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Gerald Edelman
1929 - 2014 (85 years)
Gerald Maurice Edelman was an American biologist who shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work with Rodney Robert Porter on the immune system. Edelman's Nobel Prize-winning research concerned discovery of the structure of antibody molecules. In interviews, he has said that the way the components of the immune system evolve over the life of the individual is analogous to the way the components of the brain evolve in a lifetime. There is a continuity in this way between his work on the immune system, for which he won the Nobel Prize, and his later work in neuroscience and...
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Leonard Hayflick
1928 - Present (96 years)
Leonard Hayflick is a Professor of Anatomy at the UCSF School of Medicine, and was Professor of Medical Microbiology at Stanford University School of Medicine. He is a past president of the Gerontological Society of America and was a founding member of the council of the National Institute on Aging . The recipient of a number of research prizes and awards, including the 1991 Sandoz Prize for Gerontological Research, he has studied the aging process for more than fifty years. He is known for discovering that normal human cells divide for a limited number of times in vitro . This is known as the Hayflick limit.
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James P. Allison
1948 - Present (76 years)
James Patrick Allison is an American immunologist and Nobel laureate who holds the position of professor and chair of immunology and executive director of immunotherapy platform at the MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas.
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Gregory S. Paul
1954 - Present (70 years)
Gregory Scott Paul is an American freelance researcher, author and illustrator who works in paleontology. He is best known for his work and research on theropod dinosaurs and his detailed illustrations, both live and skeletal. Professionally investigating and restoring dinosaurs for three decades, Paul received an on-screen credit as dinosaur specialist on Jurassic Park and Discovery Channel's When Dinosaurs Roamed America and Dinosaur Planet. He is the author and illustrator of Predatory Dinosaurs of the World , The Complete Illustrated Guide to Dinosaur Skeletons , Dinosaurs of the Air , The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs , Gregory S.
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Esther Lederberg
1922 - 2006 (84 years)
Esther Miriam Zimmer Lederberg was an American microbiologist and a pioneer of bacterial genetics. She discovered the bacterial virus λ and the bacterial fertility factor F, devised the first implementation of replica plating, and furthered the understanding of the transfer of genes between bacteria by specialized transduction.
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Anthony Fauci
1940 - Present (84 years)
Anthony Stephen Fauci is an American physician-scientist and immunologist who served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022, and the chief medical advisor to the president from 2021 to 2022. Fauci was one of the world's most frequently cited scientists across all scientific journals from 1983 to 2002. In 2008, President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States, for his work on the AIDS relief program PEPFAR.
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Bruce Alberts
1938 - Present (86 years)
Bruce Michael Alberts is an American biochemist and the Chancellor’s Leadership Chair in Biochemistry and Biophysics for Science and Education, emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco. He has done important work studying the protein complexes which enable chromosome replication when living cells divide. He is known as an original author of the "canonical, influential, and best-selling scientific textbook" Molecular Biology of the Cell, and as Editor-in-Chief of Science magazine.
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George Davis Snell
1903 - 1996 (93 years)
George Davis Snell NAS was an American mouse geneticist and basic transplant immunologist. Work George Snell shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Baruj Benacerraf and Jean Dausset for their discoveries concerning "genetically determined structures on the cell surface that regulate immunological reactions". Snell specifically "discovered the genetic factors that determine the possibilities of transplanting tissue from one individual to another. It was Snell who introduced the concept of H antigens." Snell's work in mice led to the discovery of HLA, the major histocompatibility complex, in humans that is analogous to the H-2 complex in mice.
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Kenneth R. Miller
1948 - Present (76 years)
Kenneth Raymond Miller is an American cell biologist, molecular biologist, and Professor Emeritus of Biology at Brown University. Miller's primary research focus is the structure and function of cell membranes, especially chloroplast thylakoid membranes. Miller is a co-author of a major introductory college and high school biology textbook published by Prentice Hall since 1990.
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Bruce Ames
1928 - Present (96 years)
Bruce Nathan Ames is an American biochemist. He is a professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and was a senior scientist at Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute . He is the inventor of the Ames test, a system for easily and cheaply testing the mutagenicity of compounds.
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Paul Greengard
1925 - 2020 (95 years)
Paul Greengard was an American neuroscientist best known for his work on the molecular and cellular function of neurons. In 2000, Greengard, Arvid Carlsson and Eric Kandel were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries concerning signal transduction in the nervous system. He was Vincent Astor Professor at Rockefeller University, and served on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Cure Alzheimer's Fund, as well as the Scientific Council of the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation. He was married to artist Ursula von Rydingsvard.
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Linda B. Buck
1947 - Present (77 years)
Linda Brown Buck is an American biologist best known for her work on the olfactory system. She was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with Richard Axel, for their work on olfactory receptors. She is currently on the faculty of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.
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Jerry Coyne
1949 - Present (75 years)
Areas of Specialization: Ecology, Evolution Jerry Coyne is professor emeritus at the University of Chicago for the Department of Ecology and Evolution. He earned a BS in biology from the William & Mary. He was drafted while attending graduate school at Rockefeller University, but returned to his studies upon his return, earning a PhD in biology from Harvard University. He went on to a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Davis. He is an expert in speciation and ecological and evolutionary genetics. He has been a vocal critic of religion, intelligent design, theistic evolution, and creationism, and has authored several books on the topic, including Faith vs.
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James F. Crow
1916 - 2012 (96 years)
James Franklin Crow was Professor Emeritus of Genetics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a prominent population geneticist whose career spanned from the modern synthesis to the genomic era.
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Matthew Meselson
1930 - Present (94 years)
Matthew Stanley Meselson is a geneticist and molecular biologist currently at Harvard University, known for his demonstration, with Franklin Stahl, of semi-conservative DNA replication. After completing his Ph.D. under Linus Pauling at the California Institute of Technology, Meselson became a Professor at Harvard University in 1960, where he has remained, today, as Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences.
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Robert Tjian
1949 - Present (75 years)
Robert Tjian is a Hong Kong-born American biochemist best known for his work on eukaryotic transcription. He is currently professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute . On April 1, 2009, Tjian became the President of HHMI. On August 4, 2015, he announced that he would step down as President at the end of 2016.
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Martin Chalfie
1947 - Present (77 years)
Martin Lee Chalfie is an American scientist. He is University Professor at Columbia University. He shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Osamu Shimomura and Roger Y. Tsien "for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP". He holds a PhD in neurobiology from Harvard University.
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Robert Weinberg
1942 - Present (82 years)
Robert Allan Weinberg is a biologist, Daniel K. Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology , director of the Ludwig Center of the MIT, and American Cancer Society Research Professor. His research is in the area of oncogenes and the genetic basis of human cancer.
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Howard T. Odum
1924 - 2002 (78 years)
Howard Thomas Odum , usually cited as H. T. Odum, was an American ecologist. He is known for his pioneering work on ecosystem ecology, and for his provocative proposals for additional laws of thermodynamics, informed by his work on general systems theory.
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Sidney Altman
1939 - 2022 (83 years)
Sidney Altman was a Canadian-American molecular biologist, who was the Sterling Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology and Chemistry at Yale University. In 1989, he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Thomas R. Cech for their work on the catalytic properties of RNA.
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Barry Commoner
1917 - 2012 (95 years)
Barry Commoner was an American cellular biologist, college professor, and politician. He was a leading ecologist and among the founders of the modern environmental movement. He was the director of the Center for Biology of Natural Systems and its Critical Genetics Project. He ran as the Citizens Party candidate in the 1980 U.S. presidential election. His work studying the radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons testing led to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963.
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Andrew Benson
1917 - 2015 (98 years)
Andrew Alm Benson was an American biologist and a professor of biology at the University of California, San Diego, until his retirement in 1989. He is known for his work in understanding the carbon cycle in plants.
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Eric Lander
1957 - Present (67 years)
Areas of Specialization: Systems Biology, Genetics Eric Lander is founding director of the Broad Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, Professor of Biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. He graduated from Princeton University as valedictorian, with a BS in mathematics. He went on to attend University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, where he earned his PhD He is a founder of Verastem and a founding advisor of Foundation Medicine. He began his career in mathematics, but soon started looking at mathematical applications in neurobiology.
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Martin Rodbell
1925 - 1998 (73 years)
Martin Rodbell was an American biochemist and molecular endocrinologist who is best known for his discovery of G-proteins. He shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Alfred G. Gilman for "their discovery of G-proteins and the role of these proteins in signal transduction in cells."
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Robert T. Bakker
1945 - Present (79 years)
Robert Thomas Bakker is an American paleontologist who helped reshape modern theories about dinosaurs, particularly by adding support to the theory that some dinosaurs were endothermic . Along with his mentor John Ostrom, Bakker was responsible for initiating the ongoing "dinosaur renaissance" in paleontological studies, beginning with Bakker's article "Dinosaur Renaissance" in the April 1975 issue of Scientific American. His specialty is the ecological context and behavior of dinosaurs.
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Paul D. MacLean
1913 - 2007 (94 years)
Paul Donald MacLean was an American physician and neuroscientist who made significant contributions in the fields of physiology, psychiatry, and brain research through his work at Yale Medical School and the National Institute of Mental Health. MacLean's evolutionary triune brain theory proposed that the human brain was in reality three brains in one: the reptilian complex, the limbic system, and the neocortex.
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Stanley B. Prusiner
1942 - Present (82 years)
Stanley Ben Prusiner is an American neurologist and biochemist. He is the director of the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases at University of California, San Francisco . Prusiner discovered prions, a class of infectious self-reproducing pathogens primarily or solely composed of protein. He received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1994 and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1997 for prion research developed by him and his team of experts beginning in the early 1970s.
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Robert Sapolsky
1957 - Present (67 years)
Robert Morris Sapolsky is an American neuroendocrinology researcher and author. He is a professor of biology, neurology, neurological sciences, and neurosurgery at Stanford University. In addition, he is a research associate at the National Museums of Kenya.
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Paul Sereno
1957 - Present (67 years)
Paul Callistus Sereno is a professor of paleontology at the University of Chicago and a National Geographic "explorer-in-residence" who has discovered several new dinosaur species on several continents, including at sites in Inner Mongolia, Argentina, Morocco and Niger. One of his most widely publicized discoveries is that of a nearly complete specimen of Sarcosuchus imperator — popularly known as SuperCroc — at Gadoufaoua in the Tenere desert of Niger.
Go to ProfileElaine Ingham is an American microbiologist and soil biology researcher and founder of Soil Foodweb Inc. She is known as a leader in soil microbiology and research of the soil food web, She is an author of the USDA's Soil Biology Primer.
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Elvin A. Kabat
1914 - 2000 (86 years)
Elvin Abraham Kabat was an American biomedical scientist and one of the founding fathers of quantitative immunochemistry. Kabat was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University in 1977, National Medal of Science in 1991, and American Association of Immunologists Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995. He is the father of Jon Kabat-Zinn.
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Feng Zhang
1981 - Present (43 years)
Areas of Specialization: Neuroscience, Bioengineering Feng Zhang is a core member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University, the James and Patricia Poitras Professor in Neuroscience for the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and for Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Biological Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After immigrating to the US from China with his mother at the age of 11, he attended school in Iowa. He earned his BA in Chemistry and Physics from Harvard University and his PhD in chemical and biological engineering from Stanford University. Best kn...
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Leigh Van Valen
1935 - 2010 (75 years)
Leigh Van Valen was a U.S. evolutionary biologist. At the time of his death, he was professor emeritus in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago. Research and interests Amongst other work, Van Valen's proposed "Law of Extinction", known as Van Valen's law, drew upon the apparent constant probability of extinction in families of related organisms, based on data compiled from existing literature on the duration of tens of thousands of genera throughout the fossil record. Van Valen proposed the Red Queen Hypothesis , as an explanatory tangent to the Law of Extinction.
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Julius Axelrod
1912 - 2004 (92 years)
Julius Axelrod was an American biochemist. He won a share of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1970 along with Bernard Katz and Ulf von Euler. The Nobel Committee honored him for his work on the release and reuptake of catecholamine neurotransmitters, a class of chemicals in the brain that include epinephrine, norepinephrine, and, as was later discovered, dopamine. Axelrod also made major contributions to the understanding of the pineal gland and how it is regulated during the sleep-wake cycle.
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Masatoshi Nei
1931 - 2023 (92 years)
Areas of Specialization: Evolutionary Biology Masatoshi Nei is a Carnell Professor with the department of biology at Temple University. An evolutionary biologist, he studied at both Kyoto University and the University of Miyazaki. He has been prolific in the development of the statistical theory of molecular evolution, developing new theories as new discoveries in molecular biology emerge. He has worked at institutions such as Brown University, National Institute of Radiological Sciences and Kyoto University, advancing his understanding of how mutations can drive evolution. He is famous for ma...
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Daniel I. Arnon
1910 - 1994 (84 years)
Daniel Israel Arnon was a Polish-born American plant physiologist and National Medal of Science recipient whose research led to greater insights into the operation of photosynthesis and nutrition in plants.
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Robert W. Holley
1922 - 1993 (71 years)
Robert William Holley was an American biochemist. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1968 for describing the structure of alanine transfer RNA, linking DNA and protein synthesis.
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Solomon H. Snyder
1938 - Present (86 years)
Solomon Halbert Snyder is an American neuroscientist who has made wide-ranging contributions to neuropharmacology and neurochemistry. He studied at Georgetown University, and has conducted the majority of his research at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Many advances in molecular neuroscience have stemmed from Snyder's identification of receptors for neurotransmitters and drugs, and elucidation of the actions of psychotropic agents. He received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1978 for his research on the opioid receptor, and is one of the most highly cited researche...
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Herman Kalckar
1908 - 1991 (83 years)
Herman Moritz Kalckar was a Danish biochemist who pioneered the study of cellular respiration. Kalckar made a number of significant contributions to the development of 20th century biochemistry including:a founder of bioenergetics;enzymology, including novel assay techniques;galactose metabolism in both microorganisms and animal tissues;suggestion that strontium-90 levels in children’s deciduous teeth correlated with nuclear testing.
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Eugene Odum
1913 - 2002 (89 years)
Eugene Pleasants Odum was an American biologist at the University of Georgia known for his pioneering work on ecosystem ecology. He and his brother Howard T. Odum wrote the popular ecology textbook, Fundamentals of Ecology . The Odum School of Ecology is named in his honor.
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Paul D. Boyer
1918 - 2018 (100 years)
Paul Delos Boyer was an American biochemist, analytical chemist, and a professor of chemistry at University of California Los Angeles . He shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for research on the "enzymatic mechanism underlying the biosynthesis of adenosine triphosphate " with John E. Walker, making Boyer the first Utah-born Nobel laureate; the remainder of the Prize in that year was awarded to Danish chemist Jens Christian Skou for his discovery of the Na+/K+-ATPase.
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Edwin G. Krebs
1918 - 2009 (91 years)
Edwin Gerhard Krebs was an American biochemist. He received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research and the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize of Columbia University in 1989 together with Alfred Gilman and, together with his collaborator Edmond H. Fischer, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1992 for describing how reversible phosphorylation works as a switch to activate proteins and regulate various cellular processes.
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Marcus Feldman
1942 - Present (82 years)
Areas of Specialization: Evolutionary Biology Marcus Feldman is co-director of the Center for Computational, Evolutionary, and Human Genomics and the Burnet C. and Mildred Finley Wohlford Professor of Biological Sciences, and director of the Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies at Stanford University. He earned degrees in mathematics and statistics from the University of Western Australia, a master of science in mathematics from Monash University, and a PhD from Stanford University. While collaborating with L.L. Cavalli-Sforza, he introduced a quantitative theory of cultural ...
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Bruce McEwen
1938 - 2020 (82 years)
Bruce Sherman McEwen was an American neuroendocrinologist and head of the Harold and Margaret Milliken Hatch Laboratory of Neuroendocrinology at Rockefeller University. He was known for his work on the effects of environmental and psychological stress, having coined the term allostatic load.
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John Ostrom
1928 - 2005 (77 years)
John Harold Ostrom was an American paleontologist who revolutionized the modern understanding of dinosaurs. Ostrom's work inspired what his pupil Robert T. Bakker has termed a "dinosaur renaissance".
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Mary Higby Schweitzer
1953 - Present (71 years)
Mary Higby Schweitzer is an American paleontologist at North Carolina State University, who led the groups that discovered the remains of blood cells in dinosaur fossils and later discovered soft tissue remains in the Tyrannosaurus rex specimen MOR 1125, as well as evidence that the specimen was a pregnant female when she died.
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Lubert Stryer
1938 - Present (86 years)
Lubert Stryer is the Emeritus Mrs. George A. Winzer Professor of Cell Biology, at Stanford University School of Medicine. His research over more than four decades has been centered on the interplay of light and life. In 2007 he received the National Medal of Science from President Bush at a ceremony at the White House for elucidating the biochemical basis of signal amplification in vision, pioneering the development of high density microarrays for genetic analysis, and authoring the standard undergraduate biochemistry textbook, Biochemistry. It is now in its ninth edition and also edited by Jeremy Berg, John L.
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George Wald
1906 - 1997 (91 years)
George Wald was an American scientist and activist who studied pigments in the retina. He won a share of the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Haldan Keffer Hartline and Ragnar Granit.
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Michael Behe
1952 - Present (72 years)
Michael Joseph Behe is an American biochemist and an advocate of the pseudoscientific principle of intelligent design . He serves as professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and as a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. Behe advocates for the validity of the argument for irreducible complexity , which claims that some biochemical structures are too complex to be explained by known evolutionary mechanisms and are therefore probably the result of intelligent design. Behe has testified in several court cases related to intelligent design, including the court case Kitzmiller v.
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