Sept 18: Famous Scientists who were born today and
their work
Edwin Mattison McMillan
Born 18 Sep 1907; died 7 Sep 1991.
Edwin Mattison
McMillan was an American nuclear physicist who shared the Nobel Prize for
Chemistry in 1951 (with Glenn T. Seaborg) for his discovery of element 93. Just
as the planet Neptune is beyond Uranus, this new element was named neptunium,
the first element beyond uranium, thus called a transuranium
element.
Charles Valentine Riley
Born 18 Sep 1843; died 14 Sep 1895.
British-born
American entomologist who pioneered the scientific study of insects for their
economic impact in agriculture. He was a keen observer of relationships in
nature, and enhanced his written observations with drawings. He initiated
biological control. After studying the parasites and predators of the cottony
cushion scale, which was destroying the citrus industry in California, he
introduced (1888) a natural enemy of the scale from Australia. The effectiveness
of the Vedalia cardinalis beetle in reducing the populations of the cottony
cushion scale promoted the study of biological control of pests.
John Aitken
Born 18 Sep 1839; died 14 Nov 1919.
Scottish physicist and
meteorologist who, through a series of experiments and observations in which he
used apparatus of his own design, elucidated the crucial role that microscopic
particles, now called Aitken nuclei, play in the condensation of atmospheric
water vapour in clouds and fogs. Ill health prevented Aitken from holding any
official position; he worked instead in the laboratory in his home in Falkirk.
Jean Bernard Léon Foucault
Born 18 Sep 1819; died 11 Feb 1868.
French physicist whose
Foucault Pendulum experimentally proved that the Earth rotates on its axis (6
Jan 1851). Using a long pendulum with a heavy bob, he showed its plane rotated
at a rate related to Earth's angular velocity and the latitude of the site. He
studied medicine and physics and became an assistant at the Paris Observatory
(1855). He invented an accurate test of a lens for chromatic and spherical
aberations. Working with Fizeau, and also independently, he made accurate
measurements of the absolute velocity of light. In 1850, Foucault showed that
light travels slower in water than in air. He also built a gyroscope (1852), the
Foucault's prism (1857) and made improvements for mirrors of reflecting
telescopes.«
Adrien-Marie Legendre
Born 18 Sep 1752; died 10 Jan 1833.
French mathematician who
contributed to number theory, celestial mechanics and elliptic functions. In
1794, he was put in charge of the French government's department that was
standardizing French weights and measures. In 1813, he took over as head of the
Bureau des Longitudes upon the death of Lagrange, its former chief. It was in a
paper on celestial mechanics concerning the motion of planets (1784) that he
first introduced the Legendre Polynomials. His provided outstanding work on
elliptic functions (1786), and his classic treatise on the theory of numbers
(1798) and also worked on the method of least squares.«
John Clark
Born 18 Sep 1951; died 12 Aug 2004.
English molecular biologist who was
a founder of applying molecular technology to farm animals. In 1985, he began
work in genetic modification (at what is now the Roslin Institute) to produce a
sheep giving milk with human proteins. He was successful within five years.
Tracy, the result of five year's work, produced 35g of the alpha-1-antitrypsin
(used in treatment of cystic fibrosis) in each litre of her milk. During the
1990's, Clark continued to develop transgenic techniques on large animals. With
his colleagues, he a produced a sheep from which a prion protein gene had been
removed. Clark's work set the stage for Ian Wilmut's team at Roslin to clone a
sheep, Dolly (1996), the result of transplanted the DNA of an adult sheep to an
unfertilised egg cell.«