend that he rode his bicycle unaccompanied more than 60 miles (97 km) from Southampton to Sherborne, stopping overnight at an inn.

Turing's natural inclination toward mathematics and science did not earn him respect from some of the teachers at Sherborne, whose definition of education placed more emphasis on the classics. His headmaster wrote to his parents: "I hope he will not fall between two stools. If he is to stay at public school, he must aim at becoming educated. If he is to be solely a Scientific Specialist, he is wasting his time at a public school". Despite this, Turing continued to show remarkable ability in the studies he loved, solving advanced problems in 1927 without having studied even elementary calculus. In 1928, aged 16, Turing encountered Albert Einstein's work; not only did he grasp it, but he extrapolated Einstein's questioning of Newton's laws of motion from a text in which this was never made explicit.

At Sherborne, Turing formed an important friendship with fellow pupil Christopher Morcom, which provided inspiration in Turing's future endeavours. However, the friendship was cut short by Morcom's death in February 1930 from complications of bovine tuberculosis contracted after drinking infected cow's milk some years previously. This event shattered Turing's religious faith. He became an atheist and adopted the conviction that all phenomena, including the workings of the human brain, must be materialistic, but he still believed in the survival of the spirit after death.

About Agnes Arber

Agnes Robertson Arber FRS (23 February 1879 – 22 March 1960) was a British plant morphologist and anatomist, historian of botany and philosopher of biology. She was born in London but lived most of her life in Cambridge, including the last 51 years of her life. She was the first woman botanist to be elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society (21 March 1946, at the age of 67) and the third woman overall. She was the first woman to receive the Gold Medal of the Linnean Society of London (24 May 1948, at the age of 69) for her contributions to botanical science.

Her scientific research focused on the monocotyledon group of flowering plants. She also contributed to development of morphological studies in botany during the early part of the 20th century. Her later work concentrated on the topic of philosophy in botany, particularly on the nature of biological research.

Biography

Agnes Arber was born on 23 February 1879 in London. She was the first child of Henry Robertson, an artist and Agnes Lucy Turner and had three younger siblings, Donald Struan Robertson (who later became Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Cambridge) Janet Robertson who later became a portrait painter and Margaret Robertson (married name Hills) who edited Keats. Her father gave her regular drawing lessons during her early childhood, which later provided her with the necessary skills to illustrate her scientific publications herself.

At the age of eight Arber began attending the North London Collegiate School founded and run by Frances Buss, one of the leading proponents for girls' education. Under the direction of the school's science teacher Miss Edith Aitken Arber discovered a fascination with botany, publishing her first piece of research in 1894 in the school's magazine and later coming first in the school's botany examinations, winning a scholarship. It was here that Arber first met Ethel Sargent, a plant morphologist who gave regular presentations to the school science club. Sargent would later become her mentor and colleague, having a profound influence on Arber's research interests and methods.

In 1897 Arber began studying at University College, London, gaining her B.Sc. in 1899. After gaining an entrance scholarship Arber became a member of Newnham College, Cambridge and took a further degree in Natural Sciences. She gained first class results in every examination at both universities, along with several prizes and medals from University College, London. After finishing her Cambridge degree in 1902 Arber worked in the private laboratory of Ethel Sargent for a year, before returning to University College, London as holder of the Quain Studentship in Biology. She was awarded a Doctorate of Science in 1905.

Agnes Arber married paleobotanist Edward Alexander Newall Arber (1870–1918), in 1909 and moved back to Cambridge, where she would remain for the rest of her life. Her only child Muriel Agnes Arber was born in 1913. Arber and her husband had many interests in common, and her marriage was described as 'happy'. Arber was awarded a Research Fellowship from Newnham College in 1912 and published her first book Herbals, their origin and evolution in the same year. Her husband Newall Arber died in 1918 following a period of ill health. Arber never re-married, but continued with her research. She studied in the Balfour Laboratory for Women from her marriage until the laboratory's closure in 1927. Arber maintained a small laboratory in a back room of her house from then until she stopped performing bench research in the 1940s and turned to philosophical study.

Agnes Arber died on 22 March 1960 at the age of 81.

About Yellapragada Subbarow

Yellapragada Subbarow (12 January 1895 – 9 August 1948) was an Indian biochemist who discovered the function of adenosine triphosphate as an energy source in the cell, and developed methotrexate for the treatment of cancer. Most of his career was spent in the United States. Despite his isolation of ATP, Subbarow was denied tenure at Harvard and remained without a green card throughout his life, though he would lead some of America's most important medical research during World War II.

Early life and education

He was born to a Telugu Niyogi Brahmin family in Bhimavaram of the Old Madras Presidency, now in West Godavari District, Andhra Pradesh. He passed through a traumatic period in his schooling at Rajahmundry (due to the premature death of close relatives by disease) and eventually matriculated in his third attempt from the Hindu High School, Madras. He passed the Intermediate Examination from the Presidency College and entered the Madras Medical College where his education was supported by friends and Kasturi Suryanarayana Murthy, whose daughter he later married. Following Gandhi's call to boycott British goods he started wearing khadi surgical dress; this incurred the displeasure of M. C. Bradfield, his surgery professor. Consequently, though he did well in his written papers, he was awarded the lesser LMS certificate and not a full MBBS degree.

Subbarow tried to enter the Madras Medical Service without success. He then took up a job as Lecturer in Anatomy at Dr. Lakshmipathi's Ayurvedic College at Madras. He was fascinated by the healing powers of Ayurvedic medicines and began to engage in research to put Ayurveda on a modern footing.

A chance meeting with an American doctor, who was visiting on a Rockefeller Scholarship, changed his mind. The promise of support from Malladi Satyalingam Naicker Charities in Kakinada, and financial assistance raised by his father-in-law, enabled Subbarow to proceed to the U.S. He arrived in Boston on 26 October 1922.

Career in America

After earning a diploma from the Harvard Medical School he joined Harvard as a junior faculty member. With Cyrus Fiske, he developed a method for the estimation of phosphorus in body fluids and tissues. He discovered the role of phosphocreatine and adenosine triphosphate (ATP) in muscular activity, which earned him an entry into biochemistry textbooks in the 1930s. He obtained his Ph.D. degree the same year.

He joined Lederle Laboratories, a division of American Cyanamid (now a division of Wyeth which is owned by Pfizer), after he was denied a regular faculty position at Harvard. At Lederle, he developed a method to synthesize folic acid, Vitamin B9,[4] based on work by Lucy Wills to isolate folic acid as a protective agent against anemia. After his work on folic acid and with considerable input from Dr. Sidney Farber, he developed the important anti-cancer drug methotrexate - one of the very first cancer chemotherapy agents and still in widespread clinical use. He also discovered[clarification needed] the drug Hetrazan which was used by the World health Organization against filariasis. Under Subbarow, Benjamin Duggar made his discovery of the world's first tetracycline antibiotic, aureomycin, in 1945. This discovery was made as a result of the largest distributed scientific experiment ever performed to that date, when American soldiers who had fought all over the world were instructed at the end of WWII to collect soil samples from wherever they were, and bring the samples back for screening at Lederle Laboratories for possible anti-bacterial agents produced by natural soil fungi.

About V. Balakrishnan

V. Balakrishnan (born 1943 as Venkataraman Balakrishnan) is an Indian theoretical physicist who has worked in a number of fields of areas, including particle physics, many-body theory, the mechanical behavior of solids, dynamical systems, stochastic processes, and quantum dynamics. He is an accomplished researcher who has made important contributions to the theory of anelasticity, continuous-time random walks, and recurrences in dynamical systems.

He received his PhD from Brandeis University in 1970. After a decade at TIFR and IGCAR Kalpakkam, he joined IIT Madras as a Professor of Physics in 1980. He was elected Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences in 1985.

In addition to his research, Balakrishnan is a popular and noted teacher of Physics, known for his engaging teaching style, which combines physical insight, mathematical rigor, and wry wit. He has taught a very wide range of courses over the past 30 years from introductory physics to quantum field theory to dynamical systems. Two of his courses (38 lectures on classical physics and 31 on quantum physics) taught at IIT Madras are available on YouTube, and are extremely popular, having received about 1 million views in all (as of December 2011).

Balakrishnan has authored the book Elements of Nonequilibrium Statistical Mechanics (CRC Press 2008), and has co-authored the book Beyond the Crystalline State: An Emerging Perspective (Springer 1989). Preliminary drafts of a comprehensive book on Mathematical Physics based on his courses have been circulated, and the book will likely appear in print in 2012.

His wife, Radha Balakrishnan, is a theoretical physicist who works on nonlinear dynamics (in particular, solitons and integrable systems). His son, Hari Balakrishnan, is a renowned academic, currently the Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science at MIT. His daughter, Hamsa Balakrishnan, is also on the faculty at MIT as an Assistant Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

About Vikram Sarabhai

Vikram Ambalal Sarabhai (12 August 1919 – 30 December 1971) was an Indian physicist.

He is considered the father of India's space programme.

Biography

Dr.Vikram Sarabhai was born on 12 August 1919 in the city of Ahmedabad, in Gujarat state in western India. The Sarabhai family was an important and rich Jain business family. His father Ambalal Sarabhai was an affluent industrialist and owned many textiles mills in Gujarat. Vikram Sarabhai was one of the eight children of Ambalal and Sarla Devi.

Sarabhai matriculated from the Gujarat College in Ahmedabad after passing the Intermediate Science examination.

After that, he moved to England and joined the St. John's College, University of Cambridge. He received the Tripos in Natural Sciences from Cambridge in 1940.

About Vijay P. Bhatkar

Vijay Bhatkar is an Indian scientist. India's computer magazine Dataquest has placed him among the star pioneers who shaped India's IT industry.

Career & Contributions

Bhatkar is best known as the architect of India's national initiative in supercomputing where he led the development of Param supercomputers. He developed the first Indian supercomputer, the Param 8000, in 1991 and then later the Param 10000 in 1998. Based on the Param series of supercomputers, he built the National Param Supercomputing Facility (NPSF) which has been now made available as a grid computing facility through Garuda grid on the National Knowledge Network (NKN) providing nationwide access to High Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure. Currently, Bhatkar is working on exascale supercomputing via the Capability, Capacity and Infrastructure on National Knowledge Network.

Bhatkar has authored/edited over 12 books and 80 technical and research papers and addressed several university convocations, international and national conferences and conventions and public functions.

About Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

Venkatraman "Venki" Ramakrishnan (born 1952) is an Indian-born American and British structural biologist, who shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Thomas A. Steitz and Ada E. Yonath, "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome". He currently works at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England.

Early life

Ramakrishnan was born in Chidambaram in Cuddalore district of Tamil Nadu, India to C. V. Ramakrishnan and Rajalakshmi. Both his parents were scientists and taught biochemistry at the Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda.[5] He moved to Vadodara (previously also known as Baroda) in Gujarat at the age of three, where he had his schooling at Convent of Jesus and Mary, except for spending 1960–61 in Adelaide, Australia. Following his Pre-Science at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, he did his undergraduate studies in the same university on a National Science Talent Scholarship, graduating with a BSc degree in Physics in 1971.

In January 2010 lecture at the Indian Institute of Science, he revealed that he failed to get admitted to any of the Indian Institutes of Technology or the Christian Medical College, Vellore, Tamil Nadu.

Immediately after graduation he moved to the U.S.A., where he obtained his PhD degree in Physics from Ohio University in 1976. He then spent two years studying biology as a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego while making a transition from theoretical physics to biology.

Career

Ramakrishnan began work on ribosomes as a postdoctoral fellow with Peter Moore at Yale University. After his post-doctoral fellowship, he initially could not find a faculty position even though he had applied to about 50 universities in the U.S.

He continued to work on ribosomes from 1983-95 as a staff scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory. In 1995 he moved to the University of Utah as a Professor of Biochemistry, and in 1999, he moved to his current position at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, where he had also been a sabbatical visitor during 1991-92.

In 1999, Ramakrishnan's laboratory published a 5.5 Angstrom resolution structure of the 30S subunit. The following year, his laboratory determined the complete molecular structure of the 30S subunit of the ribosome and its complexes with several antibiotics. This was followed by studies that provided structural insights into the mechanism that ensures the fidelity of protein biosynthesis. More recently, his laboratory has determined the atomic structure of the whole ribosome in complex with its tRNA and mRNA ligands. Ramakrishnan is also known for his past work on histone and chromatin structure.

About U. Aswathanarayana

Uppugunduri Aswathanarayana (born 1928) is the Honorary Director of the Mahadevan International Centre for Water Resources Management, India. He is counted among the doyens of geology in independent India and is revered as a leading scientist from Andhra Pradesh. He studied / taught geology in Andhra University, India; California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California; Oxford University, United Kingdom, University of Western Ontario, Canada; University of Sagar, India; University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, Mozambique. He has served as the Dean and Director of Centre of Advanced Study in Geology, University of Sagar, India; Head of Department of Geology, University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Director, State Mining Corporation, Tanzania and Adviser on Environment and Technology, Mozambique. He also served as Consultant to UNDP, World Bank, Louis Berger Inc., and SIDA, while in Mozambique.

Education

Aswathanarayana had a difficult childhood because of poverty. He was a student of the Municipal High School, Ongole, Andhra Pradesh, India. He nearly missed the mathematics examination in the Secondary School Leaving Certificate of the then Madras Presidency when he reached the examination hall 30 minutes late, as he had to walk barefoot in the hot sun to reach the examination hall which was far away. He actually scored 100% marks in mathematics and set up a record for aggregate marks in the examination. Despite his meritorious performance in the high school, he almost gave up the idea of going to college because his parents could not afford it. Ultimately his mother had to sell whatever jewels she had to send him to college and then to university after a gap of time.

It was the vision of his mentor, Prof. C. Mahadevan of Andhra University, that launched him on his doctoral studies in what later came to be known as nuclear geology. Geology in those days was just hammer and hand lens affair. He did doctoral research in radioactivity studies using the equipment that he built himself with the help of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai. It was the first doctoral thesis on nuclear geology in India, and was examined by Arthur Holmes, F.R.S. of UK, J. Tuzo Wilson, F.R.S., of Canada, and Louis Ahrens then at Oxford. Later he did post-doctoral work on lead isotopes with Clair Patterson in Caltech in 1957, and Rb - Sr and K - Ar dating with S. Moorbath in Oxford, England, in 1963.

Career

In the course of a career of teaching, research and institutional capacity building spanning more than half a century, Aswathanarayana has been associated with Andhra University, Visakhapatnam, India, which was his alma mater; California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA; Oxford University, Oxford, England; University of Western Ontario, London, Canada; University of Saugar, Sagar, Madhya Pradesh, India; University of Dar es Salaam, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, Maputo, Mozambique. He has served as the Dean and Director of Centre of Advanced Study in Geology, University of Sagar; Head of Department of Geology, University of Dar es Salaam; Director, State Mining Corporation, Tanzania and Adviser on Environment and Technology, Mozambique. He also served as Consultant to UNDP, World Bank, Louis Berger Inc., and SIDA, while in Mozambique. He was a UGC National Fellow, India (1976–79); UGC National Lecturer, India and UNIDO Consultant on Non-Metallic Minerals, Vienna (1988).

About Tej P. Singh

Tej P. Singh is an Indian biophysicist and a scientific leader who has made original and novel contributions in the fields of Rational Structure based drug design, Protein Structure biology and X-ray crystallography. He has played an active role in the development of research programmes on drug design in the fields of Tuberculosis, Inflammation, Cancer, Epilepsy, Gastropathy and Arthritis in India. He has published more than 350 research papers in leading international journals and has submitted the highest number of protein structures in India in the Protein Data Bank (PDB). He has been nominated as a fellow of six national and international academies, namely, the Third World Academy of Sciences, Indian National Science Academy, National Academy of Sciences, Indian Academy of Sciences, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and Biotech Research Society of India.

He has been awarded various national and international awards over the years, for instance, the Jawaharlal Nehru Birth Centenary Lecture Award of INSA (2011), Annual Award of the Instrumentation Society of India (2011), CSIR Foundation Day Lecture award (2010), Goyal Prize in Life Sciences (2007), Professor G.N. Ramachandran CSIR Gold Medal for the Excellence in Biological Sciences and Technology (2006) and, Professor G.N. Ramachandran 60th Birthday Commemoration INSA Medal (2006).

Professional career

Soon after obtaining his Ph. D degree, he worked about a year (1977) as a lecturer at the University of Indore. He then spent more than two years (1978–1980) as an Alexander von Humboldt / Max-Planck, post doctoral fellow in the German laboratory of Professor Robert Huber, who later received the Nobel Prize. After his return to India he worked as a reader at Sardar Patel University (1980–83) and an Additional Professor (1984–85) in the Department of Biophysics at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi. He was appointed Professor and Head of the Department in 1986, where he established a flourishing school of structural biology and new drug discovery.

Work

The three-dimensional structures of various proteins including lactoperoxidase,[1] Peptidoglycan recognition Protein and lactoferrin from several species, ribosome inactivating proteins, bifunctional inhibitor proteins from plant seeds and various serine proteases and their inhibitors have been determined by his group. The elaborate structural studies of proteins from several important systems as potential drug targets such as phospholipase A2, cyclooxygenase, lipoxygenase, endothelin receptor, endothelin converting enzyme, breast cancer regression proteins and matrix metanosomal proteins as well as their complexes with natural and designed synthetic ligands have been carried out. His laboratory has submitted more than 301 sets of proteins structure coordinates in the protein data bank (PDB) which makes it the highest number in India. Initially, he had contributed significantly on the structure - function studies of a number of antipyretic, analgesic and anti-inflammatory agents and then on antibacterial sufonamides and their derivatives. He had developed the rules of peptide design with alpha, beta – dehydro - amino acids through extensive studies using syntheses, and X-ray and NMR structure determinations. These design rules are being exploited for making specific peptides to act as tight inhibitors of target enzymes and potent antagonists of target receptors for eventually leading to useful therapeutic agents.

As part of his protein structural studies, a large number of structures of lactoferrin proteins from various species in iron-saturated and apo-forms as well as those of its proteolytically generated monoferric functional N- and C-lobes have been determined in his laboratory through which it was demonstrated that large-scale conformational changes occur in the structures of lactoferrins upon iron-binding and iron-release, cations other than ferric ion also bind to the iron-binding cleft but with lower affinity, similarly anions other than carbonate/bicarbonate can also bind with reduced potency, and bilobal lactoferrin can be converted into two functional N-terminal and C-terminal lobes with proteinase K. These studies have provided valuable insights into the structural basis of iron-binding and iron-release in lactoferrins and their roles as antibacterial agents and in other therapeutic applications. While carrying out enzymatic cleavage of lactoferrin proteins, a novel antifungal decapeptide was discovered whose excellent potency against bacterial infections has been established.

His group has carried out extensive structural studies of phospholipase A2 enzymes and their complexes with various natural compounds, substrate analogues, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory agents and designed peptides. The new molecules have also been designed against cyclooxygenase and lypoxygenase. The enzymes phospholipase A2, cyclooxygenase and lypoxygenase are involved in the production of pro-inflammatory compounds collectively called as eicosanoids. He has already developed several highly potent inhibitors that are under consideration for further evaluation as anti-inflammatory agents. His group has been practicing the rational approach of structure-based drug design for developing therapeutic agents against various inflammatory disorders such as rheumatism and arthritis using PLA2, COX-2 and LOX enzymes as macromolecular targets.

His group has determined the crystal structures of several secretory glycoproteins isolated from dry secretions of various mammalian species including humans. This is a new class of proteins, first time detected whose functions and structures were unknown. These proteins are implicated as protective signaling factors in the large-scale tissue remodeling processes. Their role in the breast cancers as protective factors for the breast cancer cells makes them important targets for structure - based drug design and offers opportunities for developing new therapeutic agents against breast cancer. He has been able to design several peptides that bind to these proteins with potencies ranging up to 10-7 M.

The crystal structures of the complexes of these proteins with designed peptides have helped in identifying the site of binding in this protein. The structures of the complexes with various oligosachharides have provided information about the potencies of sugar binding. It also indicated the type and nature of sugars that will bind to this class of proteins specifically. Furthermore, several crystal structures of the ternary complexes of these proteins with peptides and sugars have helped in understanding the mode of binding of these proteins to cell surface receptors. He initiated a new programme on Clinical Proteomics in which it is intended to characterize all the proteins that are expressed during various patho/physiological conditions. The newly identified proteins will either be useful as biomarkers or they may be associated with the progression of diseases making them important targets for drug design. He has published more than 350 research papers in the leading journals.

About Swapan Chattopadhyay

Swapan Chattopadhyay (born December 26, 1951) is a particle accelerator physicist noted for his pioneering contributions of innovative concepts, techniques and developments in high energy particle colliders, coherent and incoherent light sources, ultrafast sciences in the femto- and atto- second regimes, superconducting linear accelerators and various applications of interaction of particle and light beams. He has directly contributed to the development of many accelerators around the world, e.g. the Super Proton-Antiproton Synchrotron and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the Advanced Light Source at Berkeley, the asymmetric-energy electron-positron collider PEP-II at Stanford, the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator facility (CEBAF) at Jefferson Lab and the Free-Electron Lasers at Jefferson and Daresbury Laboratories.

Chattopadhyay currently holds a triple appointment as the Sir John Cockcroft Chair of Physics jointly at the Universities of Liverpool, Manchester and Lancaster - the First Chair of accelerator physics in UK, named after the British Nobel Laureate credited with creating the field. Concurrently, he is the Inaugural Director of the international centre of accelerator science and technology, the Cockcroft Institute (UK), opened officially by the UK Minister of Science Lord Sainsbury in 2006—a joint venture of the UK Research Council, STFC (Science and Technology Facilities Council), Universities of Liverpool, Manchester, Lancaster and the Sci-Tech Daresbury Innovation Campus. Appointed in April 2007 following an international search and preceded by a 35-year long career in CERN and USA spanning leadership positions in Berkeley and Jefferson Laboratories, Chattopadhyay is dedicating his efforts at establishing a unique and pioneering paradigm of close collaboration between academia, national laboratories and industry, to advance global accelerator initiatives in particle, nuclear, photon and neutron sciences; to educate and train the next generation; and to enhance knowledge-based economy. Prior to his move to UK, he had served as Associate Director of Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (2001-2007); Staff/ Senior Scientist and Founding Director of the Centre for Beam Physics at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (1984-2001); and Scientific Attaché at CERN (1982- 1984). Having spent his early childhood in Calcutta and Darjeeling in India, he completed his undergraduate studies as a National Scholar and National Science Talent Scholar before receiving his Ph.D. in Physics from University of California at Berkeley in 1982. He had held Visiting Professor appointments at University of California at Berkeley, Harvard University, University of Illinois at Urbana Champagne and University of Virginia at Charlottesville at various times. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Institute of Physics (UK) and Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce(UK) and a member of many international panels and committees, including the ‘’’International Committee for Future Accelerators’’’ and the DESY Science Council. He had served as the Vice-Chair, Chair-elect, Chair and Past-Chair of the American Physical Society’s Division of Physics of Beams (2007-2011). He has mentored many scientists and engineers across the globe including Asia, North America and Europe and has delivered endowed lectures throughout the world e.g. Saha Memorial Lecture, Homi Bhabha Lecture, Raja Ramanna Memorial Lecture, and Cavendish Lecture among many.

Career

Chattopadhyay returned to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1984, where he led and defined the accelerator physics of the Advanced Light Source (ALS) and contributed to the conceptual design of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), pioneered the accelerator physics which underpinned the Berkeley-Stanford asymmetric B-factory (PEP-II) for CP-violation studies, and initiated the Berkeley FEL/Femtosecond X-ray Source and Laser-Plasma Acceleration development. He was a Senior Scientist, a Guest Professor, and the Founder/Director of the Center for Beam Physics at Berkeley, until his move to Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in 2001 as the Associate Laboratory Director for Accelerators, after 25 years at the University of California and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. At Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, he made critical advancements in microwave superconducting linear accelerators leading the way to current and future grand instruments of science such as the high precision CEBAF and its 12 GeV upgrade for precision research in hadronic physics, Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA to advance neutron sciences and novel materials research, and the current superconducting version of the International Linear Collider, to name a few. His current research at the Cockcroft Institute in UK includes development of sources of “ultra-cold” relativistic free electron beams to advance coherent electron diffraction techniques; production of novel coherent and ultra-short pulses of photons novel acceleration methods; investigation of photonic crystals and metamaterial structures for charged particle acceleration; novel high energy colliders; cavity search for “dark matter” and laboratory investigation of “dark energy” via atom interferometer techniques. Having contributed to the conception, design, construction, commissioning and operation of numerous accelerators for particle and nuclear physics, photon and neutron sciences around the world, with significant research accomplishments in advanced particle and photon beam physics, and mentoring scientists around the world, in the developing nations in particular, in accelerator developments as a unifying global force among nations, Prof. Chattopadhyay is a frequently invited speaker and advisor at professional societies and government research agencies, serving on numerous editorial, advisory and review committees throughout the world.

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