Famous British Scientists

1.

Famous British
Scientists

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Robert Hooke (1635 – 1703) was an English natural philosopher,
architect and polymath.
He built some of the earliest Gregorian telescopes and observed
the rotations of Mars and Jupiter. In 1665 he inspired the use of
microscopes for scientific exploration with his book,
Micrographia. Based on his microscopic observations of fossils,
Hooke was an early proponent of biological evolution.
Hooke coined the term “cell” for describing biological
organisms. The hand-crafted, leather and gold-tooled microscope
he used to make the observations for Micrographia, originally
constructed by Christopher White in London, is on display at the
National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, DC.

3.

Edward Jenner (1749 – 1823) was an English physician and
scientist who was the pioneer of smallpox vaccine, the
world's first vaccine. He is often called "the father
of immunology", and his work is said to have "saved more
lives than the work of any other human".
The process below shows the steps taken by Edward Jenner
to create vaccination. He did this by inoculating James
Phipps with cowpox, a virus similar to smallpox, to create
immunity, unlike variolation, which used smallpox to create
an immunity to itself.

4.

Charles Robert Darwin was born in 1809. He was an
English naturalist and geologist, best known for his
contributions to evolutionary theory. Darwin established
that all species of life have descended over time
from common ancestors. He also introduced the
scientific theory that this branching
pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he
called natural selection.

5.

Sir Isaac Newton (1642 – 1727) was an
English physicist and mathematician who is widely
recognised as one of the most influential scientists
of all time and a key figure in the scientific
revolution. Newton graduated from the University of
Cambridge. His book "Mathematical Principles of
Natural Philosophy", first published in 1687, laid the
foundations for classical mechanics. Newton built
the first practical reflecting telescope and developed
a theory of colour. He formulated the laws of motion
and universal principles of gravitation, studied
the speed of sound.

6.

John Floyer was born in 1649 in a small village in
Staffordshire. He graduated from the Queen’s College at the
University of Oxford as a medical doctor. He wrote a lot of
books on medicine. He was the first physician who studied the
pulse rate in men and determined relations between it and
other parameters such as respiration rate, body temperature,
age and sex. Floyer said “every man is a fool or becomes a
physician, when he arrives at 50 or 60 years of age”.

7.

Alexander Fleming was born in 1881 in Scottland in a
farmer’s family. He attended the Royal Polytechnic
Institution in London and after that studied
microbiology at the St.Mary’s Hospital Medical School.
In 1928 Fleming was investigating the properties of
staphylococcus bacteria, so there were Petri dishes
with it’s culture in his lab. He left them untidy for a
holiday. When he returned he was very surprised.
He mentioned that one dish was
contaminated with a fungus, and
colonies of staphylococci around it
had been destroyed.

8.

Godfrey Newbold Hounsfield was born in a farmer's family
in Sutton-on-Trent in 1919. At school he was excellent in
mathematics and physics and already then he constructed
his first electrical devices. Hounsfield graduated from
Faraday House Electrical Engineering College in London.
The idea of multiple x-ray imaging at all angles through an
object came to him accidently during a weekend walk. Firstly
he didn’t know how it could be useful. Later he suspected
that it can be of a great benefit for medicine and began
construction.
In 1967 Hounsfield constructed the first prototype of a
computed tomograph. In 1979 he got the Nobel prize in
Physiology or Medicine for this invention.

9.

Francis Harry Compton Crick was born in 1916 in
the small village Weston Farvell near
Northhampton. He graduated from the University
College London and got the degree of Ph.D. in
physics at the University of Cambridge. Crick
began studying biology only at the age 31 and
became concerned about one of the major
unsolved problems of that time – what's the
molecular base of heredity.
Maurice Wilkins was born in 1916 in New Zeland and
soon his family moved to the UK. Maurice graduated
from the University of Birmingham and got the Ph.D.
degree in physics. In 1945 Wilkins set up a
revolutionally new laboratory combining the methods
of physics and biology to solve some biological
problems. Rosalind Franklin, a British chemist, also
worked at that laboratory.

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Franklin used x-ray to obtain the
legendary “photo 51” of DNA, the point
from which the greatest invention begun.
At the same time, Francis Crick and James
Watson, an American biologist, worked at
the University of Cambridge at Cavendish
Laboratory.
Wilkins shared the images with Crick and
Watson. This helped them to build a model
of DNA which they published in 1953.

11.

Ian Wilmut was born in 1944 in a small village
Hampton Lucy in England. He graduated from the
University of Nottingham and got the degree of
Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh.
Keith Campbell was born in 1954 in Birmingham. He
graduated from the University of Sussex.
Wilmuth, an embryologist, and Campbell, a
microbiologist, were members of one team and
worked on the problem of animal cloning.

12.

Anthony Hollander was born in 1964 in London. He
graduated from the University of Bath and after that
graduated with Ph.D. degree in Pathology from the
University of Bristol. When he was just 9 years old, he
wrote a letter to the children's TV-show "Blue Peter"
that he knew how to save lives.
In November 2008 it was
reported that the first
successful transplantation of
an artificially-grown human
organ was made.
A big team from Spain, Italy
and the UK worked on it.
Hollander played a key role in that breakthrough as the only stem cell specialist of the
team.

13.

He says now that the greatest thanks
should be tendered to Miss Baxter,
the editor of "Blue Peter" show, for
the good response she had sent to
young Antony.
"If her letter had shown any hint of ridicule
or disbelief I might perhaps never have
trained to become a medical scientist or
been driven to achieve the impossible
dream, and really make a difference to a
human being's life", says Hollander.