Eric Kandel Biography: Memory, Neuroscience & Legacy
On a quiet New York afternoon, long after the flashbulbs of Stockholm faded, Eric Kandel could still be found in his Columbia University office, talking with the same animated urgency…
Jane Goodall Biography: How One Woman Changed the Way We See Animals
The Jane Goodall biography begins not in a laboratory, but with a little girl hiding in a chicken coop, determined to find out how eggs were laid. That stubborn curiosity,…
Richard Dawkins Biography: Life, Ideas and Controversy
In the second half of the twentieth century, few writers managed to smuggle such difficult science into everyday conversation as successfully as Richard Dawkins. This Richard Dawkins biography is, in…
Hans Krebs Biography: The Doctor Behind the Krebs Cycle
In the second half of the twentieth century, few writers managed to smuggle such difficult science into everyday conversation as successfully as Richard Dawkins. This Richard Dawkins biography is, in…
Hermann Joseph Muller Biography: X-Rays, Genes and Power
At first glance, the Hermann Joseph Muller biography reads like the story of a man obsessed with tiny flies and invisible rays. Look closer and it becomes something bigger: a tale about…
Sydney Brenner biography: decoding the genetic code
On a dusty high street outside Johannesburg, in a shoe repair shop where his family slept behind the counter, a boy taught himself science from discarded books and old encyclopedias.…
Theodosius Dobzhansky Biography & Evolutionary Genetics
Long before his famous line that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”, Theodosius Dobzhansky was a shy boy collecting beetles in Kiev. A strong Theodosius…
J.B.S. Haldane Biography: Rebel of Modern Genetics
One way to begin a J.B.S. Haldane biography is in a muddy trench on the Western Front. A young British officer, already famous in his regiment for a reckless courage that bordered…
Edward Tatum Biography: The Scientist Who Linked Genes to Chemistry
On a winter day in Stockholm in 1958, a reserved American geneticist stepped onto the Nobel stage, sharing the spotlight with his long-time collaborator George Beadle and the young prodigy…
George Beadle Biography: The Farmer Who Rewired Genetics
Any honest George Beadle biography has to begin on a patch of Nebraska dirt. In the early 20th century, on a modest farm near the small town of Wahoo, a…
Susumu Tonegawa biography: from antibodies to memory engrams
On paper, the Susumu Tonegawa biography looks almost impossible. One scientist, born in wartime Japan, solves a century-old riddle about how our immune system makes millions of different antibodies, wins…
Jennifer Doudna Biography: CRISPR, Ethics and Gene Editing
The story told by any serious Jennifer Doudna biography begins with a deceptively simple question: what happens when a quiet, RNA-obsessed biochemist helps give humanity the power to rewrite life’s…
Joshua Lederberg Biography: Bacterial Genetics Pioneer
Any Joshua Lederberg biography has to begin with a disconcerting fact: by the time most students are wondering what to do with their lives, he had already helped to redraw…
Emmanuelle Charpentier Biography & the CRISPR Revolution
The story told in any serious Emmanuelle Charpentier biography begins far from the headlines about gene-editing revolutions and Nobel Prizes. It starts in a quiet commuter town just south of…
Alexander von Humboldt Biography & Environmental Legacy
In the early nineteenth century, if you wanted to understand the planet, you did not reach for a textbook – you reached for Alexander von Humboldt. Today, the Alexander von Humboldt…
Svante Pääbo Biography: The Man Who Sequenced Neanderthals
On an autumn morning in Leipzig in 2022, staff at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology threw their director into a pond. It was not a prank gone wrong…
Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard Biography & Legacy
The Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard biography is, above all, the story of a stubborn curiosity that refused to stay within the boundaries of any textbook. It begins with a girl growing up…
Peter Medawar Biography: Father of Modern Transplantation
On a September afternoon in 1969, inside Exeter Cathedral, a celebrated scientist stood at the lectern to address Britain’s scientific elite. Moments into the ceremony, he collapsed with a massive…
E.O. Wilson Biography: Ant Man, Sociobiology & Half-Earth
On a humid Gulf Coast morning in the 1930s, a boy in Alabama leaned so close to a fire-ant mound that it seemed to fill his entire world. Decades later…
Rudolf Virchow Biography: Father of Modern Pathology
On a cold March morning in 1848, a young Prussian doctor stepped off a carriage, boots caked with mud from the villages of Upper Silesia and pockets full of notes…
Salvador Luria Biography: Refugee Who Changed Biology
In the crowded history of twentieth-century science, the Salvador Luria biography reads almost like a novel. A young Jewish physician from Turin, pushed out of Fascist Italy by racist laws, crosses borders…
Frederick Sanger Biography: The Chemist Who Read DNA
In the usual telling of twentieth-century biology, the spotlight falls on the double helix and the race to discover DNA’s structure. Yet behind that iconic image stands another, quieter story:…
Jacques Monod biography: Chance, Necessity & Genes
On a winter night in post-war Paris, a tall, intense scientist paced between benches at the Institut Pasteur, watching flasks of E. coli cloud and clear under different sugars. Those unremarkable bacteria…
Kary Mullis Biography: The Maverick Who Changed DNA Forever
In the long, careful history of laboratory science, the story that sits at the heart of any serious Kary Mullis biography sounds almost like fiction. A chemist driving along a dark California…
Konrad Lorenz Biography: Imprinting, Instinct & Ethology
One autumn morning in rural Austria, a man in a worn shirt and rubber boots walks across a meadow, trailed by a long, wobbling procession of grey goslings. To the…