Categories: Inventors

Famous Inventors Born in December!

Cecil Frank Powell

Date of Birth: December 5, 1903

Profession: British physicist

Notable Works: Powell was awarded the 1950 Nobel Prize in Physics for the development of the photographic nuclear emulsion plate technique for studying nuclear processes and the discovery of the pi meson or pion. Pions are a class of mesons that help explain the strong nuclear force in particle physics.

Carl Ferdinand Cori

Date of Birth: December 5, 1896

Profession: Austrian-American biochemist

Notable Works: Cori shares half the 1947 Nobel Prize in Medicine with his wife, Gerty Theresa Cori, for discovering how the body metabolizes glycogen. Glycogen is a molecule that is a starch derivative of glucose and an important part of the way the body stores food energy.

Charles Martin Hall

Date of Birth: December 6, 1863

Profession: American chemist

Notable Works: Hall discovered a method to extract aluminum from alumina (aluminum oxide). Hall used electric current to separate the aluminum metal. Before this process, aluminum was difficult to isolate as a metal. The cost of pure aluminum metal was higher than gold. Aluminum was sometimes known as the “Metal of Kings”. Hall’s process was simple, and inexpensive and revolutionized the use of lightweight metal.

Theodor Schwann

Date of Birth: December 7, 1810

Profession: German physiologist

Notable Works: Schwann defined the basic unit of animal tissue structure was the cell and helped begin the study of cell biology. He proved the cellular origin of fingernails, tooth enamel, and feathers. He also discovered the digestive enzyme pepsin and coined the term ‘metabolism’ to describe the chemical reactions in living organisms necessary to stay alive.

Jan Ingenhousz

Date of Birth: December 8, 1730

Profession: Dutch scientist

Notable Works: Ingenhousz made the first step to understanding plant respiration or photosynthesis. English chemist Joseph Priestly had recently demonstrated that plants give off oxygen. Ingenhousz expanded this research by noting that plants not only give off oxygen but absorb carbon dioxide. He also discovered sunlight was an important factor. During the day, plants absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen. During the night, or when sunlight was not available, he found the process reversed. Plants absorb oxygen and release carbon dioxide in the dark. This was the first step to understanding the process of photosynthesis.

Thomas Robert Cech

Date of Birth: December 8, 1947

Profession: American biochemist

Notable Works: Cech shares the 1989 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Sidney Altman for their discoveries involving the catalytic properties of RNA. Ribonucleic acid (RNA) was known to pass on genetic information, but both men discovered it could also work as an enzyme to catalyze chemical reactions between cells. Cech was also part of the team that discovered telomerase reverse transcription (TERT) responsible for regulating the length of telomeres. Telomeres make up the end of chromosomes.

Fritz Haber

Date of Birth: December 9, 1868

Profession: German chemist

Notable Works: Haber discovered a process to create ammonia from atmospheric gases. The Haber-Bosch process is a reaction that fixes nitrogen to form ammonia (NH3) from nitrogen gas (N2) and hydrogen gas (H2) under pressure over an iron catalyst. Haber discovered the process on a laboratory scale using tabletop lab equipment. German chemical engineer Carl Bosch converted the laboratory equipment to be used on large-scale industrial equipment. The process would earn both Haber and Bosch Nobel Prizes in Chemistry (1918 and 1931 respectively). Today, the Haber-Bosch process accounts for 100 million tons of fertilizer per year.

William Nunn Lipscomb, Jr.

Date of Birth: December 9, 1919

Profession: American chemist

Notable Works: Lipscomb Jr. was awarded the 1976 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on boranes and his contributions to the understanding of chemical bonds. Boranes are molecules made up of boron and hydrogen. Stable boranes do not follow the standard electron pair sharing bonding scheme since they do not possess the requisite number of electrons. Lipscomb showed these compounds could share electrons across three atoms to form stable bonds.

Carl Wilhelm Scheele

Date of Birth: December 9, 1742

Profession: German-Swedish apothecary

Notable Works: Scheele independently discovered oxygen. Joseph Priestly is also credited with this discovery since he published his findings first. He also discovered barium, manganese, molybdenum, tungsten, and chlorine.

Howard Martin Temin

Date of Birth: December 10, 1934

Profession: American geneticist

Notable Works: Temin was awarded the 1975 Nobel Prize in Medicine with David Baltimore and Renalto Dulbecco for their work on the interactions between tumour viruses and the genetic material of the cell. It was previously believed genetic information travels only from DNA to RNA to proteins. He showed that some tumour viruses could reverse that flow from RNA to DNA using a process called reverse transcriptase.

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Angelina Kushnarova

Angelina Kushnarova (Sverediuk) was born in Ukraine. She graduated from Ternopil Medical University with a specialization in Medicine and completed an internship in Radiology at Lviv University. She worked as a Radiologist, while also working as a web developer.