Elizabeth Blackburn is the leading researcher in the field of telomeres, the 'telomerase' enzyme, and their effect on the aging of cells and propogation of cancer

Kary Mullis he invented the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a central technique in molecular biology which allows the amplification of specified DNA sequences

Richard Dawkins is best known for popularising the Williams Revolution in his book "The Selfish Gene"

Stephen Jay Gould was a paleontologist, evolutionary biologist as well as the most influential and widely read writer of popular science of his generation

Stuart Alan Kauffman is a biologist and complex systems researcher, and is most widely known for his promotion of self-organization as a factor that is at least as important as Darwinian natural selection in producing the complexity of biological systems and organisms

Daniel Janzen founded "Area de Conservación Guanacaste", probably the oldest, largest and most successful habitat restoration project in the world, 1.430 km2, located just south of the Costa Rica-Nicaragua border, between the Pacific Ocean and the Talamanca mountain range

David Suzuki is a geneticist who has attained prominence as a science broadcaster ("The Nature of Things") and an environmental activist

William Donald Hamilton can be seen as one of the forerunners of the discipline of sociobiology founded by Edward Osborne Wilson

Robert Rosen focused his scientific work on the question: "what is life?" ("why are organisms alive?")

Richard Alexander his scientific pursuits integrate the fields of systematics, ecology, evolution, natural history and behaviour

Carl Woese is an American microbiologist famous for defining the Archaea (a new domain or kingdom of life) in 1977 by phylogenetic analysis of 16S ribosomal RNA, a technique pioneered by Woese which is now standard practice, he was also the originator of the RNA world hypothesis in 1967

George Christopher Williams is noted for starting the Williams revolution, presenting a gene-centric basis for biology with his book "Adaptation and Natural Selection"

John Maynard Smith was instrumental in the application of game theory to evolution and theorised on other problems such as the evolution of sex and signalling theory

Rosalind Elsie Franklin made important contributions to the understanding of the fine structures of coal, DNA and viruses

Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer was the South African museum official who in 1938 brought to the attention of the world the existence of the coelacanth, a fish thought to have been extinct for seventy million years

Rachel Louise Carson was a zoologist and biologist whose landmark book, Silent Spring is often credited with having launched the global environmental movement

Ernst Mayr helped develop the modern evolutionary synthesis of Mendelian genetics and Darwinian evolution

Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey was an archaeologist whose work was important in establishing human evolutionary development in Africa

George Gaylord Simpson was the most influential scientists in paleontology (the study of the developing history of life on earth based on the fossil record) of the twentieth century

Ronald Fisher has been described by Richard Dawkins as "the greatest of Darwin’s successors," was one of the founders of the neo-Darwinian modern evolutionary synthesis

Sir Albert Howard is an organic farming pioneer, and a principal figure in the early organic movement

David Grandison Fairchild was responsible for the introduction of more than 20,000 exotic plants and varieties of established crops into the United States, including mangos, alfalfa, nectarines, dates, horseradish, bamboos and flowering cherries

Robert Koch is considered one of the founders of bacteriology, he became famous for the discovery of the tubercle bacillus and the cholera bacillus and for his development of Koch's postulates

Gustav Heinrich Theodor Eimer is credited with popularizing the term "Orthogenesis" to describe an intrinsic drive in life towards perfection, a form of directed evolution

John Lubbock was responsible for inventing the names Palaeolithic and Neolithic to denote the Old and New Stone Ages respectively

Anton de Bary is considered a founding father of plant pathology (phytopathology) and coined the term symbiosis

Armand David found in China altogether 200 species of wild animals, of which 63 were hitherto unknown to zoologists (such as the Giant Panda or the Père David's Deer), and 807 species of birds, 65 of which had not been described before

Thomas Henry Huxley known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his defence of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. He also coined the term "agnosticism" to describe his stance on religious belief

Alfred Russel Wallace his independent proposal of a theory of evolution by natural selection prompted Charles Darwin to reveal his own more developed and researched, but unpublished, theory sooner than he had intended

Gregor Mendel is often called the "father of genetics" for his study of the inheritance of traits in pea plants

Rudolf Virchow one of his most famous rules is Omnis cellula e cellula ("every cell originates from another cell")

Charles Darwin achieved lasting fame as originator of the theory of evolution through natural selection

Alcide d'Orbigny was the first scientist to describe geological timescales and defined numerous geological strata

Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg German naturalist, zoologist, comparative anatomist, geologist, and microscopist, was one of the most famous and productive scientists of his time

Christian Jürgensen Thomsen related the classification of artifacts to technology, that is, according to the materials in which they were made (stone, bronze, and iron), thereby defining the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age

John James Audubon American ornithologist. He painted, catalogued, and described the birds of North America

Georges Cuvier his system of zoological classification led him toward the development of paleontology

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach was a German physiologist and anthropologist.on the basis of his craniometrical research (analysis of human skulls), he divided the human species into five races: the Caucasian or white race, the Mongolian or yellow, the Malayan or brown race, the Negro or black race, and the American or red race

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe known for his literary works but also a scientist. In biology his theory of plant metamorphosis stipulated that all plant formation stems from a modification of the leaf

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck coined the term biology and taught that evolution fuctions by inheritance of acquired characteristics

Sir Joseph Banks was the English naturalist and botanist on Cook's first great voyage (1768-1771) and some 75 species bear Banks' name. He is credited with the introduction to the West of eucalyptus, acacia, mimosa, and the genus named after him, Banksia

Erasmus Darwin his most important scientific work is his Zoönomia, which contains a system of pathology, and a treatise on "generation," in which he, anticipated the views of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who in turn is regarded to have foreshadowed the theory of evolution

Johann Reinhold Forster made contributions to the early ornithology of Europe and North America. He is best known as the naturalist on James Cook's second Pacific voyage, when he was accompanied by his son Georg Forster

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon influenced the next two generations of naturalists, including Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Charles Darwin with his views such as the high similarity between humans and apes, and the possibility of a common ancestry

Mark Catesby produced the first published account of the flora and fauna of North America.  It included 220 plates of birds, reptiles and amphibians, fish, insects, and mammals

Marcello Malpighi was an Italian doctor, who gave his name to several physiological features. He was pioneer in using a microscope and he has also been described as  a founder of comparative physiology and microscopic anatomy

Gaspard Bauhin introduced binomial nomenclature into taxonomy, which was much later taken up by Linnaeus

Rembert Dodoens Dodoens' herbal Cruydeboeck with 715 images (1554) was influenced by that of Leonhart Fuchs. He divided the plant kingdom in six groups

Leonardo da Vinci is known as an artist but was also an anatomist. He dissected hundreds of specimens and drew exact copies of them

Theophrastus was the successor of Aristotle in the Peripatetic school, the most important of his books are two large botanical treatises, On the History of Plants and On the Causes of Plants