- Francis Harry Compton Crick
Francis Harry Compton Crick was born on June 8th, 1916, at Northampton, England, being the elder child of Harry Crick and Annie Elizabeth Wilkins . He has one brother, A. F. Crick , who is a doctor in New Zealand. Crick was educated at Northampton Grammar School and Mill Hill School, London.
- James D. Watson
James Dewey Watson born April 6, 1928) is an American molecular biologist, best known as one of the co-discoverers of the structure of the DNA molecule. Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material".
- Maurice Wilkins
Maurice Hugh Frederick Wilkins CBE FRS (15 December 1916 – 5 October 2004) was a New Zealand-born British molecular biologist, and Nobel Laureate who contributed research in the fields of phosphorescence, radar, isotope separation, and X-ray diffraction. He was most widely known for his work at King's College London on the structure of DNA, for which he, …
- Rosalind Franklin
Rosalind Elsie Franklin was an English physical chemist and crystallographer who made important contributions to the understanding of the fine structures of DNA, viruses, coal and graphite. Franklin is best known for her work on the X-ray diffraction images of DNA which formed a basis of Watson and Crick's hypothesis of the double helical structure of DNA in their 1953 publication, and when published constituted critical evidence of the hypothesis.
- Max Perutz
Max Ferdinand Perutz, OM (May 19 1914 - February 6 2002) was an Austrian-British molecular biologist. He was born in Vienna in 1914. In 1936 he became a research student at the Cavendish Laboratory in a crystallography group directed by J.D. Bernal, and remained in Cambridge subsequently.
- John Kendrew
Sir John Cowdery Kendrew (March 24, 1917 - August 23, 1997) was an English biochemist and crystallographer who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Max Perutz; their group in the Cavendish Laboratory investigated the structure of heme-containing proteins.
- Harvey Bialy
Harvey Bialy (born New York City, 1945) is an American molecular biologist and AIDS dissident. He was one of the original signatories to the letter establishing the Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV-AIDS Hypothesis, the editor of its first newsletter, and was a member of the controversial South African Presidential AIDS Advisory Panel convened by Thabo Mbeki in 2000.
- Elizabeth Blackburn
Elizabeth (Liz) H(elen) Blackburn (November 26, 1948 -) is a professor of biology and leading researcher in the field of the telomere and the telomerase enzyme, and their relationships to aging and cancer. She was born in Hobart, the capital of the Australian state of Tasmania, but has become a citizen of the United States.
- Sidney Altman
Sidney Altman (born May 7, 1939) is a Canadian-born molecular biologist, who is currently the Sterling Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology and Chemistry at Yale University. In 1989 he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Thomas R. Cech for their work on the catalytic properties of RNA.
- Susumu Tonegawa
Susumu Tonegawa is a Japanese scientist who won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1987 for "his discovery of the genetic principle for generation of antibody diversity." Although he won the Nobel Prize for his work in immunology, Tonegawa is a molecular biologist by training. In his later years, he has turned his attention to the molecular and cellular basis of memory formation.
- Richard J. Roberts
Richard John Roberts (born September 6, 1943, in Derby, England) is a British biochemist and molecular biologist. He was awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Phillip Allen Sharp for the discovery of introns in eukaryotic DNA and the mechanism of gene-splicing. Roberts is the son of a motor mechanic and housewife. When he was 4, the family moved to Bath. In Bath, he attended the Beechen Cliff School.
- François Jacob
François Jacob is a Jewish French biologist who, together with Jacques Monod, originated the idea that control of enzyme levels in all cells occurs through feedback on transcription. He won a third of the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1965; it was split between him, Jacques Monod, and André Lwoff.
- Oswald Avery
Oswald Theodore Avery (October 21, 1877-1955) was a Canadian-born American physician and medical researcher. The major part of his career was spent at the Rockefeller Institute Hospital in New York City. Avery was one of the first molecular biologists and was a pioneer in immunochemistry, but he is best known for his discovery in 1944 with his co-workers Colin MacLeod and Maclyn McCarty that DNA is the material of which genes and chromosomes are made.
- Bruce Ames
Bruce Ames (born December 16, 1928), is a professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a senior scientist at Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute (CHORI). He is the inventor of the Ames test, a system for easily and cheaply testing the mutagenicity of compounds. His research focuses on cancer and aging and he has authored over 500 scientific publications.
- Bonnie Bassler
Bonnie L. Bassler is a professor of molecular biology at Princeton University. She made key insights into the mechanism by which bacteria communicate, known as quorum sensing. In 2002 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. Dr. Bassler was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2006.
- Seymour Benzer
Seymour Benzer (born October 15, 1921) is an accomplished American physicist, molecular biologist and behavioral geneticist.
- Maclyn McCarty
Maclyn McCarty (June 9, 1911-January 2, 2005) was an American geneticist. In 1944 he, Oswald Avery and Colin MacLeod followed up on Griffith's experiment. Their experimental results showed that the genetic material of living cells is composed of DNA.
- William Astbury
William Thomas Astbury FRS (Bill Astbury, 25 February,1898 - 4 June,1961) was an English physicist and molecular biologist who made pioneering X-ray diffraction studies of biological molecules. His work on keratin provided the foundation for Linus Pauling's discovery of the alpha helix. He also studied the structure for DNA in 1937 and made the first step in the elucidation of its structure.
- Martha Chase
Martha Cowles Chase (1927 - 2003) was a young laboratory assistant in the early 1950s when she and Alfred Hershey conducted one of the most famous experiments in 20th century biology. Devised by American bacteriophage expert Alfred Hershey at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory New York, the famous experiment demonstrated the genetic properties of DNA over proteins.
- David Lloyd
David Lloyd (c. 1938 - 30 May 2006) was an evolutionary biologist and the seventh New Zealander to be elected as a fellow of the Royal Society in London. He did pioneering work on the theory of plant reproduction. In December of 1992, Lloyd fell victim to poisoning by acrylamide, a common laboratory chemical. As a result, he laid in a coma for three months and he was left blind, mute, and quadriplegic.
- Richard Lathe
Richard Lathe is a molecular biologist and a former professor at the University of Strasbourg and Edinburgh University, where he worked for the Centre for Genome Research and the Centre for Neuroscience. He was assistant director at the biotech company Transgene in Strasbourg, a principal scientist at ABRO, Edinburgh, and Co-Director of the Biotechnology College ESBS based in Strasbourg. Lathe is also the founder, in 2002, and director of Pieta Research, …
- Susan Lindquist
Susan Lindquist (born 5 June 1949) is a well-known molecular biologist studying (among other things) the effects of protein folding and heat-shock proteins. Lindquist is a member and former Director of the Whitehead Institute. Lindquist is best known for her research that provided strong evidence for a new paradigm in genetics based upon the inheritance of proteins with new, self-perpetuating shapes rather than new DNA sequences.
- Axel Ullrich
Axel Ullrich born October 19, 1943) Lauban, Schlesien, Germany in is an German cancer researcher and has been the Director of Molecular biology at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany since 1988. His research has primarily focused on signal transduction. After taking a degree in biochemistry at the University of Tuebingen, Germany, he received a Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg in Molecular Genetics in 1975.
- Sol Spiegelman
Sol Spiegelman (14 December, 1914 - 20 January, 1983) was an American molecular biologist. He developed the technique of nucleic acid hybridization, which helped to lay the groundwork for advances in recombinant DNA technology. Spiegelman was born and educated in New York City, and earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from the City College of New York in 1939. He began his graduate studies at Columbia University in 1940, looking into cellular physiology.
- Har Gobind Khorana
Har Gobind Khorana (born January 9, 1922) is an American molecular biologist born of Indian Punjabi heritage in British India. He was awarded the Nobel prize (shared with Robert W. Holley and Marshall Warren Nirenberg) in 1968 for his work on the interpretation of the genetic code and its function in protein synthesis. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1966.
- Anita Roberts
Anita B. Roberts, (April 3, 1942 - May 26, 2006) was a molecular biologist who made pioneering observations of a protein, TGF beta, 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.
- Phillip A. Sharp
Phillip A. Sharp received the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Much of Sharp's scientific work has been conducted at MIT's Center for Cancer Research, which he joined in 1974 and directed from 1985 to 1991. He subsequently led the Department of Biology from 1991 to 1999. Sharp is co-founder of Biogen, Inc and also co-founder of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals.
- Richard Henderson
Richard Henderson (b. 1945 in Scotland) is a British molecular biologist. Henderson was educated at Edinburgh University (B.Sc. Hons in Physics, 1st Class) and Cambridge University (Ph.D. 1969). He has worked at the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology (MRC LMB) in Cambridge since 1973, and has been its director since 1996. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1983, and has been awarded the William Bate Hardy Prize (1978), …
- Peter Walter
Peter Walter is a German-American molecular biologist and biochemist. He earned a B.S. degree in chemistry from the Free University of Berlin, an M.S. degree in organic chemistry from Vanderbilt University, and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the Rockefeller University. He is currently Professor and Chairman of the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).
- Franklin Stahl
Dr. Franklin William Stahl (born October 8, 1929) is an American molecular biologist. With Matthew Meselson, Stahl conducted the famous Meselson-Stahl experiment showing that DNA is replicated by a semiconservative mechanism, meaning that each strand of the DNA serves as a template for the "replicated" strand. He is Emeritus Professor of Biology at the University of Oregon's Institute of Molecular Biology in Eugene, Oregon.
- Marc van Montagu
Marc Van Montagu (b.Ghent, 10 November 1933) is a Belgian molecular biologist. He was full Professor and director of the Laboratory of Genetics at the faculty of Sciences at Ghent University (Belgium) and scientific director of the Genetics Department of the Flanders Interuniversity Institute for Biotechnology (VIB). Together with Jozef Schell he founded the biotech company Plant Genetic Systems Inc.
- Graham Cairns-Smith
Dr. Alexander Graham Cairns-Smith (born 1931) is an organic chemist and molecular biologist at the University of Glasgow, most famous for his controversial 1985 book, "Seven Clues to the Origins of Life". The book popularized a theory he had developed since the mid-1960s, that a simple intermediate step between dormant matter and organic life might be provided by the self-replication of clay crystals in solution.
- Edwin Southern
Professor Sir Edwin Mellor Southern, FRS (born 1938) is a 2005 Lasker Award-winning molecular biologist. His award is for the invention of the Southern blot, now a common laboratory procedure. Professor Southern is Professor of Biochemistry (Emeritus) at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Trinity College. He is the Founder, Chairman and Chief Scientific Officer of Oxford Gene Technology.
- Alfred Mirsky
Alfred Ezra Mirsky was an American pioneer in molecular biology. Mirsky graduated from Harvard College in 1922, after which he studied for two years at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University until 1924 when he moved to the University of Cambridge on a US National Research Council fellowship. He received his PhD from Cambridge in 1926, with a dissertation on the Haemoglobin molecule. On May 25, 1926 Mirsky married Reba Paeff, …
- Carol W. Greider
Carol Greider is a molecular biologist at Johns Hopkins University, who discovered the enzyme telomerase in 1984 while working with Elizabeth Blackburn. She pioneered research on the structure of telomeres, the ends of chromosomes.
- Jack Myers
Jack Myers (July 10,1913-December 28, 2006) was an American molecular biologist and writer of popular science. Born in Boyds Mills, Pennsylvania, Myers graduated from Juniata College in 1933, and gained a Masters from Montana State University in 1935, and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1939. Myers joined the University of Texas in 1941, teaching until 1980. He continued researching as an emeritus professor until 1999.
- William French Anderson
William French Anderson, M.D. (b. 1936) is a U.S. physician, geneticist and molecular biologist. He is considered a pioneer of gene therapy. He graduated from Harvard College in 1958 and from Harvard Medical School in 1963. In 1990, he claimed to be the first person ever to succeed in gene therapy of a 4-year-old girl suffering from SCID (a form of an immuno-deficiency disorder called "bubble boy disease"). His claims were later found to have been exaggerated.
- Joan A. Steitz
Joan Argetsinger Steitz is a molecular biologist at Yale University, famed for her discoveries involving RNA, including ground-breaking insights such as that ribosomes interact with mRNA by complementary base pairing and that introns are spliced by snRNPs, small nuclear ribonucleoproteins which occur in eukaryotes (such as yeasts and humans).
- Tom Maniatis
Tom Maniatis born 8 May, 1943 in Denver, Colorado is an American professor of molecular and cellular biology. Maniatis is a graduate of the University of Colorado. At the age of 28 he received a PhD in Molecular Biology from Vanderbilt University, and he received Honorary PhD's from the University of Athens and the Watson School of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Maniatis carried out postdoctoral studies with Professor Mark Ptashne at Harvard University and with Dr.
- Jerry Adams
Jerry McKee Adams, FAA, FRS (born 17 June, 1940) is an American molecular biologist whose research into the genetics of haemopoietic differentiation and malignancy, led him and his wife, Professor Suzanne Cory, to be the first two scientists to pioneer gene cloning techniques in Australia, and to successfully clone mammalian genes.