- Francis Collins
Francis S. Collins (born April 14, 1950), M.D., Ph.D., is a physician-geneticist, noted for his landmark discoveries of disease genes, and his leadership of the Human Genome Project (HGP). He is director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). With Collins at the helm, the HGP has attained several milestones, while running ahead of schedule and under budget. A working draft of the human genome was announced in June 2000, …
- 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.
- Gregor Mendel
Gregor Johann Mendel (July 20, 1822 - January 6, 1884) was a Moravian Augustinian priest and scientist often called the "father of modern genetics" for his study of the inheritance of traits in pea plants. Mendel showed that the inheritance of traits follows particular laws, which were later named after him. The significance of Mendel's work was not recognised until the turn of the 20th century. Its rediscovery prompted the foundation of genetics
- David Suzuki
David Takayoshi Suzuki, CC, OBC, Ph.D (born March 24 1936), is a Canadian science broadcaster and environmental activist. Since the mid 1970s, Suzuki has become known for his TV and radio series and books about nature and the environment. He is best known as host of the popular and long-running CBC Television science magazine, "The Nature of Things", seen in syndication in over 40 nations.
- Barbara McClintock
Barbara McClintock was a pioneering American scientist and one of the world's most distinguished cytogeneticists. McClintock received her PhD in botany from Cornell University in 1927, where she was a leader in the development of maize cytogenetics. The field remained the focus of her research for the rest of her career. From the late 1920s, McClintock studied chromosomes and how they change during reproduction in maize.
- Spencer Wells
Spencer Wells (born April 6 1969 in Georgia, USA) is a geneticist and anthropologist, and an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society. He leads The Genographic Project.
- Richard Lewontin
Richard Charles "Dick" Lewontin (born March 29, 1929) is an American evolutionary biologist, geneticist and social commentator. A leader in developing the mathematical basis of population genetics and evolutionary theory, he pioneered the notion of using techniques from molecular biology such as gel electrophoresis to apply to questions of genetic variation and evolution. In a pair of 1966 papers co-authored with J.L. Hubby in the journal "Genetics", …
- Theodosius Dobzhansky
Theodosius Grygorovych Dobzhansky (Ukrainian - Теодосій Григорович Добжанський; sometimes anglicized to Theodore Dobzhansky; January 25, 1900 - December 18, 1975) was a noted geneticist and evolutionary biologist. Dobzhansky was born in Ukraine (then part of Imperial Russia) and emigrated to the United States in 1927.
- 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".
- Thomas Hunt Morgan
Thomas Hunt Morgan (September 25, 1866 - December 4, 1945) was an American geneticist and embryologist. Morgan received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1891 and researched embryology during his tenure at Bryn Mawr. Following the rediscovery of Mendelian inheritance in 1900, Morgan's research moved to the study of mutation in the fruit fly "Drosophila melanogaster".
- Sewall Wright
Sewall Green Wright ForMemRS (December 21, 1889 – March 3, 1988) was an American geneticist known for his influential work on evolutionary theory. Along with R. A. Fisher and J.B.S. Haldane, he was a founder of theoretical population genetics. Evolutionary biologists argue as to whether Fisher or Wright made the greater contribution. He is the discoverer of the inbreeding coefficient and of methods of computing it in pedigrees.
- Francis Galton
Sir Francis Galton F.R.S. (February 16, 1822 - January 17, 1911), half-cousin of Charles Darwin, was an English Victorian polymath, anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, psychometrician, and statistician. He was knighted in 1909. Galton had a prolific intellect, and produced over 340 papers and books throughout his lifetime.
- J. B. S. Haldane
John Burdon Sanderson Haldane FRS (November 5, 1892 - December 1, 1964), who normally used "J.B.S." as a first name, was a British geneticist and evolutionary biologist. He was one of the founders (along with Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright) of population genetics.
- George Church
George Church (1954-) is an American molecular geneticist. He is currently Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Health Sciences & Technology at Harvard and MIT. With Walter Gilbert he developed the first direct genomic sequencing method in 1984 and helped initiate the Human Genome Project in 1984 while he was a Research Scientist at newly-formed Biogen Inc. He invented the broadly-applied concepts of molecular multiplexing and tags, …
- Mario Capecchi
Mario Capecchi , Ph.D. Distinguished Professor Co-Chairman of Human Genetics Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
- Charles Murray
Charles Alan Murray (born 1943) is a controversial libertarian American race researcher. He is employed as a conservative political policy writer at the American Enterprise Institute. In the controversial book, "The Bell Curve", co-authored with the late Richard Herrnstein, they claim that affirmative action is a waste of resources because environmental interventions cannot overcome what they claim is the markedly inferior intellect of African Americans.
- Dean Hamer
Dr Dean Hamer (born 1951) is a geneticist, who, as of 2007 is the director of the Gene Structure and Regulation Unit at the U.S. National Cancer Institute (part of the National Institutes of Health). He obtained his BA at Trinity College, CT, USA and his Ph.D from Harvard Medical School. He was a co-inventor of gene transfer in animal cells and the first to produce growth hormones, vaccine subunits, and other useful products by this approach.
- John Maynard Smith
Professor John Maynard Smith, F.R.S. (6 January 1920 - 19 April 2004) was a British evolutionary biologist and geneticist. Originally an aeronautical engineer during the Second World War, he then took a second degree in genetics under the well-known biologist J.B.S. Haldane. Maynard Smith was instrumental in the application of game theory to evolution and theorised on other problems such as the evolution of sex and signaling theory.
- Alec Jeffreys
Sir Alec John Jeffreys, FRS (born 9 January 1950 at Oxford in Oxfordshire) is a British geneticist, who developed techniques for DNA fingerprinting and DNA profiling. After graduating from the University of Oxford, he moved to the University of Leicester in 1977, where he developed genetic fingerprinting. DNA fingerprinting uses variations in the genetic code to identify individuals. The technique has been applied in forensics for law enforcement, …
- Bruce Lahn
Bruce Lahn (1969-) is a geneticist at the University of Chicago specializing in evolutionary genetics, especially the genetic basis that underlies the dramatic evolutionary changes of the human brain. Lahn's other research interests include stem cell biology and neurogenetics. His research on the microcephalin gene led to a hypothesis that Neanderthals may have contributed to the recent development of the human brian.
- William Bateson
William Bateson (August 8, 1861 - February 8, 1926) was a British geneticist. He was the first person to use the term genetics to describe the study of heredity and biological inheritance.
- Ronald Fisher
Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher, FRS (17 February 1890 – 29 July 1962) was an English statistician, evolutionary biologist, and geneticist. He was described by Anders Hald as "a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science" and Richard Dawkins described him as "the greatest of Darwin's successors".
- Richard Goldschmidt
Richard Benedict Goldschmidt was a German-born American geneticist. He is considered the first to integrate genetics, development, and evolution. He pioneered understanding of reaction norms, genetic assimilation, dynamical genetics, and heterochrony. Controversially, Goldschmidt advanced a model of macroevolution through macromutations that is popularly known as the "Hopeful Monster" hypothesis. Goldschmidt also described the nervous system of the nematode, …
- Mary-Claire King
Mary-Claire King (1946-) is an American human geneticist. She is professor at the University of Washington, where she studies the genetics and interaction of genetics and environmental influences on human conditions such as HIV, lupus, inherited deafness, and also breast and ovarian cancer.
- M. S. Swaminathan
Monkombu Sambasivan Swaminathan is an Indian agriculture scientist, born August 7, 1925, in Kumbakonam, Tamilnadu, The second of four sons of a surgeon. His ancestral home is the island village of Monkompu, Alleppey District, Kerala. He is known as "Father of the Green Revolution" in India, for his leadership and success in introducing and further developing high yielding varieties of wheat in India.
- Jacques Monod
Jacques Lucien Monod was a French biologist who was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965. Born in Paris, he was also awarded several other honours and distinctions, among them the Légion d'honneur. Monod (along with François Jacob) is famous for his work on the Lac operon. Study of the control of expression of genes in the Lac operon provided the first example of a transcriptional regulation system.
- Hermann Joseph Muller
Hermann Joseph "H. J." Muller (December 21, 1890 - April 5, 1967) was a Nobel Prize-winning American geneticist and educator, best known for his work on the physiological and genetic effects of radiation (X-ray mutagenesis) as well as his outspoken political beliefs.
- Michael Smith
Michael Smith, CC, OBC (April 26, 1932 - October 4, 2000) was a British-born Canadian biochemist who was the 1993 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry. Smith received the Prize for his fundamental contributions to the establishment of oligonucleotide-based, site-directed mutagenesis and its development for protein studies. Born in Blackpool, England, he received his PhD in 1956 from the University of Manchester.
- Stephen Oppenheimer
Stephen Oppenheimer (born 1947), a British physician, a member of Green College, Oxford and an honorary fellow of Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, performs and publishes research in the field of genetics. From 1972 Oppenheimer worked as a clinical paediatrician in Malaysia, Nepal and Papua New Guinea. From 1979 he moved into medical research and teaching, with positions at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, Oxford University, a research centre in Kilifi, …
- Massimo Pigliucci
As professor of ecology and evolution, he does research and teaching at SUNY-Stony Brook when he is not pursuing his interests in philosophy of science at the same institution.
- James F. Crow
James F. Crow (b. 1916) is Professor Emeritus of Genetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Some of his most significant peer-reviewed contributions were coauthored with Motoo Kimura. His major contribution to the field, however, is arguably his teaching. He has written an influential introductory textbook on genetics and a more advanced one with Kimura, and the list of his graduate and undergraduate students and postdocs includes Alexey Kondrashov, James Bull, …
- Leroy Hood
Dr. Hood is recognized as one of the world's leading scientists in molecular biotechnology and genomics. A passionate and dedicated researcher, he holds numerous patents and awards for his work and prides himself on his life-long commitment to making science accessible to the general public. One of his foremost goals is to bring hands-on, inquiry-based science to K-12 classrooms.
- Neil Risch
Neil Risch is an American human geneticist and professor at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Risch is the Lamond Family Foundation Distinguished Professor in Human Genetics and Director of the Institute for Human Genetics and Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at UCSF. Known for his work on numerous genetic diseases including torsion dystonia, Risch emphasizes the links between population genetics and clinical application, …
- Edward B. Lewis
Edward B. Lewis (May 20, 1918 - July 21, 2004) was an American geneticist, the winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Medicine. Lewis was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania and graduated from E.L. Meyers High School. He received a B.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1938, where he worked on "Drosophila melanogaster" in the lab of C.P. Oliver. In 1942 Lewis received a Ph.D. from California Institute of Technology (Caltech), …
- Seymour Benzer
Seymour Benzer (born October 15, 1921) is an accomplished American physicist, molecular biologist and behavioral geneticist.
- Walter Bodmer
Sir Walter Bodmer is a German-born British human geneticist. Bodmer has developed models for population genetics and done work on the HLA system and the use of somatic cell hybrids for human linkage studies. Bodmer became the Principal of Hertford College, Oxford, in 1996. He was the Director General (1991–1996) and director of research (1979-1991) of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974 and was knighted in 1986.
- Nikolai Vavilov
Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov was a prominent Russian botanist and geneticist best known for having identified the centres of origin of cultivated plants. He devoted his life to the study and improvement of wheat, corn, and other cereal crops that sustain the global population. He was born into a merchant family in Moscow, the older brother of renowned physicist Sergey Ivanovich Vavilov.
- 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.
- David Sloan Wilson
David Sloan Wilson (1949-) is an American evolutionary biologist. Son of the author Sloan Wilson, David Sloan Wilson is a distinguished professor at Binghamton University. He is a prominent proponent of the concept of group selection in evolution. He has, along with Elliott Sober in their book "Unto Others" proposed a framework called multilevel selection theory, which incorporates the more orthodox approach of gene-level selection and individual selection.
- George Wells Beadle
George Wells Beadle (October 22, 1903 - June 9, 1989) was an American scientist in the field of genetics. He shared half of the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Edward Lawrie Tatum for their discovery that genes act by regulating biochemical events within the cell. The other half of that year's award went to Joshua Lederberg. Beadle and Tatum's key experiments involved exposing the bread mold "Neurospora crassa" to x-rays, causing mutations.