• Question: Hi guys, Which scientist's research has proven most useful over the course of the last two centuries.

    Asked by to Bethany, Hannah, Keith, Peter, Ramya on 19 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Hannah Tanner

      Hannah Tanner answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      Sorry, I have no idea how I would possibly quantify usefulness of research over two centuries.

      How would you measure usefulness of research?

    • Photo: Peter Elliott

      Peter Elliott answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      There are too many to count. Watson and Crick for their work on DNA, Fleming for discovering Penicillin, Louis Pasteur developed the cures for anthrax and rabies and many many more scientists too.

      I think it is a very personal answer. For me knowing that Felming’s work has saved more lives than those lost in all the wars that have ever occurred puts him high up my list.

    • Photo: Keith Grehan

      Keith Grehan answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      An interesting thing about science is that it is a building process. So each scientist contributes their work to this whole thing that we call science. What really matters is the process and that the knowledge gets shared.
      This way every scientist is important as the next one along will build on their work…Even Einstein said that his theory of special relativity was an idea “ripe for discovery” meaning that several other people were right on the verge of developing the theory themselves…Einstein was just that little bit faster 🙂
      Sharing of ideas and work in science is a very important part of the process and this is why it’s so important for scientists to publish their work.
      In the 1850’s a Christian monk called Gregor Mendel experimented with pea plants and found out lots about how characters are transferred from one generation to the next (he didn’t know it and had no way to look at them but he had discovered genes !!!), but Mendel didn’t really engage with other people doing experiments (obviously no email or Skype so chatting to people was a serious hassle ) and because of this when Darwin published his On the Origin of Species (the book that explained the theory of Evolution for the first time) he didn’t know about Mendel (even though they were working around the same time). Darwin never knew how one generation could inherit traits from the last one and if he had known about Mendel’s work it would have made his work even more in-depth and important. In this example we see two scientists each doing something different and really important but its only when their ideas are combine that things really get interesting if a generation couldn’t inherit changes in genes from the one before then evolution can’t work and as long as changes in genes occur and are inherited then evolution keeps going…so two scientists, two different bits of research but both feeding into a single idea and both helping us understand the world…pretty cool stuff 🙂

    • Photo: Bethany Dearlove

      Bethany Dearlove answered on 25 Jun 2014:

      I’m with Keith here – each scientist helps push the boundary of what we know about the world a little bit more, and in a way this blurs the line between different contribution. Do you choose the scientist that paved the way and established the tools for a discovery…or the one that used the information to actually make the discovery?

      Even narrowing it down to the discovery of infectious diseases, as that’s the field I work in, there are a number of key players:
      ~ Anthony van Leeuwenhoek pioneered the development of the microscope, allowing him to describe and investigate single-celled organisms, which he named animalcules, and which we now know as microorganisms.
      ~ Agostino Bassi proposed a link between microscopic cells and infectious disease in humans.
      ~ Louis Pasteur supported Bassi’s theory with experiments and presented germ theory to the French Academy of Sciences.
      ~ Robert Koch brought germ theory to the attention and practice of the wider medical community, and is known for his four postulates – a series of scientific principles used to link a particular microorganism to the disease it causes.

      …whose work would you choose as the most useful?

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