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…
Dian Fossey Biography: Life Among Mountain Gorillas
The rain clung to her parka, the mist swallowing the volcanic slopes as she crawled through mud and bamboo toward a family of mountain gorillas. In that moment, Dian Fossey…
Nikolaas Tinbergen Biography: Four Questions of Behaviour
Anyone trying to make sense of animal behaviour ends up, sooner or later, walking through the pages of a Nikolaas Tinbergen biography. The Dutch-born ethologist spent his life watching foxes,…
Motoo Kimura Biography: Neutral Theory & Evolution
On an overcast day in 1968, in a modest office in Mishima, Japan, a reserved population geneticist sketched equations that would ignite one of the most intense debates in modern…
Carl Linnaeus Biography: Inside the Life of the Father of Taxonomy
The Carl Linnaeus biography often begins with a boy in a Swedish parsonage, quietly dismantling flowers as if they were intricate toys. In the early 18th century, when most people…
Ernst Haeckel Biography: Art, Evolution & Controversy
In the late nineteenth century, few figures embodied both the brilliance and the blind spots of modern science as vividly as Ernst Haeckel. Any serious Ernst Haeckel biography has to…
Sewall Wright Biography: Architect of Population Genetics
In most tellings of 20th-century science, the headlines belong to the stars: Darwin’s intellectual heirs, the fossil hunters, the charismatic lab showmen. Yet one of the most important stories hides…
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck Biography: Life Before Darwin
In the late nineteenth century, few figures embodied both the brilliance and the blind spots of modern science as vividly as Ernst Haeckel. Any serious Ernst Haeckel biography has to…
Lynn Margulis Biography: Symbiosis and Evolution Reborn
On a cold November day in 2011, news spread that Lynn Margulis had died at 73, after a stroke at her home in Amherst, Massachusetts. For most people outside science,…
Ernst Mayr biography: Darwin’s 20th-Century Heir
To tell an Ernst Mayr biography is to trace the arc of a century in which biology reinvented itself. When he was born in 1904, evolution was still a contested idea and…
Matthias Schleiden Biography: From Courtroom to Cell
On a winter evening in the late 1830s, a disillusioned lawyer turned botanist peered down a microscope in a German laboratory and saw something that would change biology forever. This…
Theodor Schwann biography: The Quiet Architect of Cell Theory
In most school textbooks, cell theory is summed up in a few bullet points. All living things are made of cells; cells are the basic units of life. Tucked behind…
Rosalind Franklin biography: the woman who saw DNA in X-rays
The Rosalind Franklin biography is often told as a story of a brilliant woman cheated of her place in history: the scientist whose X-ray photograph unlocked the double helix, while others walked…
James Watson Biography: DNA, Genius and Fallout
On a cold Cambridge morning in the early 1950s, a young American biologist strode into the Cavendish Laboratory carrying little more than boldness, gossip and a hunger to solve one…
Francis Crick Biography: DNA, Genes and Mind
For anyone who has ever seen the famous DNA double helix spiralling across a textbook cover, the Francis Crick biography is the story behind that image. It is the story…
Barbara McClintock Biography: Jumping Genes & Genius
The Barbara McClintock biography reads almost like a detective story, unfolding not in city streets but in rows of corn that shimmered in the New York summer heat. Long before…
Thomas Hunt Morgan Biography: Father of Gene Mapping
Any Thomas Hunt Morgan biography begins in a cramped New York classroom that smelled faintly of yeast and overripe bananas, where glass bottles buzzed with tiny fruit flies and a…
Gregor Mendel Biography: The Quiet Monk Who Founded Genetics
On a patch of soil behind an Augustinian monastery in the city of Brno, a quiet friar knelt among rows of pea plants and began counting. It was not a…
Alexander Fleming Biography & the Birth of Penicillin
On a late-summer morning in 1928, in a cramped London laboratory piled high with forgotten petri dishes, a quiet Scotsman noticed that one of his bacterial cultures had gone wrong.…
Robert Koch Biography: Germs, TB and Modern Medicine
The phrase Robert Koch biography often conjures an image of a stern German doctor staring down a microscope, hunting for invisible killers. It is an accurate picture, but also a surprisingly incomplete…