MEN of SCIENCE I

http://www.bbc.co.uk

Edward Jenner

An English physician, he was the first to establish a vaccination on a scientific basis with his studies on smallpox. He was born on May 17, 1749 in Berekely, a small town in Gloucestershire, England. In 1788, he married Katharine Kingscote and bought The Chantry, a pleasant house in Berekely. Because of his wife’s delicate health, he spent the summer months at Cheltenham Spa, where, after receiving his M.D. from St. Andrew’s University in 1792, he succeeded in building up considerable medical practice. For many years he had made study of cowpox, and on May 14, 1796, he inoculated a boy named James Phipps with material taken from a cowpox pustule on the hand of the dairymaid Sarah Nelmes. The boy developed typical cowpox. Six weeks later, he was inoculated with smallpox, and it failed to have any effect. Other experiments followed, and enner published the results. He died on January 26, 1823.

http://listverse.files.wordpress.com

Viktor Meyer

A German chemist, noted for his discoveries of organic compounds, was born in Berlin on September 8, 1848. Young Viktor was taken to Heidelberg in the hope of arousing his intellectual interest, and this was accomplished at a lecture by the famous R.W. Bunsen, to whom Meyer later became an assistant. He studied in Berlin and later at Heidelberg under Bunsen, receiving his doctor’s degree there in 1867. In 1889 he succeeded Bunsen at Heidelberg as head of the most famous chemical laboratory in the world. Meyer was a pioneer in the field of organic chemistry. His major work includes the discovery of thiophene and its derivatives (in 1883), his studies in the constitution of camphor, chloral hydrate, aliphatic nitro-compounds (1872), nitriolic acid, the synthesis of diphenylmethane from benzyl alcohol and benzene (1882). In 1871, he invented a method of determining vapor densities. He died in Heidelberg on August 8, 1897.