- 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
- Steve Jones
Steve Jones (born March 24, 1944) is a professor of genetics at Galton laboratory of University College London. He is also a television presenter and a prize-winning author on the subject of biology, especially evolution. He is one of the best known contemporary popular writers on evolution. His popular writing shows a wry, sometimes rather dark, sense of humour. In 1996 his writing won him the Royal Society Michael Faraday prize ``for his numerous, …
- Steve Sailer
Steven Ernest Sailer (born December 20, 1958) is an American journalist and movie critic for "The American Conservative", ex-correspondent for UPI, and VDARE.com columnist. He writes about race relations, gender issues, politics, immigration, IQ, genetics, movies, and sports. He is perhaps best known online as a blogger. Sailer grew up in Los Angeles and attended UCLA and Rice University.
- 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.
- 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.
- Ernst Mayr
Ernst Walter Mayr (July 5, 1904, Kempten, Germany - February 3, 2005, Bedford, Massachusetts U.S.), was one of the 20th century's leading evolutionary biologists. He was also a renowned taxonomist, tropical explorer, ornithologist, historian of science, and naturalist. His work contributed to the conceptual revolution that led to the modern evolutionary synthesis of Mendelian genetics, systematics, and Darwinian evolution, …
- 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", …
- 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, …
- Aubrey de Grey
Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey, Ph.D., (born 20 April 1963 in London, England) is a controversial biomedical gerontologist who lives in the city of Cambridge, UK. He is working to expedite the development of a cure for human aging, a medical goal he refers to as engineered negligible senescence. To this end, he has identified what he concludes are the seven areas of the aging process that need to be addressed medically before this can be done.
- 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.
- 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".
- Robert Webster
Robert G. ("Rob") Webster (born May 7, 1932), in Balclutha New Zealand, leading avian influenza expert, is the virologist who in 1957 was the first to announce a link between human flu and bird flu. He correctly posited that pandemic strains of flu arise from genes in flu virus strains in nonhumans; for example, …
- Norman Borlaug
Norman Ernest Borlaug (born March 25 1914) is an American agricultural scientist, humanitarian, Nobel laureate, and has been called the father of the Green Revolution. Borlaug is a recipient of the Congressional Gold Medal. Borlaug received his Ph.D. in plant pathology and genetics from the University of Minnesota in 1942. He took up an agricultural research position in Mexico, where he developed semi-dwarf high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties.
- David Botstein
David Botstein (born 1942 in Switzerland) is an American biologist who has been the director of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University since 2003. He graduated from Harvard in 1963 and received a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1967. He then taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he became a Professor of Genetics. In 1990, he became Chairman of the Department of Genetics at Stanford University.
- 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.
- Arthur Jensen
Arthur Jensen (born August 24 1923) is a Professor Emeritus of educational psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Jensen is known for his work in psychometrics and differential psychology, which is concerned with how and why individuals differ behaviorally from one another. He is a major proponent of the hereditarian position in the nature versus nurture debate, the position that concludes genetics play a significant role in behavioral traits, …
- Michael Stebbins
Michael Stebbins is an American geneticist and science writer. He received his B.S. in biology from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and his Ph.D. in genetics while working at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he constructed genetic systems to artificially control gene expression in the brain. Since August 2005, Dr. Stebbins has served as the Director of Biology Policy for the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), …
- Henry Harpending
Henry C. Harpending (1944-) is an anthropologist and population geneticist at the University of Utah, where he is a Distinguished Professor. Harpending has broken new ground in anthropology and human biology interpreting genetic and morphometric variation within and between human populations with mathematically based models, examining hypotheses such as population growth, divergence, and gene flow. Harpending is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
- 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.
- Greg Egan
Greg Egan (August 20, 1961, Perth, Western Australia) is an Australian computer programmer and science fiction author. Egan specialises in hard science fiction stories with mathematical and quantum ontology themes, including the nature of consciousness. Other themes include genetics, simulated reality, mind transfer, sexuality, artificial intelligence, and the superiority of rational materialism over religion.
- 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.
- Andrew Fire
Andrew Zachary Fire (born on April 27th 1959) is an American professor of genetics at Stanford University. Fire is one of the laureates of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, along with Craig C. Mello, for the discovery of RNA interference (RNAi). This research was conducted at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and published in 1998. Fire is currently professor of pathology and of genetics at the Stanford University School of Medicine, …
- 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".
- 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.
- Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard
Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard is a German biologist who won the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1991 and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1995, together with Eric Wieschaus and Edward B. Lewis, for their research on the genetic control of embryonic development.
- Allan Wilson
Allan Wilson (1934-1991) was a pioneer in the use of molecular approaches to understand evolutionary change and reconstruct phylogenies. He was one of the most controversial figures in post-war biology; his work attracted a great deal of attention both from within, and outside, the academic world. Allan Wilson was born in Ngaruawahia, New Zealand, and raised on a farm at Helvetia, Pukekohe. He attended King's College in Auckland and excelled in maths and chemistry.
- Svante Pääbo
Svante Pääbo is a biologist specializing in evolutionary genetics. He was born in 1955 in Stockholm, Sweden and earned his PhD from Uppsala University in 1986. Since 1997, he has been director of the Department of Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. In 1992, he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which is the highest honour awarded in German research.
- Trofim Lysenko
Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was a biologist and agronomist who was dictator of Soviet biology under Joseph Stalin. Lysenko rejected Mendelian genetics in favor of the hybridization theories of Russian horticulturist Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin, and adopted them into a powerful political scientific movement termed Lysenkoism. His unorthodox experimental research in improved crop yields earned the support of Soviet leadership, …
- Jesse Gelsinger
Jesse Gelsinger (June 18 1981 - September 17 1999) was the first person publicly identified as having died in a clinical trial for gene therapy. He was 18 years old. Gelsinger suffered from ornithine transcarbamylase deficiency, an X-linked genetic disease of the liver, whose victims are unable to metabolize ammonia - a byproduct of protein breakdown.
- Motoo Kimura
Motoo Kimura, (November 13, 1924 - November 13, 1994) was a Japanese biologist best known for introducing the neutral theory of molecular evolution in 1968. He became one of the most influential theoretical population geneticist. In genetics, he is famous for his innovative use of diffusion equations to calculate the probability of fixation and time to fixation of beneficial, deleterious, or neutral alleles.
- Richard Axel
Richard Axel, M.D. (born July 2, 1946, New York City) is an American scientist whose work on the olfactory system won him and Linda B. Buck, a former post-doctoral scientist in his research group, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2004. In their landmark paper published in 1991, Buck and Axel cloned olfactory receptors, showing that they belong to the family of G protein coupled receptors.
- Masatoshi Nei
Masatoshi Nei is Professor of Biology at Pennsylvania State University and Director of the Institute of Molecular Evolutionary Genetics. Nei is co-founder of the journal "Molecular Biology and Evolution", together with Walter M. Fitch. He was born in 1931 in Miyazaki Prefecture, in Kyushu Island, Japan. He made important contributions to the fields of the evolutionary genetics and molecular evolution, and coined the term Molecular Population Genetics, …
- Jonathan Marks
Jonathan Marks (born 1955) is a biological anthropologist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Born in 1955, he studied at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and took graduate degrees in genetics and anthropology from the University of Arizona, completing his doctorate in 1984. He did post-doctoral research in the genetics department at UC-Davis from 1984-1987, …
- Jerome Groopman
Jerome Groopman has been a staff writer in medicine and biology for "The New Yorker" since 1998. He is also the Dina and Raphael Recanati Chair of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Chief of Experimental Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and author of four books. He has published approximately 150 scientific articles and has written several Op-Ed pieces on medicine for the "New York Times", the "Washington Post", …
- 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.
- Alfred Hershey
Alfred Day Hershey was an American Nobel Prize-winning bacteriologist and geneticist. He was born in Owosso, Michigan and received his B.S. in chemistry at Michigan State University in 1930 and his Ph.D. in bacteriology in 1934, taking a position shortly thereafter at the Department of Bacteriology at Washington University in St. Louis. He began performing experiments with bacteriophages with Italian-American Salvador Luria and German Max Delbrück in 1940, …
- Michael Levin
Michael Levin (born 21 May 1943; Ph.D., Columbia University) is a professor of philosophy at City University of New York, who has published works on psionics, metaphysics, epistemology, race, homosexuality, animal rights, the philosophy of archaeology, the philosophy of logic, philosophy of language, and the philosophy of science. He is critical of certain sects of feminism, …
- Mark Geier
Dr. Mark R. Geier has an MD., with a PhD in genetics. Dr. Geier is president of the Genetic Centers of America, president of the Institute of Chronic Illnesses and has been in clinical practice for more than 25 years. He was a researcher at the National Institutes of Health for 10 years. Dr. Geier was also a professor at the Johns Hopkins University and at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.
- Ian Gibson
Ian Gibson (born September 26, 1938) British politician, is the Labour Member of Parliament for Norwich North. Ian Gibson was born in Dumfries, Scotland and was educated locally at the Dumfries Academy, before attending the University of Edinburgh where he was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in genetics and became a Doctor of Philosophy. He continued his studies in the United States of America at both Indiana University and the University of Washington.
- Peter McGuffin
Peter McGuffin is a psychiatric geneticist from Belfast, Northern Ireland. After emigrated with his parents at aged 10 to the Isle of Wight, he first decided that he wanted to be a psychiatrist at the age of 16 after coming across Freud’s "Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis", in a local public library. He attended medical school at the University of Leeds, England where he graduated in 1972 and then received postgraduate training in internal medicine.