Biographical

Outline of the History of Biology in Finland

Daniel Bernoulli was born on January 29th 1700. He came from a long line of mathematicians. His father Johann was head of mathematics at Groningen University in the Netherlands. The family was prone to bitter rivalry: something he was to suffer when he became estranged from his father some 30 years later.

At the age of five, the Bernoulli family returned home to Basel in Switzerland, so that Johann's wife could be with her ailing father. Some years earlier Johann had applied to become professor of mathematics at Basel University, but this was denied him because his elder brother, Jakob had deliberately schemed to prevent him getting the post. Later Jakob got the professorship. En route to Basel, Johann learned that Jakob had just died of tuberculosis. He later recalled rather shamelessly that " ... I could succeed to my brother's position." He set about lobbying for the vacant position and in less than two months he got his way.

This paper explores the dissemination and development of science in colonial America. Specifically, I examine a general periodical (or newspaper), the Pennsylvania Gazette, in the years 1729 - 1765. I impose the modern definition of science to describe a style of enlightenment natural inquiry which would include natural philosophy, naturalism, technics, medicine, and husbandry, among others. I utilize three questions:
What was the role of the Pennsylvania Gazette in the 'popularization' and accessibility of science?
How did the Pennsylvania Gazette serve the interests of the public and of those doing science?
What was the image of natural philosophy that was promoted in the Pennsylvania Gazette?

Welcome to the National Library of Medicine's Profiles in Science site!
This site celebrates twentieth-century leaders in biomedical research and public health. It makes the archival collections of prominent scientists, physicians, and others who have advanced the scientific enterprise available to the public through modern digital technology.

If the word hydraulics is understood to mean the use of water for the benefit of mankind, then its practice must be considered to be even older than recorded history itself. Traces of irrigation canals from prehistoric times still exist in Egypt and Mesopotamia; the Nile is known to have been dammed at Memphis some six thousand years ago to provide the necessary water supply, and the Euphrates River was diverted into the Tigris even earlier for the same purpose. Ancient wells still in existence reach to surprisingly great depths; and underground aqueducts were bored considerable distances, even through bedrock. In what is now Pakistan, houses were provided with ceramic conduits for water supply and drainage some five thousand years ago; and legend tells of vast flood-control projects in China barely a millenium later. All of this [1] clearly demonstrates that men must have begun to deal with the flow of water countless millenia before these times.

These web pages are the result of a project for Dr. Phillips's Psychology of Women class, Spring 1999. Originally these biographies of women in psychology were displayed as a bulletin board recognizing March as Women's History Month. When we searched the web and found almost no information on women in psychology, we decided to make it a resource that the world could share.
In chosing women to write about, we tried to include women of various races, ages, and sexual orientations. Some of these women are famous, some are not. Some are modern, and some are from the past. We feel they all share one trait, however: They are all remarkable women who have made an impact on psychology. We hope you enjoy reading about them.

STEPHEN JAY GOULD teaches biology, geology and the history of science at Harvard University, where he has been on the faculty since 1967. He received an A.B. from Antioch College and a PhD. in paleontology from Columbia University. Well known for his popular scientific writings, in particular his monthly column in Natural History magazine, he is the author of 13 books.
Some creators announce their inventions with grand éclat. God proclaimed, "Fiat lux," and then flooded his new universe with brightness. Others bring forth great discoveries in a modest guise, as did Charles Darwin in defining his new mechanism of evolutionary causality in 1859: "I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection."

Stephen William Hawking was born on 8 January 1942 (300 years after the death of Galileo) in Oxford, England. His parents' house was in north London, but during the second world war Oxford was considered a safer place to have babies. When he was eight, his family moved to St Albans, a town about 20 miles north of London. At eleven Stephen went to St Albans School, and then on to University College, Oxford, his father's old college. Stephen wanted to do Mathematics, although his father would have preferred medicine. Mathematics was not available at University College, so he did Physics instead. After three years and not very much work he was awarded a first class honours degree in Natural Science.

When future historians turn to examine the major intellectual accomplishments of the twentieth century, they will undoubtedly give a special place to the extraordinary achievements in biology, achievements that have revolutionized our understanding of life's processes and of disease. Important intimations of what was to happen in biology were already apparent in the second half of the nineteenth century. Darwin had delineated the evolution of animal species, Mendel had discovered some basic rules about inheritance, and Weissman, Roux, Driesch, de Vries, and other embryologists were beginning to decipher how an organism develops from a single cell. What was lacking at the end of the nineteenth century, however, was an overarching sense of how these bold advances were related to one another.

Edward O. Wilson is the founder of Sociobiology and is widely regarded to be the world's most famous living scientist. Recently, Wilson seized the word "consilience" from deep within the history of science and reintroduced it into our language by emblazoning it across the cover of his latest best-seller, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. In this book, Wilson offers to unify the "two cultures" of literature and science for once and forever, as "the way to renew the crumbling structure of the liberal arts" (12). It is an offer many of my colleagues find attractive, for Wilson carries enormous authority both as a natural scientist and as an eloquent speaker for the environmentally appealing concepts of "biophilia" and "biodiversity." He has well-nigh captured the Thoreau Society: for example, in June 1998 he joined Bill and Hillary Clinton as a featured guest at the opening of the Thoreau Institute, delivering a brief address which has been reprinted as the Preface to the Thoreau Society's collection of Thoreau's writings on science, which I edited and entitled Material Faith.