#1
James Watson
1928 - Present (96 years)
Areas of Specialization: Molecular Biology, Genetics James D. Watson is a zoologist, geneticist and molecular biologist. He earned a Bachelor of Science from the University of Chicago and a PhD from Indiana University. He is most recently well-known due to his controversial comments about race and genetics, for which he has been largely ostracized. Prior to his unfortunate foray into racial genetics, he was highly regarded and famous for his work on molecular biology. He is credited for significant contributions to our understanding of cancer, neurological diseases and the genetic basis for cancer and other diseases.
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Ernst Mayr
1904 - 2005 (101 years)
Ernst Walter Mayr was one of the 20th century's leading evolutionary biologists. He was also a renowned taxonomist, tropical explorer, ornithologist, philosopher of biology, and historian of science. His work contributed to the conceptual revolution that led to the modern evolutionary synthesis of Mendelian genetics, systematics, and Darwinian evolution, and to the development of the biological species concept.
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Edward O. Wilson
1929 - 2021 (92 years)
Areas of Specialization: Myrmecology, Biodiversity, Sociobiology Edward O. Wilson is the world’s leading expert on ants, a specialty known as myrmecology, but that’s not all. He is also considered the father of biodiversity and the father of sociobiology. He is the Pellegrino University Research Professor Emeritus of Entomology at the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and a lecturer at Duke University. He earned his BS and MS in biology from the University of Alabama. He was named to the Harvard Society of Fellows, which enabled him to travel around the world studying ant species from Australia to Cuba.
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Stephen Jay Gould
1941 - 2002 (61 years)
Stephen Jay Gould was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was one of the most influential and widely read authors of popular science of his generation. Gould spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In 1996, Gould was hired as the Vincent Astor Visiting Research Professor of Biology at New York University, after which he divided his time teaching between there and Harvard.
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Linus Pauling
1901 - 1994 (93 years)
Linus Carl Pauling was an American chemist, biochemist, chemical engineer, peace activist, author, and educator. He published more than 1,200 papers and books, of which about 850 dealt with scientific topics. New Scientist called him one of the 20 greatest scientists of all time, For his scientific work, Pauling was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954. For his peace activism, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962. He is one of five people to have won more than one Nobel Prize . Of these, he is the only person to have been awarded two unshared Nobel Prizes, and one of two peo...
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Salvador Luria
1912 - 1991 (79 years)
Salvador Edward Luria was an Italian microbiologist, later a naturalized U.S. citizen. He won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1969, with Max Delbrück and Alfred Hershey, for their discoveries on the replication mechanism and the genetic structure of viruses. Salvador Luria also showed that bacterial resistance to viruses is genetically inherited.
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Richard Lewontin
1929 - 2021 (92 years)
Areas of Specialization: Evolutionary Bioogy, Population Genetics Richard Lewontin is a geneticist, evolutionary biologist, mathematician, and commentator. He earned a BS in biology from Harvard University, a master’s degree in mathematical statistics, and a PhD in zoology from Columbia University. Lewontin is best known for his work in theoretical and experimental population genetics. In 1960, he worked with Ken-Ichi Kojima to become the first population geneticist to identify the equations for change of haplotype frequencies with interacting national selection at two loci. He has become a vo...
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Walter Gilbert
1932 - Present (92 years)
Walter Gilbert is an American biochemist, physicist, molecular biology pioneer, and Nobel laureate. Education and early life Walter Gilbert was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on March 21, 1932, into a Jewish family, the son of Emma , a child psychologist, and Richard V. Gilbert, an economist.
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David Baltimore
1938 - Present (86 years)
Areas of Specialization: Microbiology David Baltimore is director of the Joint Center for Translational Medicine and President Emeritus and Robert Andrews Milliken Professor of Biology at the California Institute of Technology. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College and a PhD in biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he also conducted his postdoctoral research on virus replication. His research has produced remarkable contributions to cancer research, biotechnology, recombinant DNA research virology, and immunology. In 1975, he shared the Nobel Prize for P...
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Joshua Lederberg
1925 - 2008 (83 years)
Joshua Lederberg, ForMemRS was an American molecular biologist known for his work in microbial genetics, artificial intelligence, and the United States space program. He was 33 years old when he won the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering that bacteria can mate and exchange genes . He shared the prize with Edward Tatum and George Beadle, who won for their work with genetics.
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Carl Woese
1928 - 2012 (84 years)
Carl Richard Woese was an American microbiologist and biophysicist. Woese is famous for defining the Archaea in 1977 through a pioneering phylogenetic taxonomy of 16S ribosomal RNA, a technique that has revolutionized microbiology. He also originated the RNA world hypothesis in 1967, although not by that name. Woese held the Stanley O. Ikenberry Chair and was professor of microbiology at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign.
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Norman Borlaug
1914 - 2009 (95 years)
Norman Ernest Borlaug was an American agronomist who led initiatives worldwide that contributed to the extensive increases in agricultural production termed the Green Revolution. Borlaug was awarded multiple honors for his work, including the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal.
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Barbara McClintock
1902 - 1992 (90 years)
Barbara McClintock was an American scientist and cytogeneticist who was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. McClintock received her PhD in botany from Cornell University in 1927. There she started her career as the leader of the development of maize cytogenetics, the focus of her research for the rest of her life. From the late 1920s, McClintock studied chromosomes and how they change during reproduction in maize. She developed the technique for visualizing maize chromosomes and used microscopic analysis to demonstrate many fundamental genetic ideas. One of those ideas was...
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Paul Berg
1926 - 2023 (97 years)
Paul Berg was an American biochemist and professor at Stanford University. He was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1980, along with Walter Gilbert and Frederick Sanger. The award recognized their contributions to basic research involving nucleic acids, especially recombinant DNA.
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Carol W. Greider
1961 - Present (63 years)
Carolyn Widney Greider is an American molecular biologist and Nobel laureate. She joined the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Distinguished Professor in the department of molecular, cell, and developmental biology in October 2020.
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Kary Mullis
1944 - 2019 (75 years)
Kary Banks Mullis was an American biochemist. In recognition of his role in the invention of the polymerase chain reaction technique, he shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Michael Smith and was awarded the Japan Prize in the same year. PCR became a central technique in biochemistry and molecular biology, described by The New York Times as "highly original and significant, virtually dividing biology into the two epochs of before PCR and after PCR."
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Har Gobind Khorana
1922 - 2011 (89 years)
Har Gobind Khorana was an Indian-American biochemist. While on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, he shared the 1968 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Marshall W. Nirenberg and Robert W. Holley for research that showed the order of nucleotides in nucleic acids, which carry the genetic code of the cell and control the cell's synthesis of proteins. Khorana and Nirenberg were also awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University in the same year.
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Oliver Smithies
1925 - 2017 (92 years)
Oliver Smithies was a British-American geneticist and physical biochemist. He is known for introducing starch as a medium for gel electrophoresis in 1955, and for the discovery, simultaneously with Mario Capecchi and Martin Evans, of the technique of homologous recombination of transgenic DNA with genomic DNA, a much more reliable method of altering animal genomes than previously used, and the technique behind gene targeting and knockout mice. He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2007 for his genetics work.
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Alfred Hershey
1908 - 1997 (89 years)
Alfred Day Hershey was an American Nobel Prize–winning bacteriologist and geneticist. Early Years Hershey was born in Owosso, Michigan to Robert Day and Alma Wilbur Hershey. He earned a B.S. in chemistry in 1930, and Ph.D. in bacteriology in 1934 from Michigan State University. Shortly after, Hershey accepted a faculty position at Washington University in St. Louis, serving as an instructor of bacteriology and immunology from 1934-1950.
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Erwin Chargaff
1905 - 2002 (97 years)
Erwin Chargaff was an Austro-Hungarian-born American biochemist, writer, Bucovinian Jew who emigrated to the United States during the Nazi era, and professor of biochemistry at Columbia University medical school. He wrote a well-reviewed autobiography, Heraclitean Fire: Sketches from a Life Before Nature.
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Mario Capecchi
1937 - Present (87 years)
Mario Ramberg Capecchi is an Italian-born molecular geneticist and a co-awardee of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering a method to create mice in which a specific gene is turned off, known as knockout mice. He shared the prize with Martin Evans and Oliver Smithies. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Human Genetics and Biology at the University of Utah School of Medicine.
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G. Ledyard Stebbins
1906 - 2000 (94 years)
George Ledyard Stebbins Jr. was an American botanist and geneticist who is widely regarded as one of the leading evolutionary biologists of the 20th century. Stebbins received his Ph.D. in botany from Harvard University in 1931. He went on to the University of California, Berkeley, where his work with E. B. Babcock on the genetic evolution of plant species, and his association with a group of evolutionary biologists known as the Bay Area Biosystematists, led him to develop a comprehensive synthesis of plant evolution incorporating genetics.
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Jennifer Doudna
1964 - Present (60 years)
Areas of Specialization: Biochemistry, Molecular Biology Jennifer Doudna is a Li Ka Shing Chancellor Chair Professor for the Department of Chemistry and Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition, she has been a professor at the University of California, San Francisco and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and senior investigator at the Gladstone Institutes. She earned a B.A. in biochemistry from Pomona College and a Ph.D. in biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology from Harvard Medical School. She is best known for her work with CRISPR.
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Marshall Warren Nirenberg
1927 - 2010 (83 years)
Marshall Warren Nirenberg was an American biochemist and geneticist. He shared a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1968 with Har Gobind Khorana and Robert W. Holley for "breaking the genetic code" and describing how it operates in protein synthesis. In the same year, together with Har Gobind Khorana, he was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University.
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Edward B. Lewis
1918 - 2004 (86 years)
Edward Butts Lewis was an American geneticist, a corecipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He helped to found the field of evolutionary developmental biology. Early life Lewis was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, the second son of Laura Mary Lewis and Edward Butts Lewis, a watchmaker-jeweler. His full name was supposed to be Edward Butts Lewis Jr., but his birth certificate was incorrectly filled out with "B." as his middle name.
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Eric Kandel
1929 - Present (95 years)
Eric Richard Kandel is an Austrian-born American medical doctor who specialized in psychiatry, a neuroscientist and a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University. He was a recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research on the physiological basis of memory storage in neurons. He shared the prize with Arvid Carlsson and Paul Greengard.
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Jack W. Szostak
1952 - Present (72 years)
Jack William Szostak is a Canadian American biologist of Polish British descent, Nobel Prize laureate, University Professor at the University of Chicago, former Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, and Alexander Rich Distinguished Investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston. Szostak has made significant contributions to the field of genetics. His achievement helped scientists to map the location of genes in mammals and to develop techniques for manipulating genes. His research findings in this area are also instrumental to the Human Genome Project. He was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, along with Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol W.
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Robert Gallo
1937 - Present (87 years)
Robert Charles Gallo is an American biomedical researcher. He is best known for his role in establishing the human immunodeficiency virus as the infectious agent responsible for acquired immune deficiency syndrome and in the development of the HIV blood test, and he has been a major contributor to subsequent HIV research.
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Arthur Kornberg
1918 - 2007 (89 years)
Arthur Kornberg was an American biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1959 for the discovery of "the mechanisms in the biological synthesis of ribonucleic acid and deoxyribonucleic acid" together with Spanish biochemist and physician Severo Ochoa of New York University. He was also awarded the Paul-Lewis Award in Enzyme Chemistry from the American Chemical Society in 1951, an L.H.D. degree from Yeshiva University in 1962, and the National Medal of Science in 1979. In 1991, Kornberg received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement and the Gairdner F...
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Randy Schekman
1948 - Present (76 years)
Randy Wayne Schekman is an American cell biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, former editor-in-chief of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and former editor of Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology. In 2011, he was announced as the editor of eLife, a new high-profile open-access journal published by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust launching in 2012. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1992. Schekman shared the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with James Rothman and Thomas C....
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Niles Eldredge
1943 - Present (81 years)
Areas of Specialization: Evolutionary Biology Niles Eldredge is a biologist and paleontologist. He studied Latin and geology as an undergraduate before earning a PhD at Columbia University. His career and research have been devoted to the exploration of paleontology and evolutionary theory. As curator of the American Museum of Natural History’s Department of Invertebrates, and later, Invertebrate Paleontology, he specialized in the study of the evolution of Phacopida trilobites, which went extinct roughly 245 million years ago. A critic of the more common, gene-centered, view of evolution, he ...
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Lynn Margulis
1938 - 2011 (73 years)
Lynn Margulis was an American evolutionary biologist, and was the primary modern proponent for the significance of symbiosis in evolution. Historian Jan Sapp has said that "Lynn Margulis's name is as synonymous with symbiosis as Charles Darwin's is with evolution." In particular, Margulis transformed and fundamentally framed current understanding of the evolution of cells with nuclei – an event Ernst Mayr called "perhaps the most important and dramatic event in the history of life" – by proposing it to have been the result of symbiotic mergers of bacteria.
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H. Robert Horvitz
1947 - Present (77 years)
H. Robert Horvitz is a professor of biology and member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, chair of the Board of Trustees of the Society for Science & the Public, and a member of the USA Science and Engineering Festival’s Advisory Board. He studied mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned a Ph.D. in biology from Harvard University. He completed his postdoctoral studies at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Horvitz is best known for his work researching the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans.
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Oliver H. Lowry
1910 - 1996 (86 years)
Oliver Howe Lowry was an American biochemist. He devised the Lowry protein assay, the subject of the most-cited scientific paper in history. Biography Lowry was the youngest of a family of five children. His father was a teacher and later an administrator in the Chicago public school system. His three brothers and sister all earned graduate degrees in various fields, and Lowry was inspired to emulate his siblings. He attended Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, for his undergraduate studies, having intended to major in chemical engineering. However, upon the advice of a fellow student, he ended up shifting his focus towards biochemistry.
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James Rothman
1950 - Present (74 years)
James Edward Rothman is an American biochemist. He is the Fergus F. Wallace Professor of Biomedical Sciences at Yale University, the Chairman of the Department of Cell Biology at Yale School of Medicine, and the Director of the Nanobiology Institute at the Yale West Campus. Rothman also concurrently serves as adjunct professor of physiology and cellular biophysics at Columbia University and a research professor at the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London.
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Robert Trivers
1943 - Present (81 years)
Robert Ludlow "Bob" Trivers is an American evolutionary biologist and sociobiologist. Trivers proposed the theories of reciprocal altruism , parental investment , facultative sex ratio determination , and parent–offspring conflict . He has also contributed by explaining self-deception as an adaptive evolutionary strategy and discussing intragenomic conflict.
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Paul R. Ehrlich
1932 - Present (92 years)
Paul Ralph Ehrlich is an American biologist known for his predictions and warnings about the consequences of population growth, including famine and resource depletion. Ehrlich is the Bing Professor Emeritus of Population Studies of the Department of Biology of Stanford University, and President of Stanford's Center for Conservation Biology.
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Garrett Hardin
1915 - 2003 (88 years)
Garrett James Hardin was an American ecologist. He focused his career on the issue of human overpopulation, and is best known for his exposition of the tragedy of the commons in a 1968 paper of the same title in Science, which called attention to "the damage that innocent actions by individuals can inflict on the environment". He is also known for Hardin's First Law of Human Ecology: "We can never do merely one thing. Any intrusion into nature has numerous effects, many of which are unpredictable." Garrett held hardline anti-immigrant positions as well as positions on eugenics and multiethnicism that have led multiple sources to label him a white nationalist.
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Andrew Fire
1959 - Present (65 years)
Andrew Zachary Fire is an American biologist and professor of pathology and of genetics at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with Craig C. Mello, for the discovery of RNA interference . This research was conducted at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and published in 1998.
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Daniel Nathans
1928 - 1999 (71 years)
Daniel Nathans was an American microbiologist. He shared the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of restriction enzymes and their application in restriction mapping. Early life and education Nathans was born in Wilmington, Delaware, the last of nine children born to Russian Jewish immigrant parents, Sarah and Samuel Nathans. During the Great Depression his father lost his small business and was unemployed for a long time.
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Eugene Koonin
1956 - Present (68 years)
Eugene Viktorovich Koonin is a Russian-American biologist and Senior Investigator at the National Center for Biotechnology Information . He is a recognised expert in the field of evolutionary and computational biology.
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Melvin Calvin
1911 - 1997 (86 years)
Melvin Ellis Calvin was an American biochemist known for discovering the Calvin cycle along with Andrew Benson and James Bassham, for which he was awarded the 1961 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He spent most of his five-decade career at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Seymour Benzer
1921 - 2007 (86 years)
Seymour Benzer was an American physicist, molecular biologist and behavioral geneticist. His career began during the molecular biology revolution of the 1950s, and he eventually rose to prominence in the fields of molecular and behavioral genetics. He led a productive genetics research lab both at Purdue University and as the James G. Boswell Professor of Neuroscience, emeritus, at the California Institute of Technology.
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Richard Axel
1946 - Present (78 years)
Richard Axel is an American molecular biologist and university professor in the Department of Neuroscience at Columbia University and investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His work on the olfactory system won him and Linda Buck, a former postdoctoral research scientist in his group, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2004.
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Maclyn McCarty
1911 - 2005 (94 years)
Maclyn McCarty was an American geneticist, a research scientist described in 2005 as "the last surviving member of a Manhattan scientific team that overturned medical dogma in the 1940s and became the first to demonstrate that genes were made of DNA." He had worked at Rockefeller University "for more than 60 years." 1994 marked 50 years since this work's release.
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Donald A. Glaser
1926 - 2013 (87 years)
Donald Arthur Glaser was an American physicist, neurobiologist, and the winner of the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physics for his invention of the bubble chamber used in subatomic particle physics. Education Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Glaser completed his Bachelor of Science degree in physics and mathematics from Case School of Applied Science in 1946. He completed his PhD in physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1949. Glaser accepted a position as an instructor at the University of Michigan in 1949, and was promoted to professor in 1957. He joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, in 1959, as a professor of physics.
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Francis Collins
1950 - Present (74 years)
Francis Sellers Collins is an American physician-geneticist who discovered the genes associated with a number of diseases and led the Human Genome Project. He served as director of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, from 17 August 2009 to 19 December 2021, serving under three presidents.
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Joseph L. Goldstein
1940 - Present (84 years)
Joseph Leonard Goldstein ForMemRS is an American biochemist. He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1985, along with fellow University of Texas Southwestern researcher, Michael Brown, for their studies regarding cholesterol. They discovered that human cells have low-density lipoprotein receptors that remove cholesterol from the blood and that when LDL receptors are not present in sufficient numbers, individuals develop hypercholesterolemia and become at risk for cholesterol related diseases, notably coronary heart disease. Their studies led to the development of statin dru...
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Phillip Allen Sharp
1944 - Present (80 years)
Phillip Allen Sharp is an American geneticist and molecular biologist who co-discovered RNA splicing. He shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Richard J. Roberts for "the discovery that genes in eukaryotes are not contiguous strings but contain introns, and that the splicing of messenger RNA to delete those introns can occur in different ways, yielding different proteins from the same DNA sequence". He has been selected to receive the 2015 Othmer Gold Medal.
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Stanley Norman Cohen
1935 - Present (89 years)
Stanley Norman Cohen is an American geneticist and the Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in the Stanford University School of Medicine. Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer were the first scientists to transplant genes from one living organism to another, a fundamental discovery for genetical engineering. Thousands of products have been developed on the basis of their work, including human growth hormone and hepatitis B vaccine. According to immunologist Hugh McDevitt, "Cohen's DNA cloning technology has helped biologists in virtually every field". Without it, "the face of biomedicine and biotechnology woul...
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