German archaeologist and scholar who taught himself thirteen languages. He was a highly successful businessman, and used his accumulated wealth to finance an expedition to find ancient Troy. He managed to locate the city, but his unsystematic excavation methods unfortunately destroyed and jumbled the remains of the ancient city. Nevertheless, the developments arising from his work led to the creation of modern techniques of scientific archaeology.
Heinrich Schliemann (Born: January 6, 1822 in Neubukow, Mecklenburg-Schwerin; Death: December 26, 1890, Naples) was a German archaeologist, an advocate of the historical reality of places mentioned in the works of Homer, and an important excavator of Troy and of the Mycenaean sites Mycenae and Tiryns, lending material weight to Homer’s Iliad and Vergil’s Aeneid as reflecting historical events.
Childhood, youth, and life as a businessman
Schliemann was born in Neubukow in 1822. His father was a poor Protestant minister named Ernst Schliemann. Heinrich’s mother, Luise Therese Sophie, died in 1831, when he was just 9. After her death, Heinrich was sent to live with his uncle. He was enrolled in the Gymnasium (grammar school) at Neustrelitz at age 11 with his attendance paid for by his father. He attended the grammar school for at least a year. He would later show interest in history. This had been encouraged by his father, who had schooled him in the tales of the Iliad and the Odyssey and had given him a copy of Ludwig Jerrer’s Illustrated History of the World for Christmas in 1829. Schliemann later claimed that at the age of 8 he had declared he would one day excavate the city of Troy. Schliemann’s interest in the classics continued throughout his time at the Gymnasium, so it is likely that he would have been further exposed to Homer. However, he was transferred to the vocational school, or Realschule, after his father was accused of embezzling church funds, and had to quit the vocational school in 1836 when his father was no longer able to pay for it. According to his diary, his interest in ancient Greece was conceived when he overheard a university student reciting the Odyssey of Homer in classical Greek; Heinrich was taken by the language’s beauty. Unfortunately, his family’s poverty left Schliemann unable to afford a university education, and as such it was Schliemann’s early academic experiences that established the fundamental character of his later life. He was a highly original person with unconventional thinking and methods which appeared to have given him a lot of admirers as well as enemies. He wanted to return to the educated life, to reacquire all the things of which he was deprived in childhood. Yet in his archaeological career, there was often a division between him and the educated professionals.
He is a French customs official who argued that the shaped stones found in association with animal bones during canal dredging in the Somme Valley were actually ancient tools. He presented this assertion in Antiquites Celtiques et Antediluviennes (Celtic and Antediluvian Antiques), (1847-1864).
Jacques Boucher de Crèvecœur de Perthes (10 September 1788-5 August 1868), sometimes referred to as Boucher de Perthes, was a French geologist and antiquary notable for his discovery, in about 1830, of flint tools in the gravels of the Somme valley.
Born at Rethel, in the Ardennes, he was the eldest son of Jules Armand Guillaume Boucher de Crèvecœur, botanist and customs officer, and of Etienne-Jeanne-Marie de Perthes (whose surname he was authorised by royal decree in 1818 to assume in addition to his father’s). In 1802 he entered government employ as an officer of customs. His duties kept him for six years in Italy, but upon his returning in 1811 he found rapid promotion at home, and finally was appointed, in March 1825, to succeed his father as director of the douane (customs office) at Abbeville, where he remained for the rest of his life.
His leisure time was chiefly devoted to the study of what was afterwards called the Stone Age and antediluvian man, as he expressed it. About the year 1830 he had found, in the gravels of the Somme valley, flints which in his opinion bore evidence of human handiwork; but not until many years afterwards did he make public the important discovery of a worked flint implement with remains of elephant and rhinoceros in the gravels of Menchecourt. This was in 1846.
James Dewey Watson (born April 6, 1928) is an American molecular biologist, best known as one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA. Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material”. He studied at the University of Chicago and Indiana University and subsequently worked at the University of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory in England where he first met Francis Crick.
In 1956 he became a junior member of Harvard University’s Biological Laboratories until 1976, but in 1968 served as Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York and shifted its research emphasis to the study of cancer. In 1994 he became its President for ten years, and then subsequently served as its Chancellor until 2007, when he was forced into retirement by controversy over several comments about race and intelligence. Between 1988 and 1992 he was associated with the National Institutes of Health, helping to establish the Human Genome Project. He has written many science books, including the seminal textbook The Molecular Biology of the Gene (1965) and his bestselling book The Double Helix (1968) about the DNA Structure discovery.
Biography
Watson was born in Chicago, Illinois, on April 6, 1928, the son of a businessman, also named James Dewey Watson, and Margaret Jean Mitchell. His father was of midwestern English descent. His mother’s father Lauchlin Mitchell, a tailor, was from Glasgow, Scotland, and her mother, Lizzie Gleason, was the child of Irish parents from Tipperary. Watson was fascinated with bird watching, a hobby he shared with his father. Watson appeared on Quiz Kids, a popular radio show that challenged precocious youngsters to answer questions. Thanks to the liberal policy of University president Robert Hutchins, he enrolled at the University of Chicago at the age of 15. After reading Erwin Schrodinger’s book What Is Life? in 1946, Watson changed his professional ambitions from the study of ornithology to genetics. He earned his B.S. in Zoology from the University of Chicago in 1947. In his autobiography, Avoid Boring People, Watson describes the University of Chicago as an idyllic academic institution where he was instilled with the capacity for critical thought and an ethical compulsion not to suffer fools who impeded his search for truth, in contrast to his description of his later work at Harvard University.
American geneticist who studied the Neurospora red bread mold. By subjecting the mold to X-rays, he caused it to mutate. He then observed that some mold lost the ability to produce a particular organic compound in needed to survive. By adding different but similar compounds and seeing if the mold used it, he could unravel the chemical reactions by which the mold synthesized needed chemicals. Beadle concluded that the characteristic function of the gene was to control the synthesis of a particular enzyme. For this hypothesis, which he published with Tatum, he shared the 1958 Nobel prize in medicine with Tatum and Lederberg.
George Wells Beadle (October 22, 1903 – June 9, 1989) was an American scientist in the field of genetics, and Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine Nobel laureate who with Edward Lawrie Tatum discovered the role of genes in regulating biochemical events within cells.
Beadle and Tatum’s key experiments involved exposing the bread mold Neurospora crassa to x-rays, causing mutations. In a series of experiments, they showed that these mutations caused changes in specific enzymes involved in metabolic pathways. These experiments led them to propose a direct link between genes and enzymatic reactions, known as the “one gene, one enzyme”.
Theodosius Grygorovych Dobzhansky, also known as T. G. Dobzhansky, and sometimes Anglicized to Theodore Dobzhansky (Ukrainian – Теодосій Григорович Добжанський; January 25, 1900 – December 18, 1975) was a noted geneticist and evolutionary biologist, and a central figure in the field of evolutionary biology for his work in shaping the unifying modern evolutionary synthesis. Dobzhansky was born in Ukraine (then part of Imperial Russia) and emigrated to the United States in 1927.
Biography
Early life
Dobzhansky was born on January 25, 1900 in Nemyriv, Ukraine. An only child, his father Grigory Dobzhansky was a mathematics teacher, and his mother was Sophia Voinarsky. In 1910 the family moved to Kiev, Ukraine. At high school, Dobzhansky collected butterflies and decided to become a biologist. In 1915, he met Victor Luchnik who convinced him to specialize in beetles instead. Dobzhansky attended the University of Kiev between 1917 and 1921, where he then studied until 1924. He then moved to Leningrad, Russia, to study under Yuri Filipchenko, where a Drosophila melanogaster lab had been established.
