She has achieved international acclaim for her work in growth factor research, having discovered and characterized, together with Dr Sporn, the cytokine transforming growth factor-β (TGF-β).
Anita B. Roberts (Born: April 3, 1942 ; Died: May 26, 2006) was a molecular biologist who made pioneering observations of a protein, TGF-β, that is critical in healing wounds and bone fractures and that has a dual role in blocking or stimulating cancers. Roberts was the 49th most-cited scientist in the world and the second most-cited female scientist as of 2005.
Roberts was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she grew up. She attended Oberlin College and earned her doctorate in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1968. After postdoctoral work at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Roberts joined the National Cancer Institute in 1976. From 1995 to 2004, she served as Chief of the institute’s, and continued her research until her death in 2006.
In the early-1980s, Dr. Roberts and her colleagues at the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland began to experiment with the protein, called TGF-β, short for transforming growth factor beta.
Euclid, also known as Euclid of Alexandria, was a Greek mathematician and is often referred to as the Father of Geometry. He was active in Alexandria during the reign of Ptolemy I (323 BC-283 BC). He is the author of Elements which gives the principles of what is now called Euclidean geometry deduced from a small set of axioms. Euclid also wrote works on perspective, conic sections, spherical geometry, number theory, and rigor.
Biographical knowledge
Little is known about Euclid other than his writings. What biographical information we do have comes largely from commentaries by Proclus and Pappus of Alexandria. Euclid was active at the great Library of Alexandria and may have studied at Plato’s Academy in Greece. The date and place of Euclid’s birth and the date and circumstances of his death are unknown.
Some writers in the Middle Ages confused him with Euclid of Megara, a Greek Socratic philosopher who lived approximately one century earlier.
English economist who believed that progress towards a better society was impossible, because human population would always increase faster than the methods of supporting them could be developed. He published his views anonymously in Essay on Population (1798). His work inspired both Charles Darwin and Wallace.
The English political economist and demographer Thomas Robert Malthus FRS (13 February 1766 – 23 December 1834) analyzed population growth and noted the potential for populations to increase rapidly, often faster than the food supply available to them. Commentators may refer to such a runaway scenario, as outlined in Malthus’s treatise An Essay on the Principle of Population, as a “Malthusian catastrophe”.
Modern commentators generally refer to him as Thomas Malthus, but during his lifetime he went by his middle name, Robert.
Biography
Thomas Robert Malthus, the second son of eight children (six of them girls) born to Daniel and Henrietta Malthus near Guildford, Surrey, came into a prosperous family, with his father a personal friend of the philosopher David Hume and an acquaintance of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The young Malthus received his education at home in Bramcote, Nottinghamshire and at the Dissenting Academy, Warrington until his admission to Jesus College, Cambridge in 1784. There he studied many subjects and took prizes in English declamation, Latin and Greek, but he majored in mathematics. He earned a masters degree in 1791 and won election as a fellow of Jesus College two years later. In 1797, he took orders and became an Anglican country parson at Albury Church, near Guildford in Surrey.
Malthus married his cousin, Harriet, on April 12, 1804, and had three children: Henry, Emily and Lucy. In 1805 he became Britain’s first professor in political economy at the East India Company College (now known as Haileybury) in Hertfordshire. His students affectionately referred to him as “Pop” or “Population” Malthus. In 1818 Malthus became a Fellow of the Royal Society.
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.
