The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
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List of the most influential people in Biology,
#16301
Ferdinand von Mueller
1825 - 1896 (71 years)
Baron Sir Ferdinand Jacob Heinrich von Mueller, was a German-Australian physician, geographer, and most notably, a botanist. He was appointed government botanist for the then colony of Victoria by Governor Charles La Trobe in 1853, and later director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne. He also founded the National Herbarium of Victoria. He named many Australian plants.
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Edward Adelbert Doisy
1893 - 1986 (93 years)
Edward Adelbert Doisy was an American biochemist. He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1943 with Henrik Dam for their discovery of vitamin K and its chemical structure. Doisy was born in Hume, Illinois, on November 13, 1893. He completed his A.B. degree in 1914 and his M.S. degree in 1916 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He completed his Ph.D. in 1920 from Harvard University.
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Nikolai Koltsov
1872 - 1940 (68 years)
Nikolai Konstantinovich Koltsov was a Russian biologist and a pioneer of modern genetics. Among his students were Nikolay Timofeeff-Ressovsky, Vladimir Pavlovich Efroimson, A.S. Serebrovsky, and Nikolay Dubinin. Along with his students, he demonstrated the fine structure of genes, and examined the structure of the cell and pioneered the idea of a cytoskeleton. His career was cut short in Stalinist Russia after being falsely accused of supporting scientific racism. He died unexpectedly following government persecution and there are allegations that he was executed.
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Robert Brown
1773 - 1858 (85 years)
Robert Brown was a Scottish botanist and paleobotanist who made important contributions to botany largely through his pioneering use of the microscope. His contributions include one of the earliest detailed descriptions of the cell nucleus and cytoplasmic streaming; the observation of Brownian motion; early work on plant pollination and fertilisation, including being the first to recognise the fundamental difference between gymnosperms and angiosperms; and some of the earliest studies in palynology. He also made numerous contributions to plant taxonomy, notably erecting a number of plant fa...
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Jan Swammerdam
1637 - 1680 (43 years)
Jan or Johannes Swammerdam was a Dutch biologist and microscopist. His work on insects demonstrated that the various phases during the life of an insect—egg, larva, pupa, and adult—are different forms of the same animal. As part of his anatomical research, he carried out experiments on muscle contraction. In 1658, he was the first to observe and describe red blood cells. He was one of the first people to use the microscope in dissections, and his techniques remained useful for hundreds of years.
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Nikolai Vavilov
1887 - 1943 (56 years)
Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov was a Russian and Soviet agronomist, botanist and geneticist who identified the centers of origin of cultivated plants. He devoted his life to the study and improvement of wheat, maize and other cereal crops that sustain the global population.
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Julius von Sachs
1832 - 1897 (65 years)
Julius von Sachs was a German botanist from Breslau, Prussian Silesia. He is considered the founder of experimental plant physiology and co-founder of modern water culture. Julius von Sachs and Wilhelm Knop are monumental figures in the history of botany by first demonstrating the importance of water culture for the study of plant nutrition and plant physiology in the 19th century.
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Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke
1819 - 1892 (73 years)
Ernst Wilhelm Ritter von Brücke was a German physician and physiologist. He is credited with contributions made in many facets of physiology. Biography He was born Ernst Wilhelm Brücke in Berlin. He graduated in medicine at the University of Berlin in 1842, and during the following year, he became a research assistant to Johannes Peter Müller. In 1845 he founded the Physikalische Gesellschaft in Berlin, together with Emil Du Bois-Reymond, Hermann von Helmholtz and others, in the house of physicist Heinrich Gustav Magnus. Later on, this became known as the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft .
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Daniel Solander
1733 - 1782 (49 years)
Daniel Carlsson Solander or Daniel Charles Solander was a Swedish naturalist and an apostle of Carl Linnaeus. Solander was the first university-educated scientist to set foot on Australian soil. Biography Solander was born in Piteå, Norrbotten, Sweden, to Rev. Carl Solander a Lutheran principal, and Magdalena . Solander enrolled at Uppsala University in July 1750 and initially studied languages, the humanities and law. The professor of botany was the celebrated Carl Linnaeus, who was soon impressed by young Solander's ability and accordingly persuaded his father to let him study natural history.
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Albrecht Kossel
1853 - 1927 (74 years)
Ludwig Karl Martin Leonhard Albrecht Kossel was a German biochemist and pioneer in the study of genetics. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1910 for his work in determining the chemical composition of nucleic acids, the genetic substance of biological cells.
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Achille Valenciennes
1794 - 1865 (71 years)
Achille Valenciennes was a French zoologist. Valenciennes was born in Paris, and studied under Georges Cuvier. His study of parasitic worms in humans made an important contribution to the study of parasitology. He also carried out diverse systematic classifications, linking fossil and current species.
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Friedrich Miescher
1844 - 1895 (51 years)
Johannes Friedrich Miescher was a Swiss physician and biologist. He was the first scientist to isolate nucleic acid in 1869. He also identified protamine and made a number of other discoveries. Miescher had isolated various phosphate-rich chemicals, which he called nuclein , from the nuclei of white blood cells in Felix Hoppe-Seyler's laboratory at the University of Tübingen, Germany, paving the way for the identification of DNA as the carrier of inheritance. The significance of the discovery, first published in 1871, was not at first apparent, and Albrecht Kossel made the initial inquiries into its chemical structure.
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Philip Miller
1691 - 1771 (80 years)
Philip Miller FRS was an English botanist and gardener of Scottish descent. Miller was chief gardener at the Chelsea Physic Garden for nearly 50 years from 1722, and wrote the highly popular The Gardeners Dictionary.
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John Lindley
1799 - 1865 (66 years)
John Lindley FRS was an English botanist, gardener and orchidologist. Early years Born in Catton, near Norwich, England, John Lindley was one of four children of George and Mary Lindley. George Lindley was a nurseryman and pomologist and ran a commercial nursery garden. Although he had great horticultural knowledge, the undertaking was not profitable and George lived in a state of indebtedness. As a boy he would assist in the garden and also collected wild flowers he found growing in the Norfolk countryside. Lindley was educated at Norwich School. He would have liked to go to university or to buy a commission in the army but the family could not afford either.
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André Marie Constant Duméril
1774 - 1860 (86 years)
André Marie Constant Duméril was a French zoologist. He was professor of anatomy at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle from 1801 to 1812, when he became professor of herpetology and ichthyology. His son Auguste Duméril was also a zoologist, and the author citation Duméril is used for both André and his son.
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Ulf von Euler
1905 - 1983 (78 years)
Ulf Svante von Euler was a Swedish physiologist and pharmacologist. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1970 for his work on neurotransmitters. Life Ulf Svante von Euler-Chelpin was born in Stockholm, the son of two noted scientists, Hans von Euler-Chelpin, a professor of chemistry, and Astrid Cleve, a professor of botany and geology. His father was German and the recipient of Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1929, and his maternal grandfather was Per Teodor Cleve, Professor of Chemistry at the Uppsala University, and the discoverer of the chemical elements thulium and holmium.
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Henry Chandler Cowles
1869 - 1939 (70 years)
Henry Chandler Cowles was an American botanist and ecological pioneer. A professor at the University of Chicago, he studied ecological succession in the Indiana Dunes of Northwest Indiana. This led to efforts to preserve the Indiana Dunes. One of Cowles' students, O. D. Frank continued his research.
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William Morton Wheeler
1865 - 1937 (72 years)
William Morton Wheeler was an American entomologist, myrmecologist and professor at Harvard University. Biography Early life and education William Morton Wheeler was born on March 19, 1865, to parents Julius Morton Wheeler and Caroline Georgiana Wheeler in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. At a young age, Wheeler had an interest in natural history, first being when he observed a moth ensnared in a spiders web; such observation interested Wheeler that he became importunate for more nature lore. Wheeler attended public school, but, due to "persistently bad behavior", he was transferred to a local German academy which was known for its extreme discipline.
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Otto Brunfels
1488 - 1534 (46 years)
Otto Brunfels was a German theologian and botanist. Carl von Linné listed him among the "Fathers of Botany". Life After studying theology and philosophy at the University of Mainz, Brunfels entered a Carthusian monastery in Mainz and later resettled to another Carthusian monastery at Königshofen near Strasbourg. In Strasbourg he got in contact with a learned lawyer Nikolaus Gerbel . Gerbel drew Brunfels' attention to the healing powers of plants and thus gave the impetus to the further botanical investigations.
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Adolf Engler
1844 - 1930 (86 years)
Heinrich Gustav Adolf Engler was a German botanist. He is notable for his work on plant taxonomy and phytogeography, such as Die natürlichen Pflanzenfamilien , edited with Karl A. E. von Prantl. Even now, his system of plant classification, the Engler system, is still used by many herbaria and is followed by writers of many manuals and floras. It is still the only system that treats all 'plants' in such depth.
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Feodor Lynen
1911 - 1979 (68 years)
Feodor Felix Konrad Lynen was a German biochemist. In 1964 he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine together with Konrad Bloch for their discoveries concerning the mechanism and regulation of cholesterol and fatty acid metabolism while he was director of the Max-Planck Institute for Cellular Chemistry in Munich.
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James Edward Smith
1759 - 1828 (69 years)
Sir James Edward Smith was an English botanist and founder of the Linnean Society. Early life and education Smith was born in Norwich in 1759, the son of a wealthy wool merchant. He displayed a precocious interest in the natural world. During the early 1780s, he enrolled in the medical course at the University of Edinburgh where he studied chemistry under Joseph Black and natural history under John Walker. He then moved to London in 1783 to continue his studies. Smith was a friend of Sir Joseph Banks, who was offered the entire collection of books, manuscripts and specimens of the Swedish nat...
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Richard Bowdler Sharpe
1847 - 1909 (62 years)
Richard Bowdler Sharpe was an English zoologist and ornithologist who worked as curator of the bird collection at the British Museum of natural history. In the course of his career he published several monographs on bird groups and produced a multi-volume catalogue of the specimens in the collection of the museum. He described many new species of bird and also has had species named in his honour by other ornithologists including Sharpe's longclaw and Sharpe's starling .
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Alfred Adler
1870 - 1937 (67 years)
Alfred Adler was an Austrian medical doctor, psychotherapist, and founder of the school of individual psychology. His emphasis on the importance of feelings of belonging, family constellation and birth order set him apart from Freud and others in their common circle. He proposed that contributing to others was how the individual feels a sense of worth and belonging in the family and society. His earlier work focused on inferiority, coining the term inferiority complex, an isolating element which he argued plays a key role in personality development. Alfred Adler considered a human being as a...
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Charles Lucien Bonaparte
1803 - 1857 (54 years)
Charles Lucien Jules Laurent Bonaparte, 2nd Prince of Canino and Musignano was a French naturalist and ornithologist. Lucien and his wife had twelve children, including Cardinal Lucien Bonaparte. Life and career Bonaparte was the son of Lucien Bonaparte and Alexandrine de Bleschamp. Lucien was a younger brother of Napoleon I, making Charles the emperor’s nephew. Born in Paris, he was raised in Italy. On 29 June 1822, he married his cousin, Zénaïde, in Brussels. Soon after the marriage, the couple left for Philadelphia in the United States to live with Zénaïde's father, Joseph Bonaparte . Bef...
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Mary Anning
1799 - 1847 (48 years)
Mary Anning was an English fossil collector, dealer, and palaeontologist who became known around the world for the discoveries she made in Jurassic marine fossil beds in the cliffs along the English Channel at Lyme Regis in the county of Dorset in Southwest England. Anning's findings contributed to changes in scientific thinking about prehistoric life and the history of the Earth.
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Edward Blyth
1810 - 1873 (63 years)
Edward Blyth was an English zoologist who worked for most of his life in India as a curator of zoology at the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta. He set about updating the museum's catalogues, publishing a Catalogue of the Birds of the Asiatic Society in 1849. He was prevented from doing much fieldwork himself, but received and described bird specimens from A.O. Hume, Samuel Tickell, Robert Swinhoe among others. His Natural History of the Cranes was published posthumously in 1881.
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Coenraad Jacob Temminck
1778 - 1858 (80 years)
Coenraad Jacob Temminck was a Dutch aristocrat, zoologist and museum director. Biography Coenraad Jacob Temminck was born on 31 March 1778 in Amsterdam in the Dutch Republic. From his father, Jacob Temminck, who was treasurer of the Dutch East India Company with links to numerous travellers and collectors, he inherited a large collection of bird specimens. His father was a good friend of Francois Levaillant who also guided Coenraad.
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Walther Flemming
1843 - 1905 (62 years)
Walther Flemming was a German biologist and a founder of cytogenetics. He was born in Sachsenberg as the fifth child and only son of the psychiatrist Carl Friedrich Flemming and his second wife, Auguste Winter. He graduated from the Gymnasium der Residenzstadt, where one of his colleagues and lifelong friends was writer Heinrich Seidel.
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Alois Alzheimer
1864 - 1915 (51 years)
Alois Alzheimer was a German psychiatrist and neuropathologist and a colleague of Emil Kraepelin. Alzheimer is credited with identifying the first published case of "presenile dementia", which Kraepelin would later identify as Alzheimer's disease.
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Marcus Elieser Bloch
1723 - 1799 (76 years)
Marcus Elieser Bloch was a German physician and naturalist who is best known for his contribution to ichthyology through his multi-volume catalog of plates illustrating the fishes of the world. Brought up in a Hebrew-speaking Jewish family, he learned German and Latin and studied anatomy before settling in Berlin as a physician. He amassed a large natural history collection, particularly of fish specimens. He is generally considered one of the most important ichthyologistss of the 18th century, and wrote many papers on natural history, comparative anatomy, and physiology.
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Richard Hertwig
1850 - 1937 (87 years)
Richard Wilhelm Karl Theodor Ritter von Hertwig , also Richard Hertwig or Richard von Hertwig, was a German zoologist and professor of 50 years, notable as the first to describe zygote formation as the fusing of spermatozoa inside the membrane of an egg cell during fertilization. Richard Hertwig was the younger brother of Oscar Hertwig, who also analyzed zygote formation.
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Pieter Bleeker
1819 - 1878 (59 years)
Pieter Bleeker was a Dutch medical doctor, ichthyologist, and herpetologist. He was famous for the Atlas Ichthyologique des Indes Orientales Néêrlandaises, his monumental work on the fishes of East Asia published between 1862 and 1877.
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Wilhelm Roux
1850 - 1924 (74 years)
Wilhelm Roux was a German zoologist and pioneer of experimental embryology. Early life Roux was born and educated in Jena, Germany where he attended university and studied under Ernst Haeckel. He also attended university in Berlin and Strasbourg and studied under Gustav Schwalbe, Friedrich Daniel von Recklinghausen, and Rudolf Virchow. Although he was trained as a clinical doctor, he spent his career in experimental biology. His doctoral thesis on the embryological development of blood vessels was a seminal early study in biophysical modelling, a milestone in the study of the cardiovascular s...
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Rudolf Leuckart
1822 - 1898 (76 years)
Karl Georg Friedrich Rudolf Leuckart was a German zoologist born in Helmstedt. He was a nephew to naturalist Friedrich Sigismund Leuckart . Academic career He earned his degree from the University of Göttingen, where he was a student of Rudolf Wagner . Afterwards he participated on a scientific expedition to the North Sea for the study marine invertebrates. Later he became a professor of zoology at the University of Giessen and the University of Leipzig .
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Theodor Boveri
1862 - 1915 (53 years)
Theodor Heinrich Boveri was a German zoologist, comparative anatomist and co-founder of modern cytology. He was notable for the first hypothesis regarding cellular processes that cause cancer, and for describing chromatin diminution in nematodes. His brother was industrialist Walter Boveri. Boveri was married to the American biologist Marcella O'Grady . Their daughter Margret Boveri became one of the best-known journalists in post-World War II Germany.
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Alexandre Yersin
1863 - 1943 (80 years)
Alexandre Emile Jean Yersin was a Swiss-French physician and bacteriologist. He is remembered as the co-discoverer of the bacillus responsible for the bubonic plague or pest, which was later named in his honour: Yersinia pestis. Another bacteriologist, the Japanese physician Kitasato Shibasaburō, is often credited with independently identifying the bacterium a few days earlier. Yersin also demonstrated for the first time that the same bacillus was present in the rodent as well as in the human disease, thus underlining the possible means of transmission.
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Jacques Loeb
1859 - 1924 (65 years)
Jacques Loeb was a German-born American physiologist and biologist. Biography Jacques Loeb, firstborn son of a Jewish family from the German Eifel region, was educated at the universities of Berlin, Munich, and Strasburg . He took postgraduate courses at the universities of Strasburg and Berlin, and in 1886 became assistant at the physiological institute of the University of Würzburg, remaining there until 1888. In a similar capacity, he then went to Strasburg University. During his vacations he pursued biological research, at Kiel in 1888, and at Naples in 1889 and 1890.
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Walter Bradford Cannon
1871 - 1945 (74 years)
Walter Bradford Cannon was an American physiologist, professor and chairman of the Department of Physiology at Harvard Medical School. He coined the term "fight or flight response", and developed the theory of homeostasis. He popularized his theories in his book The Wisdom of the Body, first published in 1932.
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George Robert Gray
1808 - 1872 (64 years)
George Robert Gray was an English zoologist and author, and head of the ornithological section of the British Museum, now the Natural History Museum, in London for forty-one years. He was the younger brother of the zoologist John Edward Gray and the son of the botanist Samuel Frederick Gray.
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Edouard Van Beneden
1846 - 1910 (64 years)
Édouard Joseph Louis Marie Van Beneden was a Belgian embryologist, cytologist and marine biologist. He was professor of zoology at the University of Liège. He contributed to cytogenetics by his works on the roundworm Ascaris. In this work he discovered how chromosomes organized meiosis .
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Alexander Agassiz
1835 - 1910 (75 years)
Alexander Emmanuel Rodolphe Agassiz , son of Louis Agassiz and stepson of Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz, was an American scientist and engineer. Biography Agassiz was born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and immigrated to the United States with his parents, Louis and Cecile Agassiz, in 1846. He graduated from Harvard University in 1855, subsequently studying engineering and chemistry, and taking the degree of Bachelor of Science at the Lawrence Scientific School of the same institution in 1857; in 1859 became an assistant in the United States Coast Survey. Thenceforward he became a specialist in marine ichthyology.
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Karl Möbius
1825 - 1908 (83 years)
Karl August Möbius was a German zoologist who was a pioneer in the field of ecology and a former director of the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin. Early life Möbius was born in Eilenburg in Saxony. At the age of four he attended primary school at the Bergschule Eilenburg, and at the age of 12 he was sent by his father to train as a teacher. In 1844 he passed the exams with distinction and began working as teacher in Seesen, on the northwest edge of the Harz mountain range. In 1849, and encouraged by Alexander von Humboldt, he began studying natural science and philosophy at Natural History Museum of Berlin.
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Henry Gray
1827 - 1861 (34 years)
Henry Gray was a British anatomist and surgeon most notable for publishing the book Gray's Anatomy. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society at the age of 25. Biography Gray was born in Belgravia, London, in 1827 and lived most of his life in London. In 1842, he entered as a student at St. George's Hospital, London , and he is described by those who knew him as a most painstaking and methodical worker, and one who learned his anatomy by the slow but invaluable method of making dissections for himself.
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Carl Ludwig Blume
1796 - 1862 (66 years)
Charles Ludwig de Blume or Karl Ludwig von Blume was a German-Dutch botanist. He was born at Braunschweig in Germany, but studied at Leiden University and spent his professional life working in the Dutch East Indies and in the Netherlands, where he was Director of the Rijksherbarium at Leiden. His name is sometimes given in the Dutch language form Karel Lodewijk Blume, but the original German spelling is the one most widely used in botanical texts: even then there is confusion, as he is sometimes referred to as K.L. Blume .
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Albert Szent-Györgyi
1893 - 1986 (93 years)
Albert Imre Szent-Györgyi de Nagyrápolt was a Hungarian biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1937. He is credited with first isolating vitamin C and discovering the components and reactions of the citric acid cycle. He was also active in the Hungarian Resistance during World War II, and entered Hungarian politics after the war.
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Joseph Pitton de Tournefort
1656 - 1708 (52 years)
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort was a French botanist, notable as the first to make a clear definition of the concept of genus for plants. Botanist Charles Plumier was his pupil and accompanied him on his voyages.
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Ross Granville Harrison
1870 - 1959 (89 years)
Ross Granville Harrison was an American biologist and anatomist credited for his pioneering work on animal tissue culture. His work also contributed to the understanding of embryonic development. Harrison studied in many places around the world and made a career as a university professor. He was also a member of many learned societies and received several awards for his contributions to anatomy and biology.
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Anton Dohrn
1840 - 1909 (69 years)
Felix Anton Dohrn FRS FRSE was a prominent German Darwinist and the founder and first director of the first zoological research station in the world, the Stazione Zoologica in Naples, Italy. He worked on embryology and examined vertebrate origins in terms of functional phylogeny and proposed a principle of succession of functions in 1875 on how one organ could become the basis for the evolution of another of an entirely different function.
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Ernest Jones
1879 - 1958 (79 years)
Alfred Ernest Jones was a Welsh neurologist and psychoanalyst. A lifelong friend and colleague of Sigmund Freud from their first meeting in 1908, he became his official biographer. Jones was the first English-speaking practitioner of psychoanalysis and became its leading exponent in the English-speaking world. As President of both the International Psychoanalytical Association and the British Psycho-Analytical Society in the 1920s and 1930s, Jones exercised a formative influence in the establishment of their organisations, institutions and publications.
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