Kategoria BISAC: Biography & Autobiography >> Science & Technology

Molecular biologist Elizabeth Blackburn -- one of Time magazine's 100 "Most Influential People in the World" in 2007 -- made headlines in 2004 when she was dismissed from the President's Council on Bioethics after objecting to the council's call for a moratorium on stem cell research and protesting the suppression of relevant scientific evidence in its final report. But it is Blackburn's groundbreaking work on telomeric DNA, which launched the field of telomere research, that will have the more profound and long-lasting effect on science and society.

In this compelling biography,...

Perhaps one of the most distinctive and studied geographers of the twentieth century, Carl O. Sauer (1889--1975) had influence that extends well beyond the confines of any one discipline. With a focus on historical and cultural geography, Sauer's essays have garnered praise from poets, natural historians, and social scientists alike who continue to explore Sauer's work. In Carl Sauer on Culture and Landscape, editors William M. Denevan and Kent Mathewson have compiled thirty-seven of Sauer's original works, including rare early writings, articles in now largely inaccessible publications,...

Hermann Gunther Gramann was one of the most remarkable personalities in 19th-century science. A "small-town genius," he developed a groundbreaking n-dimensional algebra of space and contributed to a revolution in the understanding of mathematics. His work fascinated great mathematicians such as W. R. Hamilton, J. W. Gibbs and A. N. Whitehead. This intellectual biography traces Gramann's steps towards scientific brilliance by untangling a complicated web of influences: the force of unsolved problems in mathematics, Friedrich Schleiermacher's Dialectic, German Romanticism and life in...

A contemporary of Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton, and close friend of all but Newton, Robert Hooke (1635-1703), one of the founders of the early scientific revolution, faded into almost complete obscurity after his death and remained there for nearly three centuries. The result has been that his role in the scientific revolution has been almost totally ignored. He was the first professional scientist worthy of the name, working for the young Royal Society of London as its curator of experiments for four decades. He became the Society's intellectual center, and for a while...

Scientific Elite is about Nobel prize winners and the well-defined stratification system in twentieth-century science. It tracks the careers of all American laureates who won prizes from 1907 until 1972, examining the complex interplay of merit and privilege at each stage of their scientific lives and the creation of the ultra-elite in science.

The study draws on biographical and bibliographical data on laureates who did their prize-winning research in the United States, and on detailed interviews with forty-one of the fifty-six laureates living in the United States at the...

Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer, two iconic scientists of the twentieth century, belonged to different generations, with the boundary marked by the advent of quantum mechanics. By exploring how these men differed--in their worldview, in their work, and in their day--this book provides powerful insights into the lives of two critical figures and into the scientific culture of their times. In Einstein's and Oppenheimer's philosophical and ethical positions, their views of nuclear weapons, their ethnic and cultural commitments, their opinions on the unification of physics, even the...

In the mid-1850s, no scientist in the British Empire was more visible than Richard Owen. Mentioned in the same breath as Isaac Newton and championed as Britain's answer to France's Georges Cuvier and Germany's Alexander von Humboldt, Owen was, as the Times declared in 1856, the most "distinguished man of science in the country." But, a century and a half later, Owen remains largely obscured by the shadow of the most famous Victorian naturalist of all, Charles Darwin. Publicly marginalized by his contemporaries for his critique of natural selection, Owen suffered personal attacks...

An important figure in early American science and letters, William Bartram (1739-1823) has been known almost exclusively for his classic book, "Travels." "William Bartram, The Search for Nature's Design" presents new material in the form of art, letters, and unpublished manuscripts. These documents expand our knowledge of Bartram as an explorer, naturalist, artist, writer, and citizen of the early Republic.

Part 1, the correspondence, includes letters to and from Bartram's family, friends, and peers, establishing his developing consciousness about the natural world as well as his passion...