A to Z of Biologists, Updated Edition

Lisa Yount

Description

Praise for the previous edition:

"...the coverage of women, races, and international history in general make it a good source for exploring the many faces of biologists..."—American Reference Books Annual

"...useful..."—School Library Journal

"Recommended."—Choice

A to Z of Biologists, Updated Edition uses the device of biography to put a human face on science-a method that adds immediacy for the high school student who might have an interest in pursuing a career in biology. This comprehensive survey features more than 150 entries and 50 black-and-white photographs. Each profile focuses on a biologist's research and contributions to the field and their effect on scientists whose work followed. Their lives and personalities are also discussed through incidents, quotations, and photographs.

The profiles are culturally inclusive and span a range of biologists from ancient times to the present day. The entries on women and minority biologists especially articulate the obstacles that these biologists overcame in the process of reaching their goals. This title is an ideal resource for students and general readers interested in the history of biology or the personal and professional lives of significant biologists.

People covered include:

• Rachel Louise Carson (1907–1964)


• Paul Ehrlich (1854–1915)


• Dian Fossey (1932–1985)


• Galen (c. 130–c. 201)


• Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859)


• Shibasaburo Kitasato (1852–1931)


• Severo Ochoa (1905–1993)


• Linus Carl Pauling (1901–1994)


• Rosalyn Sussman Yalow (1921–2011)


• Lap-Chee Tsui (1950–present)


• Pamela Silver (1952–present)

Sujets

• Young Adult Nonfiction
• Sciences et techniques
• Biology
• Biography
• Research
• Scientist
• History
• Nature
• Science

Informations

• Publié par: Infobase Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 octobre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438183268
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

A to Z of Biologists, Updated Edition
Copyright © 2019 by Lisa Yount
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information, contact:
Facts On File An imprint of Infobase 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001
ISBN 978-1-4381-8326-8
You can find Facts On File on the World Wide Web at http://www.infobase.com
Contents Entries Aristotle and biology Avery, Oswald Baer, Karl Ernst von Banting, Sir Frederick Grant Barr -Sinoussi, Fran oise Bateson, William Beaumont, William Behring, Emil von Beijerinck, Martinus Willem Berg, Paul Bernard, Claude Black, James Whyte Boussingault, Jean-Baptiste Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Burkholder, JoAnn Marie Burnet, Sir Frank Macfarlane Campbell, William C. Carrel, Alexis Carson, Rachel Louise Chain, Sir Ernst Boris Charpentier, Emmanuelle Church, George Cohen, Stanley H. Colborn, Theodora Crick, Francis Cuvier, Georges, Baron Dale, Henry Hallett Darwin, Charles Dawkins, Richard De Vries, Hugo Deisseroth, Karl Delbr ck, Max Doll, Richard Domagk, Gerhard Doudna, Jennifer Earle, Sylvia Alice Edwards, Robert Ehrlich, Paul Elion, Gertrude Belle Enders, John Franklin Esvelt, Kevin Fabre, Jean-Henri Fisher, Sir Ronald Aylmer Fleming, Sir Alexander Florey, Howard Walter Fossey, Dian Franklin, Rosalind Elsie Frisch, Karl von Funk, Casimir Galdikas, Birut Galen Galvani, Luigi Gilbert, Walter Golgi, Camillo Goodall, Jane Gould, Stephen Jay Haldane, J. B. S. Hales, Stephen Hall, Jeffrey C. Haller, Albrecht von Harvey, William Helmholtz, Hermann von Hershey, Alfred Day Hess, Walter Rudolf Hippocrates Hodgkin, Alan Lloyd Hodgkin, Dorothy Crowfoot Hood, Leroy Hooke, Robert Horvath, Philippe Humboldt, Alexander von Ishino, Yoshizumi Jenner, Edward Katz, Sir Bernard Khorana, Har Gobind Kimura, Motoo King, Mary-Claire Kitasato, Shibasaburo Koch, Robert Kornberg, Arthur Kornberg, Sylvy Krebs, Sir Hans Adolf Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Lavoisier, Antoine-Laurent Leakey, Louis S. B. Leakey, Mary Douglas Nicol Leakey, Richard E. Leeuwenhoek, Antoni van Levi-Montalcini, Rita Lind, James Linnaeus, Carolus Lister, Joseph Lorenz, Konrad Lovelock, James Ephraim Ludwig, Karl Luria, Salvador Lyell, Sir Charles Malpighi, Marcello Malthus, Thomas Robert Margulis, Lynn Alexander Mayr, Ernst McClintock, Barbara Mechnikov, Ilya Ilyich Medawar, Peter Brian Mendel, Gregor Meyerhof, Otto Fritz Miller, Stanley Lloyd Milstein, C sar Mitchell, Peter Dennis Monod, Jacques Montagnier, Luc Morgagni, Giovanni Battista Morgan, Thomas Hunt Muller, Hermann Joseph Nirenberg, Marshall Warren N sslein-Volhard, Christiane Ochoa, Severo Ohsumi, Yoshinori Ohta, Tomoko Okazaki, Reiji Omura, Satoshi Paracelsus Pasteur, Louis Patrick, Ruth Pauling, Linus Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich Purkinje, Jan Evangelista Ram n y Cajal, Santiago Ray, John R ntgen, Wilhelm Conrad Rosbash, Michael Ross, Ronald Sabin, Albert Bruce Salk, Jonas Sanger, Frederick Schleiden, Matthias Schwann, Theodor Semmelweis, Ignaz Philipp Sherrington, Charles Scott Silver, Pamela Snow, John Spallanzani, Lazzaro Sperry, Roger Wolcott Starling, Ernest Henry Stevens, Nettie Maria Swammerdam, Jan Szent-Gy rgyi, Albert Takabe, Tetsuko Theophrastus Tinbergen, Nikolaas Tonegawa, Susumu Tsui, Lap-Chee Tu, Youyou Venter, Craig Vesalius, Andreas Virchow, Rudolf Wallace, Alfred Russel Wambugu, Florence Watson, James Wexler, Nancy Sabin Wilkins, Maurice Wilmut, Sir Ian Yalow, Rosalyn Sussman Young, Michael W. Zhang, Feng zur Hausen, Harald
Entries
Aristotle and biology

The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle is one of the founders of science. He originated several basic ideas in biology, such as the idea of classifying living things according to features they had in common. Respected modern evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr has written, "No one prior to Darwin has made a greater contribution to our understanding of the living world than Aristotle."
Aristotle was born in 384 BCE in Stagira, a colony on the coast of northern Greece that at the time belonged to Macedonia. His father, Nicomachus, was the Macedonian king's court physician. Aristotle's parents both died when he was young.
In 367 BCE , when Aristotle was about 17 years old, he traveled to Athens, the center of the Greek intellectual world. He lived there for 20 years, studying under the famous philosopher Plato and later teaching in Plato's academy. After Plato died in 347 BCE , Aristotle began traveling around Greece. He spent three years in Assos, where he married Pythias, the niece of the local ruler. They had one daughter, but Pythias soon died, perhaps in childbirth. Aristotle also lived on the island of Lesbos for several years and probably studied marine animals there.
Around 342 BCE , Philip, the king of Macedonia, asked Aristotle to tutor the ruler's teenaged son, Alexander. Aristotle did so for about three years, until Philip died and Alexander took over the throne. Aristotle then returned to Stagira, where he married a woman named Herpyllis and had a son.
Aristotle went back to Athens in 335 BCE and set up his own philosophical academy, the Lyceum. He lectured his advanced students in the mornings and gave general talks to larger audiences in the afternoons or evenings. Most of his approximately 400 surviving books date from this time in his life. Many seem to be collections of lecture notes.
Aristotle tried to assemble and classify all existing knowledge. He made important contributions to logic, politics, ethics, and literature, as well as biology. He also attempted to describe physics and astronomy, though much less successfully. He stressed similarities and relationships among all parts of nature. He also emphasized the importance of observing the natural world, writing that "more trust should be put in the evidence of sense perception than in theories."
A basic idea in Aristotle's philosophy was that everything in nature has a purpose. He tried to find out and describe what those purposes were. He also held that each part of a living thing has a purpose or function, and that function explains why the part has the features it does. For instance, he pointed out, hawks and other birds that kill birds or animals for food (raptors) have hooked beaks and sharp, curved talons "to obtain mastery over their prey, that being suited better for deeds of violence than any other form." Biologists still study carefully the relationships between form and function in living things.
Aristotle believed that every living thing has a built-in urge to fulfill its purpose and develop itself as completely as possible. The purpose of an acorn was to become an oak tree, he said, and the acorn somehow contained both the instructions and the drive to carry out this purpose. These ideas foreshadowed modern scientists' understanding of the "program" for the development of each kind of living thing that is carried in its genes.
Three of Aristotle's books— The History of Animals, The Parts of Animals , and The Generation [Reproduction] of Animals —were concerned almost entirely with biology. They described more than 500 types of animals in detail. Aristotle's descriptions drew on his personal experience, reports and specimens from students and friends, and accounts by other writers. Some descriptions contained serious errors or even referred to creatures that never existed, but others were extremely accurate.
In The History of Animals , Aristotle introduced the idea of classifying animals according to features that they have in common. "Animals may be characterized according to their way of living, their actions, their habits, and their bodily parts," he wrote. "It is by resemblance of the shapes of their parts, or of their whole body, that the groups are marked off from each other." Aristotle's comparisons laid the foundation for comparative anatomy, which has proved very useful in understanding relationships among living things. His classification system included both an animal's specific type, such as tiger, and the group of similar creatures into which that type of animal might be placed, such as mammals. Carolus Linnaeus developed a similar, though more systematic, method of classification some 2,300 years later.
Aristotle attempted to describe how animals' bodies worked as well as what they looked like. His ideas about physiology were much less accurate than those about anatomy, however. He believed, for instance, that the heart was the seat of intelligence, whereas the brain had no function except to cool the blood. He made errors in descriptions of human anatomy and physiology because he assumed that human bodies were just like the bodies of animals he had studied. Belief in some of Aristotle's mistaken ideas held biology and medicine back for centuries.
Aristotle devoted a whole book to considering how animals reproduce. He recognized that the male and the female are equally necessary for reproduction, but, like many thinkers of his time, he downplayed the female's role. He believed that the male provided the form and energy that created the offspring, while the female provided only the substance from which it was made. He also mistakenly believed that small creatures such as insects could arise spontaneously from nonliving matter. In spite of such errors, Aristotle's writings about reproduction are one of the foundations of embryology.
Aristotle believed that complex living things were "higher," or more valuable, than simpler ones because they were more organized. (For the same reason, he held that all living things were "higher" than nonliving things.) He did not imagine that lower forms had changed into higher ones, however, as later supporters of evolution, such as Charles Robert Darwin , did. Aristotle thought that each kind of animal was exactly the same as it had be