Name the Biologist

It's been a little while but here's a new "name the biologist". It's still techniques oriented, until it turns into something else, so the list of candidates should be shrinking

As for the last instalment that was none other than Paul Erhlich another Nobel Prize winner who among many other contributions popularised the "magic bullet" theory in which the magic bullet was a compound carrying a toxin that would selectively target and kill a disease-causing organism. This is partly seen in monoclonal antibodies. Erhlich also developed staining techniques for identifying different blood cell types leading to the characterisation of several blood diseases. He was also a pioneer in chemotherapy. A pretty spectacular career.

Name the Biologist

This guy was responsible for quite a few interesting discoveries and concepts. It's hard to dodge his influence.

With regards to the last installment they were

Name the Biologist

More technique based ones. This one is a little tricky but I'm going for the one who developed the most recognisable technique and the one who named it/helped make it popular. Plenty of clues before the picture this time!

Disclaimer: I can't 100% verify the person in the 2nd picture is the one I mean - but others online seem to have made the claim...

As for last week that was

Name the Biologist

This Biologist is famous for developing a much-used technique in today's labs.

Bragging rights for the first correct answer!

As for the last installment, that was

Pacual Jordan. While he wasn't technically a biologist he was a well respected (at the time) pioneer of Quantum Physics. He was also one of the earliest proponents of the concept of Quantum Biology. Unfortunately Pascul was also a proud member of the Nazi party and this unsurprisingly led to his isolation from the physics community. It also meant that Quantum Physics was largely forgotten due to the fact he was the theories champion. It just goes to show that society and personality can often be more powerful than scientific ideas.

Name the Biologist

I only found out about this guy after attending a lecture this week. He's an interesting character in that his political views actually set back a field in Biology by half a century!

And for those who can cast their minds back a few months - here's the answer to the previous installment.

It was Matthew Meselsohn and Werner Arber for their development of restriction enzymes (although they are famous for quite a lot of things) which are an essential tool for any biologist wanting to clone pieces of DNA into various useful vectors. I'd have a lot less GFP tagged proteins if not for them.

Name the Biologist

This time we have two scientists with a connection in discovering something useful (they discovered other useful things but this one was a joint effort)

As for last week the mystery biologist was Alfred Russel Wallace who also came up with the theory of evolution via natural selection and was published papers alongside Darwin. The bizarre thing is that he was a major celebrity at the time but has been largely forgotten. Maybe a weird case of memetic survival of the fittest? Anyway these two articles do a pretty good job of analysing the man and why he has been forgotten. What can we learn from Wallace? 

•  If you want to be remembered you need to bring out a populist book rather than publish high impact papers - something that is probably very true of this era's "memorable" scientists.
•  Rushing your paper through when you realise someone else has scooped you always helps. 
• Being honourable and polite can often lead to you being forgotten.

Name the Biologist

This one is interesting as I'd never heard of the man before this week. It seems a classic case of writing a book gets you a lot more mainstream attention than publishing a paper.

As for the last instalment - the biologists were John Kendrew and Max Perutz who shared the 1962 Nobel prize for chemistry for their work on discovering the structure of heme-containing proteins. Perutz is the main reason I chose them for the quiz as he was (as far as I know) the first person to crystalise a large protein for X-ray crystallography and thus discover the structure.
I say "large" as is it was only in my digging around that I discovered the original developer of protein crystallography was actually Dorothy Hodgkin. She was a true pioneer in the developing the field (along with her John Desmond Bernal) and won the nobel prize in 1964 for solving the structure of vitamin B12 using X-ray Crystallography. I think I'll cheat and retroactively add her to the previous quiz.
Anyway the point is that X-ray Crystallography is an essential tool in the field of Biology and without it we wouldn't have a lot of major discoveries such as the structure of DNA and a lot of information on how drugs bind proteins or how viruses attach to cells. It still seems like magic to me so I salute those who understand it and especially those who developed it for use with proteins.

Name the biologist

This is a methods one and is pretty handy even if it seems like "magic" to me.

UPDATE: After a little more digging I discovered there's another Biologist who should be in this edition of the quiz. Apologies!

Last week's Halloween inspired answer is below.

Giovanni Aldini who may have inspired Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein". Much like his uncle, Luigi Galvani, Aldini believed electricity could be used to reanimate the dead. He just wanted to take it a step further from frogs to humans. He showed this could be possible with a public display of electro-stimulation of the recently executed convict George Forster. These experiments were occuring at the time Mary Shelley was writing. Besides potentially inspiring a classic book on the responsibilities of science and its applications he also contributed a lot to the understanding of galvanism and its role in living things.

Name the Biologist

This one is inspired by Halloween and he may have inspired someone else.

As for the last instalment - it was indeed John Tyndall. His contribution to biology was in finding a form of sterilization by creating "optically pure" air in which he rid a box of all air borne particles. He then found that food did not go off and concluded this was due to the removal of micro-organisms in the air. This backed up Pasteur's "germ theory" and his sterilization or "tyndalization" technique was used for some time.

This was pretty much an aside for Tyndall as he was a physicist at heart and was the first to come up with proof for the Greenhouse effect and an explanation for why the sky is blue. This last discovery, according to some (and Brian Cox), is the origin of the phrase "blue skies research". This type of research is curiosity driven where the scientist follows the results and/or whatever inspires their curiosity. This type of research can allow for discoveries that were never anticipated much like Tyndall's obsession with light and air particles lead to a sterilization technique (and a fireman's aspirator). These days funding agencies are far more happy to fund "objective-based science" eg cure a disease, build a fusion reactor making it harder for curiosity based scientists to get funding. Although with a little bit of inventiveness a researcher can make their research appear goal oriented )

Name the Biologist

It's back, thanks to a little bit of inspiration from TV

This guy is old school and biology was just a small aspect of his scientific expertise. More importantly, his research style is one that many biologists have to wrestle with.

I'll put the answer up within a week.

Name the Biologist - Halloween edition

Time for some scary biologists - can you name them?

And this guy isn't a biologist but I'd definitely enjoy being able to study him - after taking all the appropriate risk assessments.

And finally, he doesn't scare me but I think he terrifies certain demographics...

Name the Biologist - week 22

This week should technically be called, "Name the scientist" as he wasn't a biologist. I'm including him though as I read an article on the news claiming he's largely unknown and I don't think that's true. Maybe he's only well known in Science circles or maybe it's just me being drawn to larger than life scientists. Let's see.

As for last week's "genuine" Biologists they were

Name the biologist week 21

This week is a bit trickier in that there are 3 biologists to name and a bonus point for what links them. Let's dive straight into it.

Oh and this guy (he pops up a fair bit - definitely not a one trick pony)

That should probably help you on your way.

As for last week, the answer was Craig Venter. Probably best known for setting up a rival to the Human Genome Project in the form of Celera Genomics using "shotgun sequencing". Interestingly, his genome was one of the 5 sample genomes used by Celera for sequencing the human genome. While many claimed the clone approach was more accurate, the competition spurred on the Human Genome Project and Shotgun sequencing has been used for other genomes during and since.
Currently he is best known for his work on synthetic biology in the form of the J Craig Venter Institute, which has some fascinating ideas as well as opening up the idea of owning "life-forms".

Name the Biologist - Week 20

No clues this week as he should be fairly recognisable.

As for last week's entry it was none other than Joseph Priestley - a fascinating individual whose observations that air could be "injured" by a burning candle and a mouse and "healed" by a plant was the forst step to understanding photosynthesis and respiration. He actually made a whole load of other discoveries such as oxygen and possibly his greatest contrbution was the invention of Soda water and the eraser.

Name the Biologist - Week 19

Inspired by two days of Sun, I decided to make this week's entry this guy;

To be fair he is perhaps best known as a chemist. However he made observations that led to the discovery of one of life's essential chemical reactions. Reading up on the guy reveals a fascinating history. He also invented a very popular type of drink and a whole host of other things. A good old fashioned scientist - the type that should still be encouraged still but unfortunately can't due to academic structure almost selecting against it.

As for last week's biologist, it was none other than Galen. It's hard to convey his importance in terms of his impact on physiology and anatomy. Equally important was that he was one of the earliest examples of applying scientific method (Observation, theory and experimentation) to biology and published a work on how the "best physician is also a philosopher". Galen also pretty much came up with the concept of model organisms in terms of dissection and vivisection of pigs and primates to understand human anatomy because dissection was outlawed in Rome at the time.

He also made groundbreaking and lasting discoveries in neurology and established that the brain and central nervous system control motor function. He also described the function of agonists and antagonists on nerves so was a very early pharmacologist.

He was also a damn good surgeon (probably because he practised on animals) and could even remove cataracts! Sadly a lot of his techniques were forgotten for several hundred years. Good proof that his observations on diet and hygiene is the fact that he lived until the age of 87 which is pretty good going for someone in the second century.

Name the Biologist- week 18

This guy is from way back. Wiki doesn't call him a biologist but I'm willing to argue that he is.

As for the previous edition's answer;

Name the biologist - week 17

I've been struck by olympics fever so this edition is inspired by it.
Unfortunately, this seems to be another case of "there aren't any pictures of the people involved". Therefore you will have to make do with the ones involved in the process and guess the theme. I'll mention the other biologists when I give you the answer in the next installment. This guy definitely got the ball rolling though.

And this guy was pretty key in coming up with a theory for how it works.

Finally, this guy got to the root or the actual chemistry of how the whole thing works.

What's interesting is how it took a hundred years and research by several different researchers to get to the bottom of how this thing functioned. That's science for you; a long distance relay event.

The answer to the last installment was Frederick Sanger who developed the DNA sequencing method that used dideoxy chain termination. This method is still used to this day and it was instrumental in completing the human genome and Fred himself was one of the first people to complete a genome when he sequenced the virus Phage Φ-X174. In honour of his contribution to sequencing an institute in Hinxton was named after him as the Sanger Institute which is one of the world's leading centres for genomic-based research. He's also one of only a handful of people to have won two Nobel prizes.

Name the Biologist - Week 15

Busy couple of week meant I was a bit slow at finding a new candidate. But I've managed to dig up another one continuing the historical theme.

The sizes don't really reflect their relative importance. As a little bonus this guy should also be included although he didn't come up with the importance of what he found.

Although he wins in terms of owning the facial hair contest.

As for the previous edition, which was "off the hooke" it was none other than Robert Hooke, the scientist who coined the phrase "cell". He was one of those super scientists in that he wasn't content with describing and coining the word "cell" but also described a physical law too. He also wasn't that far off working out gravity and he made his own microscopes so he could draw small creatures. Basically if he was around today he'd put a dozen different types of postdocs out of work. I'm jealous as I'm more likely to break a law than have one named after me.

Name the biologist - week 14

Here's another old one - so old it's a painting rather than a photograph. I guess that could be a clue in itself. This guy named something that's pretty essential in biology.

As for last week they were the biologists who came up with the one gene-one enzyme hypothesis. George Beadle and Edward Tatum.

Name the Bioblogist - week 13

So there was a week long absence due to football being a bit busy and uninspired but I've manage to come up with a new one. This is an old school one so I will give you a clue, these two came up with a fairly important hypothesis in genetics/biochemistry.

As for the last installment, "Anonymous" wins again by recognising Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and Alexey Olovnikov. In hindsight I should have also included Jack W Szostak too. Anyway they get a mention for their work on Telomerase the enzyme that adds DNA repeats onto telomeres, the ends of chromosomes in vertebrates. It's also been linked to cell ageing which wins it a lot of attention (and is often used as a magic ageing up of human clones in sc-fi)