#101
Hamilton O. Smith
1931 - Present (93 years)
Areas of Specialization: Microbiology Hamilton Smith, M. D., is a microbiologist, distinguished professor and scientific director of Synthetic Biology & Bioenergy at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) in San Diego, California. He earned a B.A. in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1952 and a M.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1956. He interned at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis and completed a Medical Residency at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, Michigan. From 1962 to 1967 he did a fellowship in the Human Genetics department, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. F...
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Alexander Rich
1924 - 2015 (91 years)
Alexander Rich was an American biologist and biophysicist. He was the William Thompson Sedgwick Professor of Biophysics at MIT and Harvard Medical School. Rich earned an A.B. and an M.D. from Harvard University. He was a post-doc of Linus Pauling. During this time he was a member of the RNA Tie Club, a social and discussion group which attacked the question of how DNA encodes proteins. He had over 600 publications to his name.
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Robert Lefkowitz
1943 - Present (81 years)
Robert Joseph Lefkowitz is an American physician and biochemist. He is best known for his groundbreaking discoveries that reveal the inner workings of an important family G protein-coupled receptors, for which he was awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with Brian Kobilka. He is currently an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute as well as a James B. Duke Professor of Medicine and Professor of Biochemistry and Chemistry at Duke University.
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Roger Wolcott Sperry
1913 - 1994 (81 years)
Roger Wolcott Sperry was an American neuropsychologist, neurobiologist, cognitive neuroscientist, and Nobel laureate who, together with David Hunter Hubel and Torsten Nils Wiesel, won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for his work with split-brain research. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Sperry as the 44th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
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Aaron Beck
1921 - 2021 (100 years)
Aaron Temkin Beck was an American psychiatrist who was a professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. He is regarded as the father of cognitive therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy . His pioneering methods are widely used in the treatment of clinical depression and various anxiety disorders. Beck also developed self-report measures for depression and anxiety, notably the Beck Depression Inventory , which became one of the most widely used instruments for measuring the severity of depression. In 1994 he and his daughter, psychologist Judith S. Beck, founded ...
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Irving Weissman
1939 - Present (85 years)
Irving Lerner "Irv" Weissman is a Professor of Pathology and Developmental Biology at Stanford University where he is the Director of the Stanford Institute of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine along with Michael Longaker.
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Leroy Hood
1938 - Present (86 years)
Leroy "Lee" Edward Hood is an American biologist who has served on the faculties at the California Institute of Technology and the University of Washington. Hood has developed ground-breaking scientific instruments which made possible major advances in the biological sciences and the medical sciences. These include the first gas phase protein sequencer , for determining the sequence of amino acids in a given protein; a DNA synthesizer , to synthesize short sections of DNA; a peptide synthesizer , to combine amino acids into longer peptides and short proteins; the first automated DNA seque...
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Eric F. Wieschaus
1947 - Present (77 years)
Eric Francis Wieschaus is an American evolutionary developmental biologist and 1995 Nobel Prize-winner. Early life Born in South Bend, Indiana, he attended John Carroll Catholic High School in Birmingham, Alabama before attending the University of Notre Dame for his undergraduate studies , and Yale University for his graduate work.
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Jaak Panksepp
1943 - 2017 (74 years)
Jaak Panksepp was an Estonian-American neuroscientist and psychobiologist who coined the term "affective neuroscience", the name for the field that studies the neural mechanisms of emotion. He was the Baily Endowed Chair of Animal Well-Being Science for the Department of Veterinary and Comparative Anatomy, Pharmacology, and Physiology at Washington State University's College of Veterinary Medicine, and Emeritus Professor of the Department of Psychology at Bowling Green State University. He was known in the popular press for his research on laughter in non-human animals.
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Craig Mello
1960 - Present (64 years)
Craig Cameron Mello is an American biologist and professor of molecular medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, Massachusetts. He was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, along with Andrew Z. Fire, for the discovery of RNA interference. This research was conducted at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and published in 1998. Mello has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator since 2000.
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Brian Kobilka
1955 - Present (69 years)
Brian Kent Kobilka is an American physiologist and a recipient of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Robert Lefkowitz for discoveries that reveal the workings of G protein-coupled receptors. He is currently a professor in the department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Stanford University School of Medicine. He is also a co-founder of ConfometRx, a biotechnology company focusing on G protein-coupled receptors. He was named a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2011.
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Leland H. Hartwell
1939 - Present (85 years)
Leland Harrison Hartwell is former president and director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington. He shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Paul Nurse and Tim Hunt, for their discoveries of protein molecules that control the division of cells.
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Robert F. Furchgott
1916 - 2009 (93 years)
Robert Francis Furchgott was a Nobel Prize-winning American biochemist who contributed to the discovery of nitric oxide as a transient cellular signal in mammalian systems. Early life and education Furchgott was born in Charleston, South Carolina, to Arthur Furchgott , a department store owner, and Pena Furchgott. He graduated with from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1937 with a degree in chemistry and went on to earn a Ph.D in biochemistry at Northwestern University in 1940.
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Jeffrey C. Hall
1945 - Present (79 years)
Jeffrey Connor Hall is an American geneticist and chronobiologist. Hall is Professor Emeritus of Biology at Brandeis University and currently resides in Cambridge, Maine. Hall spent his career examining the neurological component of fly courtship and behavioral rhythms. Through his research on the neurology and behavior of Drosophila melanogaster, Hall uncovered essential mechanisms of the circadian clocks and shed light on the foundations for sexual differentiation in the nervous system. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences for his revolutionary work in the field of chronobiology, and nominated for the T.
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Michael Rosbash
1944 - Present (80 years)
Michael Morris Rosbash is an American geneticist and chronobiologist. Rosbash is a professor and researcher at Brandeis University and investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Rosbash's research group cloned the Drosophila period gene in 1984 and proposed the Transcription Translation Negative Feedback Loop for circadian clocks in 1990. In 1998, they discovered the cycle gene, clock gene, and cryptochrome photoreceptor in Drosophila through the use of forward genetics, by first identifying the phenotype of a mutant and then determining the genetics behind the mutation. Rosbash was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2003.
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J. Michael Bishop
1936 - Present (88 years)
John Michael Bishop is an American immunologist and microbiologist who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Harold E. Varmus and was co-winner of 1984 Alfred P. Sloan Prize. He serves as an active faculty member at the University of California, San Francisco , where he also served as chancellor from 1998 to 2009.
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Norman R. Pace
1942 - Present (82 years)
Norman Richard Pace Jr. is an American biochemist, and is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at the University of Colorado. He is principal investigator at the Pace lab.
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Martha Chase
1927 - 2003 (76 years)
Martha Cowles Chase , also known as Martha C. Epstein, was an American geneticist who in 1952, with Alfred Hershey, experimentally helped to confirm that DNA rather than protein is the genetic material of life.
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Stanley Cohen
1922 - 2020 (98 years)
Stanley Cohen was an American biochemist who, along with Rita Levi-Montalcini, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1986 for the isolation of nerve growth factor and the discovery of epidermal growth factor. He died in February 2020 at the age of 97.
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Philip Leder
1934 - 2020 (86 years)
Philip Leder was an American geneticist. Early life and education Leder was born in Washington, D.C., and studied at Harvard University, graduating in 1956. In 1960, he graduated from Harvard Medical School and completed his medical residency at the University of Minnesota.
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Bert Vogelstein
1949 - Present (75 years)
Bert Vogelstein is director of the Ludwig Center, Clayton Professor of Oncology and Pathology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at The Johns Hopkins Medical School and Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center. A pioneer in the field of cancer genomics, his studies on colorectal cancers revealed that they result from the sequential accumulation of mutations in oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes. These studies now form the paradigm for modern cancer research and provided the basis for the notion of the somatic evolution of cancer.
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Robin Wall Kimmerer
1953 - Present (71 years)
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a Native American botanist, author, an American Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental and Forest Biology; and the director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry .
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Stewart Brand
1938 - Present (86 years)
Stewart Brand is an American project developer and writer, best known as the co-founder and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He has founded a number of organizations, including the WELL, the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation. He is the author of several books, most recently Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.
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Douglas J. Futuyma
1942 - Present (82 years)
Douglas Joel Futuyma is an American evolutionary biologist. He is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, New York and a Research Associate on staff at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. His research focuses on speciation and population biology. Futuyma is the author of a widely used undergraduate textbook on evolution and is also known for his work in public outreach, particularly in advocating against creationism.
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Harvey Lodish
1941 - Present (83 years)
Harvey Franklin Lodish is a molecular and cell biologist, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , Founding Member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, and lead author of the textbook Molecular Cell Biology. Lodish's research focused on cell surface proteins and other important areas at the interface between molecular cell biology and medicine.
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Roger Y. Tsien
1952 - 2016 (64 years)
Roger Yonchien Tsien was an American biochemist. He was a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2008 for his discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, in collaboration with organic chemist Osamu Shimomura and neurobiologist Martin Chalfie. Tsien was also a pioneer of calcium imaging.
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Thomas A. Steitz
1940 - 2018 (78 years)
Thomas Arthur Steitz was an American biochemist, a Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University, and investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, best known for his pioneering work on the ribosome.
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Christof Koch
1956 - Present (68 years)
Christof Koch is a German-American neurophysiologist and computational neuroscientist best known for his work on the neural basis of consciousness. He is the president and chief scientist of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. From 1986 until 2013, he was a professor at the California Institute of Technology.
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Judah Folkman
1933 - 2008 (75 years)
Moses Judah Folkman was an American biologist and pediatric surgeon best known for his research on tumor angiogenesis, the process by which a tumor attracts blood vessels to nourish itself and sustain its existence. He founded the field of angiogenesis research, which has led to the discovery of a number of therapies based on inhibiting or stimulating neovascularization.
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Michael W. Young
1949 - Present (75 years)
Michael Warren Young is an American biologist and geneticist. He has dedicated over three decades to research studying genetically controlled patterns of sleep and wakefulness within Drosophila melanogaster.
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Ronald W. Davis
1941 - Present (83 years)
Ronald Wayne "Ron" Davis is professor of biochemistry and genetics, and director of the Stanford Genome Technology Center at Stanford University. Davis is a researcher in biotechnology and molecular genetics, particularly active in human and yeast genomics and the development of new technologies in genomics, with over 30 biotechnology patents. In 2013, it was said of Davis that "A substantial number of the major genetic advances of the past 20 years can be traced back to Davis in some way."
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David Botstein
1942 - Present (82 years)
David Botstein is an American biologist serving as the chief scientific officer of Calico. He served as the director of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University from 2003 to 2013, where he remains an Anthony B. Evnin Professor of Genomics.
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Jacques Gauthier
1948 - Present (76 years)
Jacques Armand Gauthier is an American vertebrate paleontologist, comparative morphologist, and systematist, and one of the founders of the use of cladistics in biology. Life and career Gauthier is the son of Edward Paul Gauthier and Patricia Marie Grogan. He received a B.S. degree in zoology at San Diego State University in 1973, a master's in biological science at the same institute in 1980, and a PhD in paleontology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1984. Currently he is a professor of geology and geophysics and ecology and evolutionary biology and curator of vertebrate paleontology and vertebrate zoology at Yale University.
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Richard Lenski
1956 - Present (68 years)
Richard Eimer Lenski is an American evolutionary biologist, a Hannah Distinguished Professor of Microbial Ecology, Genetics and Evolution, and Evolution of Pathogen Virulence at Michigan State University. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a MacArthur Fellow. Lenski is best known for his still ongoing -year-old long-term E. coli evolution experiment, which has been instrumental in understanding the core processes of evolution, including mutation rates, clonal interference, antibiotic resistance, the evolution of novel traits, and speciation. He is also well known for h...
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Terry Sejnowski
1947 - Present (77 years)
Terrence Joseph Sejnowski is the Francis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies where he directs the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory and is the director of the Crick-Jacobs center for theoretical and computational biology. He has performed pioneering research in neural networks and computational neuroscience.
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Isaac Asimov
1920 - 1992 (72 years)
Isaac Asimov was an American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University. During his lifetime, Asimov was considered one of the "Big Three" science fiction writers, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. A prolific writer, he wrote or edited more than 500 books. He also wrote an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. Best known for his hard science fiction, Asimov also wrote mysteries and fantasy, as well as popular science and other non-fiction.
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Mark Ptashne
1940 - Present (84 years)
Mark Ptashne is a molecular biologist. He is the Ludwig Chair of Molecular Biology at Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. Ptashne grew up in Chicago. He earned his undergraduate degree at Reed College in Portland, Oregon in 1961 and his PhD from Harvard in 1968, after which he joined the faculty of Harvard. He was made professor there in 1971 and became chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in 1980. In 1993 he was awarded an endowed chair, and in 1997 he left Harvard for MSK.
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Harold E. Varmus
1939 - Present (85 years)
Harold Eliot Varmus is an American Nobel Prize-winning scientist. He is currently the Lewis Thomas University Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and a senior associate at the New York Genome Center.
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Elisabeth Lloyd
1956 - Present (68 years)
Elisabeth Anne Lloyd is an American philosopher of science specialising in the philosophy of biology. She is currently Distinguished Professor of History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine - as well as Adjunct Professor of biology - at Indiana University, Bloomington, affiliated faculty scholar at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction and Adjunct Faculty at the Center for the Integrative Study of Animal Behavior.
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David Bartel
2000 - Present (24 years)
David P. Bartel is an American molecular biologist best known for his work on microRNAs. Bartel is a Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Member of the Whitehead Institute, and investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute .
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Thomas Huckle Weller
1915 - 2008 (93 years)
Thomas Huckle Weller was an American virologist. He, John Franklin Enders and Frederick Chapman Robbins were awarded a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1954 for showing how to cultivate poliomyelitis viruses in a test tube, using a combination of human embryonic skin and muscle tissue.
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Robert Costanza
1950 - Present (74 years)
Robert Costanza is an American/Australian ecological economist and Professor at the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity, University College London. He is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and a Full Member of the Club of Rome.
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Kenneth Carpenter
1949 - Present (75 years)
Kenneth Carpenter is a paleontologist. He is the former director of the USU Eastern Prehistoric Museum and author or co-author of books on dinosaurs and Mesozoic life. His main research interests are armored dinosaurs , as well as the Early Cretaceous dinosaurs from the Cedar Mountain Formation in eastern Utah.
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Thomas D. Pollard
1942 - Present (82 years)
Thomas Dean Pollard is a prominent educator, cell biologist and biophysicist whose research focuses on understanding cell motility through the study of actin filaments and myosin motors. He is Sterling Professor of Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology and a professor of cell biology and molecular biophysics & biochemistry at Yale University. He was dean of Yale's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences from 2010 to 2014, and president of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies from 1996 to 2001.
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Peter Walter
1954 - Present (70 years)
Peter Walter is a German-American molecular biologist and biochemist. He is currently the Director of the Bay Area Institute of Science at Altos Labs and an emeritus professor at the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics of the University of California, San Francisco . He was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator until 2022.
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Andrew Schally
1926 - Present (98 years)
Andrzej Viktor "Andrew" Schally is an American endocrinologist of Polish ancestry, who was a corecipient, with Roger Guillemin and Rosalyn Sussman Yalow, of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. This award recognized his research in the discovery that the hypothalamus controls hormone production and release by the pituitary gland, which controls the regulation of other hormones in the body. Later in life, Schally utilized his knowledge of hypothalamic hormones to research possible methods for birth control and cancer treatment.
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Ken Wilber
1949 - Present (75 years)
Kenneth Earl Wilber II is an American theorist and writer on transpersonal psychology and his own integral theory, a four-quadrant grid which purports to encompass all human knowledge and experience.
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Donald Prothero
1954 - Present (70 years)
Donald Ross Prothero is an American geologist, paleontologist, and author who specializes in mammalian paleontology and magnetostratigraphy, a technique to date rock layers of the Cenozoic era and its use to date the climate changes which occurred 30–40 million years ago. He is the author or editor of more than 30 books and over 300 scientific papers, including at least 5 geology textbooks.
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Rick Strassman
1952 - Present (72 years)
Rick Strassman is an American clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine. He has held a fellowship in clinical psychopharmacology research at the University of California San Diego and was Professor of Psychiatry for eleven years at the University of New Mexico. After 20 years of intermission, Strassman was the first person in the United States to undertake human research with psychedelic, hallucinogenic, or entheogenic substances with his research on N,N-dimethyltryptamine, also known as DMT. He is also the author of DMT: The Spirit Molecule,...
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Howard Martin Temin
1934 - 1994 (60 years)
Howard Martin Temin was an American geneticist and virologist. He discovered reverse transcriptase in the 1970s at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, for which he shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Renato Dulbecco and David Baltimore.
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