Famous People Who Made Scientific Discoveries a to z

Francis Bacon was an English Renaissance statesman and philosopher, best known for his promotion the scientific method.

Joseph Banks was a late-18th to early-19th century British explorer and botanist who pushed for the advancement of science.

Henri Becquerel was a French physicist who discovered radioactivity, an achievement for which he won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903.

Alexander Graham Bell was one of the primary inventors of the telephone, did important work in communication for the deaf and held more than 18 patents.

Naturalist, inventor and businessman Clarence Birdseye pioneered the process of flash freezing in the United States. His company was bought by General Foods.

J. Michael Bishop is a Nobel Prize winning physician and scholar who made groundbreaking discoveries in cancer research.

Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose is known for working with Albert Einstein on the Bose-Einstein Condensate and as namesake of the boson, or “God particle.”

German physicist Ferdinand Braun was the co-recipient of the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics for his developments with wireless technology.

Sydney Brenner is a Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist and a science writer.

Michael S. Brown is a molecular geneticist who was co-awarded a 1985 Nobel Prize for his work on the metabolism of cholesterol in the human body.

British astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell assisted in constructing a large radio telescope and discovered pulsars, cosmic sources of peculiar radio pulses.

Macfarlane Burnet was an Australian physician and researcher who made groundbreaking discoveries in the fields of immunology and virology.

A chemist, W.H. Carothers worked for DuPont and with his research laid the foundation for the synthetic fiber industry.

Scientist George Carruthers created inventions, such as the ultraviolet camera, or spectograph, which was used by NASA in the 1972 Apollo 16 flight, revealing the mysteries of space and the Earth's atmosphere.

Rachel Carson was a marine biologist, environmentalist and writer who alerted the world to the environmental impact of fertilizers and pesticides.

George Washington Carver was a prominent African-American scientist and inventor. Carver is best known for the many uses he devised for the peanut.

Costa Rican-born Franklin Chang-Díaz was the first Hispanic-American astronaut. He made several trips to space for NASA and developed plasma propulsion.

Scientist Edwin Cohn helped develop a method of separating blood plasma proteins, which provided lifesaving care to many soldiers during World War II.

Astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus identified the concept of a heliocentric solar system, in which the sun, rather than the earth, is the center of the solar system.

Marie Curie was a Polish-born French physicist famous for her work on radioactivity and twice a winner of the Nobel Prize.

French physicist Pierre Curie was of founding fathers of modern physics and is best known for being a pioneer in radioactive studies.

Chemist John Dalton is credited with pioneering modern atomic theory. He was also the first to study color blindness.

Charles Darwin is best known for his work as a naturalist, developing a theory of evolution to explain biological change.

Humphry Davy was a British chemist best known for his contributions to the discoveries of chlorine and iodine. He is noted for suggesting the anesthetic use of nitrous oxide in human surgery.

Austrian physicist Christian Doppler first described the Doppler effect, in reference to the observed frequency of light and sound waves, in the paper "Concerning the Coloured Light of Double Stars."

Renato Dulbecco was an Italian virologist best known winning the Nobel Prize for pioneering the growing of viruses in culture in the 1950s.

Inventor Thomas Edison created such great innovations as the electric light bulb, the telephone and the phonograph. A savvy businessman, he held more than a 1,000 patents for his inventions.

Albert Einstein was a German-born physicist who developed the theory of relativity. He is considered the most influential physicist of the 20th century.

Willem Einthoven was a physiologist who discovered the electrical properties of the heart and developed the EKG.

American biochemist and pharmacologist Gertrude B. Elion helped develop drugs to treat leukemia and prevent kidney transplant rejection. She won a Nobel Prize for medicine in 1988.

Physicist Enrico Fermi built the prototype of a nuclear reactor and worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bomb.

Jean Foucault was a French physicist and inventor best known for inventing the Foucault pendulum.

Benjamin Franklin is best known as one of the Founding Fathers who drafted the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.

British chemist Rosalind Franklin is best known for her role in the discovery of the structure of DNA ,and for her pioneering use of X-ray diffraction.

Italian scientist and scholar Galileo made pioneering observations that laid the foundation for modern physics and astronomy.

Francis Galton was an English explorer and anthropologist best known for his research in eugenics and human intelligence. He was the first to study the effects of human selective mating.

Jane Goodall created one of the most trailblazing studies of primates in modern times when she dwelled with Tanzanian chimps to observe their behavior.

American biologist A.D. Hershey won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1969 for his research done on viruses that infect bacteria.

Robert Hooke was an English philosopher, mathematician and architect who discovered the law of elasticity, now known as Hooke's law.

Astronomer Edwin Hubble revolutionized the field of astrophysics. His research helped prove that the universe is expanding, and he created a classification system for galaxies that has been used for several decades.

Heike Kamerlingh-Onnes was a Dutch scientist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his production of liquid helium. He also discovered superconductivity.

Edwin Land is best known as the inventor of the Polaroid camera and film, and as the co-founder of the Polaroid Corporation.

Immunologist and pathologist Karl Landsteiner received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the major blood types.

Mary Leakey was a paleoanthropologist who, along with husband Louis, made several prominent scientific discoveries. Skull fossils found by the Leakeys advanced our understanding of human evolution.

Rudolph A. Marcus is a Canadian chemist known for his research in electron-transfer reactions. He established what is known as the Marcus Theory, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1992.

Gregor Mendel was an Austrian monk who discovered the basic principles of heredity through experiments in his garden. Mendel's observations became the foundation of modern genetics and the study of heredity, and he is widely considered a pioneer in the field of genetics.

Dmitri Mendeleyev was a Russian chemist who developed the periodic classification of the elements.

Mexican-born chemist Mario Molina won a Nobel Prize in 1995 for his research on how man-made compounds affect the ozone layer.

English physicist and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton, most famous for his law of gravitation, was instrumental in the scientific revolution of the 17th century.