Life Sciences

Let's start with an abbreviated Biography of Mendel, and a discussion of how Mendel's life interweaves with world events.
For those who want to know more about the man and his contributions, MendelWeb is the complete source site for everything to do with Gregor Mendel, his work in plant hybridization (you can read the original paper!) and commentary on Mendel's work by other noted scientists.
But, If you just want to obtain more information on the pea experiments themselves, and their relation to basic genetics, The Biology Project: Mendelian Genetics offers host of tutorials and self-testing problems basic genetics, while:
Practice Problems for Mendelian genetics will give you some simple problems, with solutions, which you can use to test your understanding of basic Mendelian genetics.

Robert Hooke (1635-1703), a mechanic, is believed to give 'cells' their name when he examined a thin slice of cork under microscope, he thought cells looked like the small, rectangular rooms monks lived.
1651 William Harvey suggests that all living things originate from eggs
1694 JR Camerarius does pollination experiments and discovers sex in flowering plants

The attempts to reintegrate embryology and genetics during the last years of the 1930s represent the last chapter in the emergence of American biology. When had American biology finished "emerging"? I suspect that stage was reached when it had successfully resisted the last attempts to reintegrate it into European-dominated traditions of inquiry. For genetics, this occurred in the late 1930s when Richard B. Goldschmidt and Ernest Everett Just separately countered the American school of genetics with European alternatives. Goldschmidt and Just both attempted to place genetics into a physiological framework. Goldschmidt was the director of the genetics section of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute before fleeing the Nazis and coming to America in 1936. For Goldschmidt, the "static genetics" of T. H. Morgan, centered on individual particulate genes, was to be replaced by "physiological genetics" wherein the gene did not exist as an individual unit, and its activity, not its location, was the focus of research.

Agnes Arber was an eminent plant morphologist during the first half of the twentieth century. In an attempt to understand more completely the organs and organisms she had studied, she turned to philosophy and metaphysics, and ended her career as a mystic. In an article in 1941 ("The interpretation of leaf and root in the angiosperms." Biological Reviews 16: 81-105) she wrote "The leaf is a partial shoot . . . which has an inherent urge towards the development of whole shoot characters."

This web site is devoted to the Institute for History and Foundations of Science, which is part of the Faculty of Physics and Astronomy at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. The Institute consists of two distinct Sections: the History of Mathematics and the Natural Sciences Section and the Foundations of Physics Section, both located in De Uithof at the edge of the city of Utrecht.

Carl Sagan played a leading role in theAmerican space program since its inception. He was a consultant and adviser to NASA beginning in the 1950s, briefed the Apollo astronauts before their flights to the Moon, and was an experimenter on the Mariner, Viking, Voyager, and Galileo expeditions to the planets. He helped solve the mysteries of the high temperature of Venus (a massive greenhouse effect), the seasonal changes on Mars (windblown dust) and the reddish haze of Titan (complex organic molecules).

The scientists, Seth Meek and Charles Gilbert, had discovered a new species of fish. They named it Etheostoma nianguae. Today we know it as the Niangua darter, a now federally threatened fish found nowhere else but in streams in the Osage River basin. The pair's scientific expedition across the Ozarks that summer and other work vastly expanded our knowledge of the richly varied aquatic life in Missouri's streams.

When their father died, Fleming's eldest brother inherited the running of the farm. Another brother Tom had studied medicine and was opening a practice in London. Soon, four Fleming brothers and a sister were living together in London. Alec, as he was called, had moved to London when he was about 14, and went to the Polytechnic School in Regent Street. Tom encouraged him to enter business. After completing school he was employed by a shipping firm, though he didn't much like it. In 1900, when the Boer War broke out between the United Kingdom and its colonies in southern Africa, Alec and two brothers joined a Scottish regiment. This turned out to be as much a sporting club as anything; they honed their shooting, swimming, and even water polo skills, but never went to the Transvaal. Soon after this, the Flemings' uncle died and left them each 250 pounds. Tom's medical practice was now thriving and he encouraged Alec to put his legacy toward the study of medicine.

The "Irish Lives" project grew out of the radio programme PRISM's decision to include a regular look-back section that gave a brief biography of Irish scientists in history. The following pages are the scripts of those talks. IRSA and the "PRISM" team would like to thank Dr Charles Mollan of SAMTON Ltd for preparing the scripts and for giving permission to publish them on the World Wide Web.
Down along the lefthand side are the names of the people in our series. We are still anxious to collect more biographies. Our present collection includes some held at sites other than our own server.

During the 1998-1999 academic year, Iowa State University celebrated the legacy of its first African American student and faculty member, George Washington Carver. Renowned for developing innovative uses for a variety of agricultural crops such as peanuts, soybeans and sweet potatoes, Carver's legacy at Iowa State is even more than academic achievement. He was an accomplished musician, artist, orator, athletic trainer and student leader. Iowa State's land-grant heritage provided a rich environment where he could take root and blossom. It is an environment that remains rich in academic, cultural, artistic and athletic opportunities.