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,
#20401
Otto Bollinger
1843 - 1909 (66 years)
Otto Bollinger was a German pathologist born in Altenkirchen, Kusel, Rhineland-Palatinate. In 1868, he obtained his doctorate in Berlin and two years later received his habilitation. He taught classes at the Tierärtzliche Hochschule in Zürich and in 1874 became an associate professor at the Tierarzneischule in Munich. In 1880, he succeeded Ludwig von Buhl as professor of general pathology and pathological anatomy at the University of Munich.
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Fritz Perls
1893 - 1970 (77 years)
Friedrich Salomon Perls , better known as Fritz Perls, was a German-born psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and psychotherapist. Perls coined the term "Gestalt therapy" to identify the form of psychotherapy that he developed with his wife, Laura Perls, in the 1940s and 1950s. Perls became associated with the Esalen Institute in 1964 and lived there until 1969.
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Félix Dujardin
1801 - 1860 (59 years)
Félix Dujardin was a French biologist born in Tours. He is remembered for his research on protozoans and other invertebrates. Biography In 1840 he was appointed professor of geology and mineralogy at the University of Toulouse, and during the following year was a professor of zoology and botany at Rennes. In regard to his educational background, Dujardin was largely self-taught, the son of a watchmaker.
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Domenico Cirillo
1739 - 1799 (60 years)
Domenico Maria Leone Cirillo was an Italian physician, entomologist, botanist and patriot of the Neapolitan Republic of 1799. Professional life Cirillo completed his medical degree at the University of Naples in 1759 and assumed the role of Professor of Botany there the following year. He was a pioneer in the Kingdom of Naples for introducing the Linnaean system, to which he had been initiated through fruitful contacts with Gioachino Venturi, a disciple of Linnaeus.
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Jean Hanson
1919 - 1973 (54 years)
Emmeline Jean Hanson was a biophysicist and zoologist known for her contributions to muscle research. Hanson gained her PhD in zoology from Bedford College, University of London before spending the majority of her career at a biophysics research unit at King's College London, where she was a founder member, and later its second Head. While working at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she, with Hugh Huxley, discovered the mechanism of movement of muscle fibre in 1954, which came to known as "sliding filament theory". This was a groundbreaking research in muscle physiology, and for this B...
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John Henry Comstock
1849 - 1931 (82 years)
John Henry Comstock was an eminent researcher in entomology and arachnology and a leading educator. His work provided the basis for classification of butterflies, moths, and scale insects. Career Comstock was born on February 24, 1849, in Janesville, Wisconsin. He entered Cornell University as a student in 1869, a year after the school was founded. He also took classes at Harvard University in the summer of 1872 and at Yale University in 1875.
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Birbal Sahni
1891 - 1949 (58 years)
Birbal Sahni FRS was an Indian paleobotanist who studied the fossils of the Indian subcontinent. He also took an interest in geology and archaeology. He founded what is now the Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeobotany at Lucknow in 1946. His major contributions were in the study of the fossil plants of India and in plant evolution. He was also involved in the establishment of Indian science education and served as the President of the National Academy of Sciences, India and as an Honorary President of the International Botanical Congress, Stockholm.
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Franz Unger
1800 - 1870 (70 years)
Franz Joseph Andreas Nicolaus Unger was an Austrian botanist, paleontologist and plant physiologist. Life and work Initially, Unger studied law at the University of Graz. In 1820 he moved to Vienna to study medicine, in 1822 he enrolled at the Charles University in Prague. In 1823 Unger returned to Vienna and completed his medical studies in 1827.
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Georg Ossian Sars
1837 - 1927 (90 years)
Prof Georg Ossian Sars HFRSE was a Norwegian marine and freshwater biologist. Life Georg Ossian Sars was born on 20 April 1837 in Kinn, Norway , the son of Pastor Michael Sars and Maren Sars; the historian Ernst Sars was his elder brother, and the singer Eva Nansen was his younger sister. He grew up in Manger, Hordaland, where his father was the local priest. He studied from 1852 to 1854 at Bergen Cathedral School, from 1854 at Christiania Cathedral School, and joined the university at Christiana in 1857. He indulged his interest in natural history while studying medicine; having collected w...
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Margaret Morse Nice
1883 - 1974 (91 years)
Margaret Morse Nice was an American ornithologist, ethologist, and child psychologist who made an extensive study of the life history of the song sparrow and was author of Studies in the Life History of the Song Sparrow . She observed and recorded hierarchies in chicken about three decades ahead of Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe who coined the term "pecking order". After her marriage, she made observations on language learning in her children and wrote numerous research papers.
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Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald
1902 - 1982 (80 years)
Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald was a German-Dutch paleontologist and geologist who conducted research on hominins, including Homo erectus. His discoveries and studies of hominid fossils in Java and his studies of other important fossils of south-eastern Asia firmly established his reputation as one of the leading figures of 20th-century paleo-anthropology.
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Max Theiler
1899 - 1972 (73 years)
Max Theiler was a South African-American virologist and physician. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1951 for developing a vaccine against yellow fever in 1937, becoming the first African-born Nobel laureate.
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Thomas Nuttall
1786 - 1859 (73 years)
Thomas Nuttall was an English botanist and zoologist who lived and worked in America from 1808 until 1841. Nuttall was born in the village of Long Preston, near Settle in the West Riding of Yorkshire and spent some years as an apprentice printer in England. Soon after going to the United States he met professor Benjamin Smith Barton in Philadelphia. Barton encouraged his strong interest in natural history.
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Jacob Hübner
1761 - 1826 (65 years)
Jacob Hübner was a German entomologist. He was the author of Sammlung Europäischer Schmetterlinge , a founding work of entomology. Scientific career Hübner was the author of Sammlung Europäischer Schmetterlinge , a founding work of entomology. He was one of the first specialists to work on the European Lepidoptera. He described many new species, for example Sesia bembeciformis and Euchloe tagis, many of them common. He also described many new genera.
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Otto Friedrich Müller
1730 - 1784 (54 years)
Otto Friedrich Müller, also known as Otto Friedrich Mueller was a Danish naturalist and scientific illustrator. Biography Müller was born in Copenhagen. He was educated for the church, became tutor to a young nobleman, and after several years' travel with him, settled in Copenhagen in 1767, and married a lady of wealth.
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Joseph Gaertner
1732 - 1791 (59 years)
Joseph Gaertner was a German botanist, best known for his work on seeds, De Fructibus et Seminibus Plantarum . Biography He was born in Calw, and studied in Göttingen under Albrecht von Haller. He was primarily a naturalist, but also worked at physics and zoology. He travelled extensively to visit other naturalists. He was professor of anatomy in Tübingen in 1760, and was appointed professor of botany at St Petersburg in 1768, but returned to Calw in 1770. Gaertner made back cross to convert one species into another. Back cross increases nuclear gene frequency His observations were: 1....
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Alfred Newton
1829 - 1907 (78 years)
Alfred Newton FRS HFRSE was an English zoologist and ornithologist. Newton was Professor of Comparative Anatomy at Cambridge University from 1866 to 1907. Among his numerous publications were a four-volume Dictionary of Birds , entries on ornithology in the Encyclopædia Britannica while also an editor of the journal Ibis from 1865 to 1870. In 1900 he was awarded the Royal Medal of the Royal Society and the Gold Medal of the Linnaean Society. He founded the British Ornithologists Union.
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Charles Doolittle Walcott
1850 - 1927 (77 years)
Charles Doolittle Walcott was an American paleontologist, administrator of the Smithsonian Institution from 1907 to 1927, and director of the United States Geological Survey. He is famous for his discovery in 1909 of well-preserved fossils, including some of the oldest soft-part imprints, in the Burgess Shale of British Columbia, Canada.
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Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau
1810 - 1892 (82 years)
Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau was a French biologist. Life He was born at Berthézène, in the commune of Valleraugue , the son of a Protestant farmer. He studied science and then medicine at the University of Strasbourg, where he took the double degree of M.D. and D.Sc., one of his theses being a Théorie d'un coup de canon ; next year he published a book, Sur les arolithes, and in 1832 a treatise on L'Extraversion de la vessie. Moving to Toulouse, he practised medicine for a short time, and contributed various memoirs to the local Journal de Médecine and to the Annales des sciences naturelles .
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Joseph Grinnell
1877 - 1939 (62 years)
Joseph Grinnell was an American field biologist and zoologist. He made extensive studies of the fauna of California, and is credited with introducing a method of recording precise field observations known as the Grinnell System. He served as the first director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley from the museum's inception in 1908 until his death.
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Clinton Hart Merriam
1855 - 1942 (87 years)
Clinton Hart Merriam was an American zoologist, mammalogist, ornithologist, entomologist, ecologist, ethnographer, geographer, naturalist and physician. He was commonly known as the 'father of mammalogy', a branch of zoology referring to the study of mammals.
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Dmitri Ivanovsky
1864 - 1920 (56 years)
Dmitri Iosifovich Ivanovsky was a Russian botanist, the co-discoverer of :viruses , and one of the founders of virology. Life Ivanovsky was born in the village of Nizy, Gdov Uyezd. He studied at the University of Saint Petersburg under Andrei Famintsyn in 1887, when he was sent to Ukraine and Bessarabia to investigate a tobacco disease causing great damage to plantations located there at the time. Three years later, he was assigned to look into a similar disease occurrence of tobacco plants, this time raging in the Crimea region. He discovered that both incidents of disease were caused by an ...
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Edwin Stephen Goodrich
1868 - 1946 (78 years)
Edwin Stephen Goodrich FRS , was an English zoologist, specialising in comparative anatomy, embryology, palaeontology, and evolution. He held the Linacre Chair of Zoology in the University of Oxford from 1921 to 1946. He served as editor of the Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science from 1920 until his death.
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Hermann Burmeister
1807 - 1892 (85 years)
Karl Hermann Konrad Burmeister was a German Argentine zoologist, entomologist, herpetologist, botanist, and coleopterologist. He served as a professor at the University of Halle, headed the museum there and published the Handbuch der Entomologie before moving to Argentina where he worked until his death.
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Hermann Loew
1807 - 1879 (72 years)
Friedrich Hermann Loew was a German entomologist who specialised in the study of Diptera, an order of insects including flies, mosquitoes, gnats and midges. He described many world species and was the first specialist to work on the Diptera of the United States.
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Charles Bonnet
1720 - 1793 (73 years)
Charles Bonnet was a Genevan naturalist and philosophical writer. He is responsible for coining the term phyllotaxis to describe the arrangement of leaves on a plant. He was among the first to notice parthenogenetic reproduction in aphids and established that insects respired through their spiracles. He was among the first to use the term "evolution" in a biological context. Deaf from an early age, he also suffered from failing eyesight and had to make use of assistants in later life to help in his research.
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Angelo Ruffini
1864 - 1929 (65 years)
Angelo Ruffini was an Italian histologist and embryologist. He studied medicine at the University of Bologna, where beginning in 1894 he taught classes in histology. In 1903 he attained the chair of embryology at the University of Siena.
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James Homer Wright
1869 - 1928 (59 years)
James Homer Wright was an early and influential American pathologist, who was chief of pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital from 1896 to 1926. Wright was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1915, he joined with Richard C. Cabot to begin publication of the Case Records of the Massachusetts General Hospital. These began regular publication as the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal which later became the New England Journal of Medicine.
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Francis Willughby
1635 - 1672 (37 years)
Francis Willughby FRS was an English ornithologist and ichthyologist, and an early student of linguistics and games. He was born and raised at Middleton Hall, Warwickshire, the only son of an affluent country family. He was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was tutored by the mathematician and naturalist John Ray, who became a lifetime friend and colleague, and lived with Willughby after 1662 when Ray lost his livelihood through his refusal to sign the Act of Uniformity. Willughby was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1661, then aged 27.
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Max Askanazy
1865 - 1940 (75 years)
Max Askanazy was a German-Swiss pathologist. In 1890 he received his medical doctorate from the University of Königsberg, where he worked for several years in its pathological institute. In 1903 he obtained the title of professor. In 1905 he succeeded Friedrich Wilhelm Zahn , as professor of general pathology at the University of Geneva, a position he maintained until 1939.
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William Aiton
1731 - 1793 (62 years)
William Aiton was a Scottish botanist. Aiton was born near Hamilton. Having been regularly trained to the profession of a gardener, he travelled to London in 1754, and became assistant to Philip Miller, then superintendent of the Chelsea Physic Garden. In 1759 he was appointed director of the newly established botanical garden at Kew, where he remained until his death. He effected many improvements at the gardens, and in 1789 he published Hortus Kewensis, a catalogue of the plants cultivated there. He is buried at nearby St. Anne's Church, Kew.
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Hans Fruhstorfer
1866 - 1922 (56 years)
Hans Fruhstorfer was a German explorer, insect trader and entomologist who specialised in Lepidoptera. He collected and described new species of exotic butterflies, especially in Adalbert Seitz's Macrolepidoptera of the World. He is best known for his work on the butterflies of Java.
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John Kunkel Small
1869 - 1938 (69 years)
John Kunkel Small was an American botanist. He studied plants in the southeast and wrote a book about the deterioration of habitats in Florida. Born on January 31, 1869, in Harrisburg Pennsylvania, Kunkel studied botany at Franklin & Marshall College and Columbia University. He was the first Curator of Museums at The New York Botanical Garden, a post in which he served from 1898 until 1906. From 1906 to 1934 he was Head Curator and then from 1934 until his death he was Chief Research Associate and Curator. Small's doctoral dissertation, published as Flora of the Southeastern United States in 1903, and revised in 1913 and 1933, remains the best floristic reference for much of the South.
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Barton Warren Evermann
1853 - 1932 (79 years)
Barton Warren Evermann was an American ichthyologist. Early life and education Evermann was born in Monroe County, Iowa in 1853. His family moved to Indiana while he was still a child and it was there that he grew up, completed his education, and married. Evermann graduated from Indiana University in 1886.
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Arthur Henry Reginald Buller
1874 - 1944 (70 years)
Arthur Henry Reginald Buller, was a British-Canadian mycologist. He is mainly known as a researcher of fungi and wheat rust. Academic career Born in Moseley, Birmingham, England, he was educated at Queen's College, Taunton. He then studied at Mason College, which later became the University of Birmingham, , the University of Leipzig , and the University of Munich. He was awarded a D.Sc. by the University of Birmingham. He worked briefly for the Naples Zoological Station. From 1901 to 1904, he was a lecturer in Botany at the University of Birmingham. He came to Canada in 1904, founded the B...
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Louis Boutan
1859 - 1934 (75 years)
Louis Marie-Auguste Boutan was a French biologist and photographer. He was a pioneer in the field of underwater photography. Biography The son of , he was born in Versailles and studied biology and natural history at the University of Paris. In 1880, he was named deputy head assigned to organize the French exhibit at the Melbourne International Exhibition . He stayed in Australia for 18 months, travelling the continent and identifying new animal species. In 1886, Boutan was named maître de conférences at the University of Lille. In the same year, he learned how to dive. In 1893, he was named professor at the Laboratoire Arago.
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Göte Turesson
1892 - 1970 (78 years)
Göte Wilhelm Turesson was a Swedish evolutionary botanist who made significant contributions to ecological genetics, and coined the terms ecotype and agamospecies. He conducted extensive work to demonstrate that there is a genetic basis to the differentiation of plant populations. This work stood in sharp contrast to most researchers at the time, who believed that the differentiation of plant populations was due to phenotypic plasticity. Further, Turesson came to the conclusion that differentiation of plant populations was largely driven by natural selection. His work on locally adapted pl...
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Leo Kanner
1894 - 1981 (87 years)
Leo Kanner was an Austrian-American psychiatrist, physician, and social activist best known for his work related to infantile autism. Before working at the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Kanner practiced as a physician in Germany and South Dakota. In 1943, Kanner published his landmark paper Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact, describing 11 children who displayed "a powerful desire for aloneness" and "an obsessive insistence on persistent sameness." He named their condition "early infantile autism". Kanner was in charge of developing the first child psy...
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Émile Blanchard
1819 - 1900 (81 years)
Charles Émile Blanchard was a French zoologist and entomologist. Career Blanchard was born in Paris. His father was an artist and naturalist and Émile began natural history very early in life. When he was 14 years old, Jean Victoire Audouin , allowed him access to the laboratory of the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle. In 1838, he became a technician or préparateur in this then, as now, famous institution. In 1841, he became assistant-naturalist.
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William Thompson Sedgwick
1855 - 1921 (66 years)
William Thompson Sedgwick was a teacher, epidemiologist, bacteriologist, and a key figure in shaping public health in the United States. He was president of many scientific and professional organizations during his lifetime, including president of the American Public Health Association in 1915. He was one of three founders of the joint MIT-Harvard School of Public Health in 1913.
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Addison Emery Verrill
1839 - 1926 (87 years)
Addison Emery Verrill was an American invertebrate zoologist, museum curator and university professor. Life Verrill was born on February 9, 1839, in Greenwood, Maine, the son of George Washington Verrill and Lucy Verrill. As a boy he showed an early interest in natural history, building collections of rocks and minerals, plants, shells, insects and other animals. When he moved with his family to Norway, Maine, at age fourteen he attended secondary school at the Norway Liberal Institute.
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Hans von Berlepsch
1850 - 1915 (65 years)
Count Hans Hermann Carl Ludwig von Berlepsch was a German ornithologist. Berlepsch studied zoology at the University of Halle. He used his inherited wealth to sponsor bird collectors in South America, including Jan Kalinowski and Hermann von Ihering. His collection of 55,000 birds was sold to the Senckenberg Museum at Frankfurt on Main after his death.
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Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin
1727 - 1817 (90 years)
Nikolaus Joseph Freiherr von Jacquin was a scientist who studied medicine, chemistry and botany. Biography Born in Leiden in the Netherlands, he studied medicine at Leiden University, then moved first to Paris and afterward to Vienna. In 1752, he studied under Gerard van Swieten in Vienna.
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Petrus Camper
1722 - 1789 (67 years)
Petrus Camper FRS , was a Dutch physician, anatomist, physiologist, midwife, zoologist, anthropologist, palaeontologist and a naturalist in the Age of Enlightenment. He was one of the first to take an interest in comparative anatomy, palaeontology, and the facial angle. He was among the first to mark out an "anthropology," which he distinguished from natural history. He studied the orangutan, the Javan rhinoceros, and the skull of a mosasaur, which he believed was a whale.
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Jean Théodore Delacour
1890 - 1985 (95 years)
Jean Théodore Delacour was a French ornithologist and aviculturist. He later became American. He was renowned for not only discovering but also rearing some of the rarest birds in the world. He established very successful aviaries twice in his life, stocked with birds from around the world, including those that he obtained on expeditions to Southeast Asia, Africa and South America. His first aviary in Villers-Bretonneux was destroyed in World War One. The second one that he established at Clères was destroyed in World War Two. He moved to the United States of America where he worked on avian systematics and was one of the founders of the International Committee for Bird Protection .
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Édouard Chatton
1883 - 1947 (64 years)
Édouard Chatton was a French biologist who first characterized the distinction between the prokaryotic and eukaryotic cellular types. "Pansporella perplexa. Reflections on the Biology and Phylogeny of the Protozoa" [Pansporella perplexa, Amoebien a spores protegees parasite des Daphnies. Réflexions sur la biologie et la phylogénie des Protozoaires. Annales des Sciences Naturelles 10 8: 5-84. Paris, 1925]ref name=sapp2005></ref>
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