The student and successor to Aristotle, Theophrastus guarded his mentor's work and expanded the Lyceum in Athens. Theophrastus expanded upon Aristotle’s work by pioneering botany, whereas Aristotle had focused more on zoology. A skilled gardener, Theophrastus wrote about the best ways of growing plants, categorized them, and noted the best plants to use as food and medicine.
The famed Greek philosopher had many contributions to biology as a science. He was the first to conceptualize a taxonomical structure, as he recognized categories of animals and placed them into the broader categories of ‘blooded’ and ‘bloodless’. Four separate methods of reproduction were theorized by him: asexual reproduction, two types of sexual reproduction, and life forming from non-living mud. Aristotle was also among the first to recognize the relationship of an animals structure to its environment.
As mankind began to conglomerate and settle due to the invention of agriculture, knowledge about plants and animals grows more than ever before. Humans during this time begin domesticating livestock such as cows, water buffalo, and pigs, as well as utility animals like horses and dogs. Domestication requires knowledge of animal behavior and anatomy. Knowledge regarding staple crops and how best to grow them also takes root, allowing for mankind to manipulate the growth of plants in mass quantities.
In 1316, De’Luzzi wrote the Anathomia Mundini for the first time, an anatomical guide that became the staple text for physicians, surgeons, and dissectors for the next two hundred years. This book was the first solely dedicated to anatomy written in Europe since the time of the Greeks. This publication coincided with a revitalization in European rational thinking and anatomical study.
With the invention of the printing press by Gutenburg around 1440 and further innovations in the 1500s, written knowledge and detailed illustrations began to spread with increased vigor across all of Europe. This increased spread meant that biologists could access classical Greek manuscripts and current innovation with greater ease.
Considered one of the fathers of Botany, Brunfels was a German monk that practiced medicine. From 1530 until the time of his death, he wrote Herbarum Vivae Eicones, which was published in 1536. This manuscript is well known for its classification of herbs by their medicinal use, as well as the well done and accurate drawings of herbs. His work helped forge botany into a logical science.
Born in Belgium, Vesalius was a physician and responsible for the use of human dissection in the renaissance study of anatomy. After growing tired of studying human analogies in similar animals, he went against the wishes of the Catholic Church and began dissecting cadavers. Among his discoveries is the contradiction of the Christian belief that men had one less rib than women, as well as contradiction of the structure of the mandible. His work De Humani Commis Fabrica contained more than 200 detailed drawings of the structures of the human body.
Belon was a French doctor and botanist who travelled the much of the Middle East, writing and illustrating the things he saw. His works L’Histoire naturelle des estranges poisons marins and De aquatilibus challenge the classical depictions of dolphins, and distinguished them from porpoises. His most notable achievement though, was his L’Histoire de la nature des oyseaux in which he illustrated avian skeletons next to human skeletons and compared them, making him an early pioneer of homologies and comparative anatomy.
An English physician educated at Cambridge and in Italy, Harvey was the first man to model the circulation of blood in an organism. He conducted experiments involving the living dissection of animals in order to gain an understanding of how the circulatory system truly operated, and determined that it made a complete circuit of arteries and veins being pumped by the heart. His work contradicted accepted ideas, and he faced heavy criticism for his conclusions.
A master of hand-grinding lenses, Leeuwenhoek helped to enhance the microscope, and, in doing so, discovered protozoa, and opened the world of microorganisms. He wrote in great detail of the things he saw, and was among the first to see the spermatozoa of several animals, man included. He later also gave the first accurate description of a red blood cell. His discovery that weevils were the larval stage of winged insects also prompted the refutation of the theory of spontaneous generation of life.
Robert Hooke’s work primarily regarding his strides in enhancing the microscope. Hooke, an early proponent of biological evolution, was the first to use the term “cell” in regards to the biological structure after viewing the walled divisions in a slice of cork. He also included in this book detailed illustrations of insects, most notably the compound structure of a fly’s eye.
Linnaeus was the one who laid the foundations for the modern biological naming scheme of binomial nomenclature. He also published the first edition of Systema Naturae in the Netherlands in 1735. In the 1740s, he was sent on several journeys through Sweden to find and classify plants and animals.
Louis Pasteur is a quintessential figure in microbiology. After being hired by a distillery, Pasteur discovered that microorganisms are responsible for the fermentation process, and that specific microorganisms were responsible. His advances in fermentation also led to the coining of the terms aerobic and anaerobic. This also led to his discovery of pasteurization by adding heat to kill the microorganisms responsible for spoiling food and beverages. Pasteur also disproved the theory of spontaneous generation of life. With the addition of his invention of vaccines, Louis Pasteur has arguably saved more lives than any other human.
Gregor Mendel is often viewed as the father of genetics. As an Austrian monk, Mendel conducted hybrid breeding of peas to determine the nature of heredity. Over the course of 8 years, Mendel concluded with two laws of heredity: the Law of Segregation, in which Mendel determined that genetic traits can be dominant or recessive, and the Law of Independent Assortment, where certain traits present in an organism are independent of other traits.
By 1838 his methods had led him to propose the cell theory for plants. Schleiden was the first to recognize the importance of cells as fundamental units of life. In his most well-known article, Schleiden described Robert Brown's 1832 discovery of the cell nucleus.
Schwann's many contributions to include the development of the cell theory, the discovery of Schwann cells in the pepsin, the discovery of the organic nature of yeast, and the invention of the term metabolism.
He discovered that outside stimuli affected cells, and that diseased cells arise from already diseased and cancerous cells. He focused on clinical observation, physiological experiments and pathological anatomy, occasionally using laboratory animals, operating at the microscopic level. Virchow published probably his most influential work, “Cellular Pathology”, reporting that the cell was the most fundamental unit of disease pathologies, including that of cancer.
Wallace was the co-discoverer of the theory of natural selection. Wallace supplied Darwin with birds for his studies and decided to seek Darwin's help in publishing his own ideas on evolution. He sent Darwin his theory in 1858, which, to Darwin's shock, nearly replicated Darwin's own.
In 1859, Darwin introduced his scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection, in which the struggle for existence has a similar effect to the artificial selection involved in selective breeding. His theory of evolution by natural selection, now the unifying theory of the life sciences, explained where all of the astonishingly diverse kinds of living things came from and how they became exquisitely adapted to their particular environments. His theory reconciled a host of diverse kinds of evidence such as the progressive fossil record, geographical distribution of species, recapitulative appearances in embryology, homologous structures, vestigial organs and nesting taxonomic relationships.
In 1869 Miescher found nucleic acid and protamine (a protein commonly associated with nucleic acids) in salmon spermatozoa. He was one of the earliest researchers to propose and to collect data supporting the hypothesis that it is the carbon dioxide concentration (rather than the oxygen concentration) in the blood that regulates breathing.
Beijerinck was the first to recognize that viruses are reproducing entities that are different from other organisms. He also discovered new types of bacteria from soil and described biological nitrogen fixation.
These two scientists proposed that chromosomes carry hereditary information. Before their experiments there was not a lot of clarity on Mendel’s law of inheritance; however Boveri and Walter independently clarified and redefined this theory. Boveri experimented with sea urchins and found that without chromosomes an organism could not reproduced. Sutton worked with grasshoppers and observed the mitosis process and noticed that the number of programs split in half according to the sperm and egg. These experiments and observations led them to believe that chromosomes are the cause for inheritance and carry the hereditary information.
Ernest Rutherford was a noted scientist. He had already discovered alpha and beta particles through his studies of radioactivity. As any great scientist would, he continued his study on radioactivity. He decided to conduct an experiment by studying the particles of uranium. He shined a light through a gold piece of foil and made observations and measured the particles that shined through the other side of the foil. He measured the size and fraction of the particles which helped him form conclusions about the atom. This experiment alone created the first accepted model of the atom, which is still used today.
Francis Aston was a British scientist that was known for his invention of the mass spectrograph that could detect a difference in mass of the same element. This device led to Aston’s discovery that atoms had isotopes. He found 212 isotopes with his invention. The discovery of isotopes led to major scientific applications such as advances in atomic energy, the use of radiopharmaceuticals, and the building of better weapons.
The professor at St. Mary’s Hospital in London named Alexander Fleming discovered the first antibiotic named Penicillin. He discovered on accident that Penicillin kills bacteria. He was known for having a very messy lab. He had a stack of petri dishes sitting the sink of his lab. He noticed that in one petri disk all of the staph bacteria had been killed. After he took a sample of the mold, he found that Penicillium Notaum was what killed the bacteria. His publications of this discovery were not very recognized at the time but became very useful during the WWII and for curing infections.
Ruska, a German physicist and Knoll, a German engineer both built and demonstrated the first scanning electron microscope in 1931. They invented this electron microscope through research and experiments on electron beams and cathode-ray oscillographs. The microscope provided a more detailed view of any object. This was historically significant because scientist originally believed that the previous microscopes were set and could not gain any more resolution to see smaller things. This invention showed that microscopes had a lot of room for improvement and could see past the expected resolution.
Watson and Crick, both graduate students at Cambridge University provided the world with the first accepted model or structure of DNA. Through many lectures, studies, experiments, and previous knowledge they concluded that DNA was made up of two chains of nucleotides that were anti-parallel.
Dr. Christian Bernard performed the first successful human to human heart transplant. This was an astounding accomplishment within the medical field. He is also known for creating artificial heart valves, fixing problems within the blood supply of the fetus and many more accomplishments.
Roslin Institute researchers created the first cloned mammal (sheep) from an adult sheep cell. The cloned Sheep’s name was Dolly. This was an important step in biological history because scientists had only been able to clone bacteria or from an embryonic cell; this showed that one could create an entire organism from one adult cell.
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