Historical Figures

Question 1

Galileo Galilei

Answer 1

1564-1642; a pioneer of the microscope

Question 2

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek

Answer 2

1632-1723; first person to see microbes and record what he saw (called them “amoeba” and “paramisia” (out loud) or “animacules” and “wee little beasties” (on slide))

Question 3

Ogata Shunsaku

Answer 3

1748-1810; took scrapings from smallpox patients and used them to scratch skin of other people to form the first vaccination (process called variolation) and also realized that humans had immune systems that protected them from viruses

Question 4

Edward Jenner

Answer 4

~1796; deliberately exposed a healthy boy to cowpox, then exposed the same boy to smallpox. Boy had mild form of disease with no sickness, and concept of immunity and host defence was born

Question 5

Louis Pasteur

Answer 5

~1859; used a swan neck flask experiment to disprove Aristotle’s theory of spontaneous generation and concluded that organisms must come from a source. Also found that microscopic organisms were responsible for peutrification and food spoilage, and introduced the concept and practice of pasteurization. Also developed the rabies vaccine.

Disproving of spontaneous generation: put microorganisms in a flask, then boiled the broth to kill them; one flask had air entering while the other did not; flask with air saw organism growth while the flask without air did not

Question 6

Robert Koch

Answer 6

1843-1910; made contributions to the understanding of pathogens is and its link to disease. His works were the first methods reported to identify organisms in pure culture. Invented solid media and argued for causative agents of disease like specific microbes that cause anthrax, cholera, and tuberculosis.

Question 7

Dmitri Ivanoski and Martinus W. Beijerinck

Answer 7

1890-1898; first isolated a virus (tobacco mosaic virus and characterized its infection of tobacco leaves)

Question 8

Elie Metchnikoff

Answer 8

1908; observed that some cells would eat other cells (phagocytosis) with a main function to seek, inject, and kill pathogens. He made the connection to white blood cells and is therefore a pioneer in immunology

Question 9

Paul Ehrlich

Answer 9

1909; discovered the first antimicrobial drug called Compound 606 that kills treponema pallidum, the causative agent of syphilis

Question 10

Alexander Fleming

Answer 10

1928; first natural antibiotic (penicillin) which extended and saved the lives of many soldiers

Question 11

Barbara McClintock

Answer 11

1930-1940; observed and described genetic mutations and discovered transposons (jumping genes)

Question 12

Selman Waksman

Answer 12

1940; discovered antimicrobials in fungi, including soil bacteria, in the genus streptomycetes. Showed that actinomycetes are the source of almost half of all natural antibiotics

Question 13

Frederick Griffith

Answer 13

1928; found the transforming principle. Took two strains of bacteria, one virulent (smooth) and the other not (rough), and showed that an extract of the smooth strain could transfer genetic information when mixed with the rough strain

Question 14

Avery, MacLeod and McCarty

Answer 14

1944; followed up on Griffith’s experiments and determined that the transforming principle was DNA. Used RNA, DNA, and proteas to selectively degrade components and prove that DNA is the transforming principle

Question 15

Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase

Answer 15

1952; radioactively labelled bacteria phage DNA (protein) and showed that radioactive DNA was recovered in progeny phases, showing that DNA is the genetic material

Question 16

Esther and Joshua Lederberg

Answer 16

1952; proved that mutations arose spontaneously and not in response to the conditions in which the cells were grown. Esther. Developed a technique called replica plating that is used to transfer microbes from one cell surface to the other for screening purposes

Question 17

Rosalind Franklin

Answer 17

1943; looked at an X-ray diffraction image of DNA to show the double helical pattern (photo 51) and worked on molecular structures of viruses

Question 18

James Watson and Francis Crick

Answer 18

1953; published that DNA is a double helical structure with a sugar phosphate backbone held together by base pairing (G-C, A-T) and found that the structure opens like a zipper

Question 19

Fred Sanger

Answer 19

1972; found that DNA is a code using dideoxynucleotide triphosphates that serve to terminate replicating DNA chains to figure out that’s DNA sequences can be determined by the lengths of the synthesized chains

Question 20

Carl Woese and George Fox

Answer 20

1976; put together the tree of life

Question 21

Micheal Smith

Answer 21

1993; site-directed mutagenesis - now scientists can alter genetic material at discrete locations and see how changes will affect the organism

Question 22

Kary Mullins

Answer 22

1983; came up with PCR (polymerase chain reaction) and was the first to create synthetic DNA in a tube by taking DNA, annealing primers using temperature-resistant DNA polymerase, extending, and repeating

Question 23

Craig Venter

Answer 23

2000s; had his own genome sequenced faster and created life by placing a synthetic genome into a bacterial cell whose genome had been removed

Question 24

Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna

Answer 24

2005-2012; CRISPR Cas9: bacterial immune system that maintains copies of pieces of viral genomes within their genome and uses this information to direct the Cas9 enzyme to degrade incoming viral DNA

Question 25

Harvey J Alter, Micheal Houghton, Charles M. Rice

Answer 25

2020; discovered the hepatitis C virus. Alter noticed the virus was being passed on to patients who received blood transfusions, demonstrating it was caused by a virus; Houghton used a molecular approach to clone the virus genome and Rice developed serological tests to identify the genome responsible for the disease