Influential Scientists and Their Groundbreaking Discoveries
Presentations
– Sigmund Freud (XX): The father of psychoanalysis, Austrian neurologist best known for developing techniques of psychoanalysis. He described three levels of the mind: conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. He maintained that people could be cured by making their unconscious conscious. The aim of psychoanalysis therapy is to release repressed emotions and experiences.
– Archimedes (IIIBC): Mathematician, physicist, engineer, and inventor. The greatest scientist of the classical age, he made significant contributions to science: volume of a sphere, laws of levers and pulleys, center of gravity, Archimedean screw, and the most precise value of pi.
– Alexander Fleming: Bacteriology and vaccine treatment. He discovered lysozyme, an antiseptic enzyme in body fluids, which he mixed with a culture of bacteria and observed that it dissolved them. He discovered that Penicillium (mold) produced a substance that killed bacteria; he isolated and purified penicillin, which became the first antibiotic. He shared the Nobel Prize in 1945 in Physiology or Medicine.
– Pythagoras of Samos: Greek philosopher and mathematician. He is the founder of the religious movement called Pythagoreanism (very secretive). He is said to have developed the theorem of the triangle, hypotenuse (though there is no evidence that he worked on it).
– Rosalind Franklin: (XX) PhD in Chemistry. She was an X-ray crystallographer and studied the structure of DNA; she discovered it was a double helix. However, the 1953 Prize was given to Crick and Watson, who gave no credit to Franklin (who had died a few years earlier).
– Severo Ochoa: Spanish scientist of the XX century, famous for his experiments related to RNA. He created RNA synthetically using a bacterial enzyme and in 1959 received the shared Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine.
– Ivan Petrovich Pavlov: (XIX) He is famous for his theory on classical conditioning and research on the digestive process. He received the 1904 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. He researched the conditioned reflex with dogs (the relationship between a bell and food—salivation—explaining the experiment).
– Maria Blasco: Spanish researcher on telomeres and telomerase (enzyme found at the tip of chromosomes) who discovered that telomeres shorten with age. She studied the mechanisms by which tumor cells are immortal while normal body cells are mortal. Her aim was to determine the role of genetic and epigenetic factors and telomere regulators in cancer and aging.
– Stephen Hawking: Theoretical physicist and cosmologist who made significant contributions to describing black holes (collapsed stars with very intense gravity that emit Hawking radiation) and singularities.
– Pedro Alonso: Spanish scientist best known for his fight against malaria, who has been trying to find a cure. He is the Director of the Global Malaria Programme of the WHO since 2014.
– Isaac Newton: (XVII) Physicist and mathematician. He developed the theory of calculus, optics (studies on the refraction of light, color is an intrinsic property of light), and laws of gravitation (effects on planets’ orbits, heliocentric view of the Solar System), as well as the binomial theorem.
– Nicolas Copernicus: Polish astronomer who proposed the heliocentric model (Earth rotates around the Sun and around its axis) for the first time but was afraid of Church persecution. His ideas were supported by Galileo and Kepler years later.