Biology & Medicine

The 'father of medicine' sought natural causes of disease rather than divine ones and gave physicians an ethic that survives in the oath.

His careful studies of animals founded natural history and comparative anatomy, and his classification of life stood for two thousand years.

Physician to gladiators and emperors, his anatomy and physiology dominated Western and Islamic medicine for over a thousand years.

His Canon of Medicine organised all known medical knowledge into a system taught in Europe and the Islamic world for six centuries.

Avicenna's encyclopaedia codified diagnosis, drugs, and the tenets of medical practice, a standard textbook well into the Renaissance.

He described the pulmonary circulation of the blood three centuries before Europe, correcting Galen from careful reasoning.

By dissecting human bodies himself, he corrected centuries of Galen's errors and founded modern observational anatomy.

Vesalius's magnificently illustrated atlas, published the same year as Copernicus's book, remade anatomy from direct observation.

By measurement and experiment he proved the heart pumps blood around the body in a closed circle, founding modern physiology.

With hand-ground lenses he first saw bacteria, protozoa, and sperm cells — the founder of microbiology.

Looking at cork through his microscope, he named the 'cell', and his Micrographia revealed a hidden world too small to see.

He gave every species a two-word Latin name and a nested classification, the ordering of life still used by biologists today.

Linnaeus's great catalogue placed plants, animals, and minerals into a single hierarchical system of kingdoms, classes, and species.

Edward Jenner showed that cowpox protects against deadly smallpox, inventing vaccination and eventually eradicating the disease.

His theory of evolution by natural selection explained the diversity and kinship of all living things from a single simple mechanism.

Breeding pea plants, he discovered the mathematical laws of heredity, founding genetics decades before the world noticed.

He proved that microbes cause fermentation and disease, disproved spontaneous generation, and created vaccines against rabies and anthrax.

Schleiden and Schwann proposed that all plants and animals are built of cells — one of biology's great unifying principles.

He identified the microbes of anthrax, tuberculosis, and cholera and set the rigorous rules for proving that a germ causes a disease.

Darwin's book laid out the evidence for evolution and natural selection, reshaping biology and our view of humanity's place in nature.

Working with fruit flies, he showed that genes lie on chromosomes, turning Mendel's abstract factors into physical objects.

Alexander Fleming noticed a mould killing bacteria, leading to the first antibiotic and the saving of countless lives.

Biologists fused Darwin's natural selection with Mendel's genetics and population mathematics into a single theory of evolution.

Watson and Crick, using Franklin's X-ray images, revealed the structure of DNA and how heredity is copied and passed on.

Researchers worked out how triplets of DNA letters spell each amino acid, revealing the universal language shared by all life.

The ability to cut and splice genes between organisms launched genetic engineering and the entire biotechnology industry.

An international effort read the three billion letters of human DNA, giving medicine and biology a complete genetic reference.

A bacterial defence system was turned into a precise tool for editing DNA, making the rewriting of genomes cheap and routine.

Decades of molecular biology paid off when mRNA vaccines were designed, tested, and deployed against a new virus within a single year.