Jonas Salk

Jonas Salk was a Virologist and Medical Researcher who developed the first effective polio vaccine by the use of formaldehyde to inactivate the virus. He was born and raised in NYC. Choosing not to patent his discovery, he was able to allow for the rapid vaccination of the US and the eventual near extermination of polio across the world.

 

Link: https://today.ucsd.edu/story/the_legacy_of_jonas_salk_exhibit_on_display_at_geisel_library

 

-Minghao 

Gregor Mendel

Gregor Mendel, a pioneering figure in genetics, initiated his groundbreaking research on hereditary traits in plant hybrids around 1854, challenging the prevailing notions of inheritance. Contrary to the accepted belief of the time that offspring traits were a mere blend of parental characteristics, Mendel's extensive experiments with pea plants over eight years revealed fundamental principles of genetics. By carefully selecting pea plants with contrasting traits and meticulously analyzing the resulting generations, he formulated the Law of Segregation and the Law of Independent Assortment. These laws proposed that traits are passed from parents to offspring through dominant and recessive genes and that these traits are inherited independently of each other. Mendel's work, initially published in 1866 but largely overlooked during his lifetime, laid the foundation for modern genetics, demonstrating that hereditary traits follow specific statistical laws applicable across living organisms.

 

Link: https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/gregor-mendel-and-the-principles-of-inheritance-593/

-Jonah

Rita Levi-Montalcini

In WWII, Rita Levi-Montalcini sheltered in her childhood home in Italy. She cobbled together a lab in her bedroom, and with bombs falling around her, she used fertilized chicken eggs to understand a fundamental question: how does our nervous system make accurate connections to its targets (muscles, etc) all over the body? She showed that during embryonic development, we make far more nerve cells than we need. Those nerve cells grow out everywhere, and the many nerve cells that fail to connect to targets just die. It's an extraordinarily wasteful mechanism, but it's also an extraordinarily robust way to make connections.

Link: http://labs.bio.unc.edu/Goldstein/Nautilus.pdf

-Bob