Great Scientists
da Juan Sinchi
1. Galileo (Italy, 1564–1642)
1.1. His full name was Galileo Galilei – is sometimes called “the father of modern science.
1.2. He was a scientist, mathematician, and astronomer (someone who looks at the stars and planets).
1.3. When he was alive, telescopes were still very basic, and he made many improvements to them.
1.4. His best-known achievement was to show that the Earth moves around the sun, and not the sun around the Earth (although he was not the first man to have the idea).
2. Francis Crick (U.K., 1916–2004) and James Watson (U.S.A., born 1928)
2.1. In 1953, in Cambridge, U.K., Crick and Watson told the world that they had found “the secret of life.”
2.1.1. The secret is the structure of DNA, the material that makes genes, the things we get from our parents that control how we grow.
2.2. Their discovery meant that we now know much, much more about the human body.
2.3. And with that knowledge, there have been enormous improvements in medicine and medical research as well as in historical research and solving crimes
3. Jane Goodall (U.K., born 1934)
3.1. Jane Goodall is a scientist who has studied primates, especially chimpanzees, her whole life.
3.1.1. She has studied their family groups, their use of tools,and their emotions.
3.2. Her work has made it clear that chimpanzees and other primates (gorillas, for example) are not as different from people as we used to think.
3.3. Goodall has shown the world that we need to treat the animals around us with respect and protect them.
4. Louis Pasteur (France, 1822–1895)
4.1. Was one of the people who started the area of science that we now call microbiology
4.2. He did many things during his life, but he is remembered mostly because of the work that he did with milk.
4.3. When milk is about two days old, it starts to get bacteria (very small things that carry disease), and this makes it dangerous to drink – people can get diseases.
4.3.1. Pasteur developed a way to prevent this from happening.
4.3.1.1. The process is called “pasteurization.”
5. Jonas Salk (U.S.A., 1914–1995)
5.1. Jonas Salk was a scientist who created the vaccine that prevented a disease called polio.
5.1.1. Before Salk’s work in the 1950s, thousands of people used to get this disease every year, and many of them couldn’t walk because of it.