| CONTENTS |
 Louis
Agassiz was one of Europe's most
prominent experts on living and fossil fishes, as
well as one of the first scientists to propose
that all of central Europe had once been buried
beneath a massive sheet of ice. After moving to
the United States, he spurred development of a
Museum of Natural History at Harvard University. |
 George Wells Beadle
shared the 1958 Nobel Prize for Physiology or
Medicine with two colleagues for experiments with
a bread mold that enabled them to conclude that
each gene determined the structure of a specific
enzyme that, in turn, allowed a single chemical
reaction to proceed. |
| David Ross Brower
spent his life working to preserve the
environment and natural resources of the earth.
To that end he founded Friends of the Earth, the
League of Conservation Voters, Earth Island
Institute, and other environmental groups. He
also helped create a number of national parks. |
 Stephen Jay Gould
became interested in paleontology at the age of
five. As an adult, he co-developed the theory of punctuated
equilibrium, which says that the
creation of new species through evolutionary
change occurs in rather rapid bursts over periods
as short as thousands of years. He also did much
to make science understandable to
untrained readers. |
 Ernst
Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel studied the embryos of many different
kinds of animals and made drawings, many of which
are still used in biology books. Seeing that the
embryos of very different types of animals often
looked remarkably similar during their earliest
stages of development, he formulated his theory
of recapitulation. |
 Jean Baptiste Lamarck
believed that if an animal began using an organ
more than it had in the past, the size of that
organ would increase during its lifetime. For example, if a giraffe stretched its
neck to reach higher leaves, a "nervous
fluid" would flow into its neck and make it
longer over time. |
 Antonie von
Leeuwenhoek used microscopes of his
own design and construction to become the first
person to study protozoa, bacteria, and other
microscopic organisms. In so doing, he also
became the first scientist to disprove the theory
of spontaneous generation. |
 Carolus Linnaeus
developed the system now called binomial
nomenclature, which gives to each plant or animal
two names. The first indicates the genus (related
group) to which belongs, while the second gives
the species (specific name) of the specific plant
or animal within the genus. |
 Gregor Johann Mendel
was the first to conduct detailed experiments in
heredity by focusing on individual
characteristics within a single plant species.
His 30-plus years of study resulted in his
discovery of genes, and of how those genes
combine to create a wide diversity of
characteristics. |
 Archibald Menzies
accompanied Captain George Vancouver on his
voyage around the world. His job was to
investigate the whole of the natural history of
the countries visited and enumerate all trees,
shrubs, plants, etc. found by their scientific
names. His name is commemorated in the scientific
names of several of the plants he discovered. |
