Items18The creator’s order
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Alfred WegenerBorn 1 Nov 1880Alfred Wegener was a meteorologist and polar explorer when he proposed in 1912, and in his 1915 book The Origin of Continents and Oceans, that the continents had once been joined and drifted apart. He drew on fossils, rock formations and past climates across fields. Geologists largely rejected the…0i - 2
Alan TuringBorn 23 Jun 1912Alan Turing moved from mathematical logic, where his 1936 paper defined computability, to wartime codebreaking at Bletchley Park and the design of early computers. In 1952 he crossed again, into biology, with a paper showing how two interacting chemicals could produce spots and stripes on animals.…0i - 3
Max DelbrückBorn 4 Sept 1906Max Delbrück trained in theoretical physics with Niels Bohr, then turned to the question of how genes copy themselves, choosing viruses that infect bacteria as the simplest system. With Salvador Luria he designed the 1943 fluctuation test showing that bacterial mutations arise at random, and the…0i - 4
Erwin SchrödingerBorn 12 Aug 1887Erwin Schrödinger, a founder of quantum mechanics, gave public lectures in Dublin in 1943 published as What Is Life?, asking how heredity could be explained by physics and suggesting genetic information was stored in an aperiodic crystal. He did no lab biology himself, but the book inspired Francis…0i - 5
John von NeumannJohn von Neumann worked across pure mathematics, the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics, game theory, written up with economist Oskar Morgenstern in 1944, and computing, where his 1945 report on the EDVAC described the stored-program design most computers still use. He also worked on the…0i - 6
Norbert WienerBorn 26 Nov 1894Norbert Wiener, a mathematician, worked during the Second World War on predicting the paths of aircraft for anti-aircraft guns, and saw that feedback in machines resembled feedback in animals and people. His 1948 book Cybernetics founded a field linking engineering, biology, neuroscience and the…0i - 7
Linus PaulingBorn 28 Feb 1901Linus Pauling applied quantum mechanics to chemical bonding, then carried structural chemistry into biology: in 1949 he and colleagues showed sickle-cell anaemia was caused by an abnormal haemoglobin molecule, the first molecular disease, and in 1951 he proposed the alpha helix in proteins. He won…0i - 8
Dorothy HodgkinBorn 12 May 1910Dorothy Hodgkin, a chemist, pushed X-ray crystallography into ever larger biological molecules, solving the structures of penicillin in the 1940s, vitamin B12, for which she won the 1964 Nobel prize in chemistry, and finally insulin in 1969 after 35 years of work. Each solved structure had medical…0i - 9
George GamowBorn 4 Mar 1904George Gamow, a nuclear physicist and cosmologist who helped develop the theory of how the Big Bang formed light elements, read Watson and Crick's 1953 paper and immediately framed the genetic code as a cryptography problem: how could four DNA bases specify twenty amino acids? His specific…0i - 10
Rosalind FranklinBorn 25 Jul 1920Rosalind Franklin first made her name studying the microstructure of coal for the British coal industry, then applied X-ray diffraction to DNA at King's College London, producing the images, including Photograph 51, that Watson and Crick used without her knowledge. At Birkbeck she moved on to…0i
