[Carol-A]

Robert Hook would be one, Louis Pasteur (with a translator!)..... um, Joseph Banks must have some exciting tales to tell!

[DoctorBeaver (OP)]

Wasn't Joseph Banks a botanist?

[Vcoolspice]

I agree w/ the Beaver's choice and Rosalind's  

[MayoFlyFarmer]

I've not heard of him. What is PCR?

I've just found out it stands for Polymerase Chain Reaction. I've heard of that, but I'm not entirely sure what it is.

its a method by which you can amplify large amounts of a specific sequence of DNA from a very small starting amount.  an extremely useful technique both in lab science, as well as crime labs, etc.

[DoctorBeaver (OP)]

I've not heard of him. What is PCR?

I've just found out it stands for Polymerase Chain Reaction. I've heard of that, but I'm not entirely sure what it is.

its a method by which you can amplify large amounts of a specific sequence of DNA from a very small starting amount.  an extremely useful technique both in lab science, as well as crime labs, etc.

Thank you

[rosalind dna]

Wasn't Joseph Banks a botanist?

Yes you are right that Joseph Banks was a botanist but also a naturalist too,.
He was partly responsible for setting up The Kew Gardens, London.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Banks
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/science-of-natural-history/biographies/joseph-banks/joseph-banks.html
http://www.kew.org/heritage/people/banks.html

[JimBob]

What about the character (read nutter) William Flinders Petrie who measured the pyramids in a ballerina's tutu? He should be rather colorful, to say the least.

[rosalind dna]

How about all the people who were overlooked for the Nobel Prizes for Sciences, Literature, Peace etc.
Such as Ghandi who was nominated 5 times but never received it. Same went for Rosalind
Franklin.
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Overlooked achievements for the Nobel peace prize (Got these frm Wiki)
Mahatma Gandhi was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize five times between 1937 and 1948 but never received the prize before being assassinated on 30 January 1948, two days before the closing date for the 1948 Peace Prize nominations. The Norwegian Nobel Committee had very likely planned to give him the Peace Prize in 1948 as they considered a posthumous award, but ultimately decided against it and instead chose not to award the prize that year.[19]

The strict rules against a prize being awarded to more than three people at once is also a cause for controversy. Where a prize is awarded to recognise an achievement by a team of more than three collaborators, inevitably one or more will miss out. For example, in 2002, a Prize was awarded to Koichi Tanaka and John Fenn for the development of mass spectrometry in protein chemistry, an award that failed to recognise the achievements of Franz Hillenkamp and Michael Karas of the Institute for Physical and Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Frankfurt.[20]

Similarly, the prohibition of posthumous awards fails to recognise achievements by a collaborator who happens to die before the prize is awarded. Rosalind Franklin, who was key in the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953, died of ovarian cancer in 1958, four years before Francis Crick, James D. Watson and Maurice Wilkins (one of Franklin's collaborators) were awarded the Prize for Medicine or Physiology in 1962.[21] Franklin's significant and relevant contribution was only briefly mentioned in Crick and Watson's Nobel Prize-winning paper: "We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr. M.H.F. Wilkins, Dr. R.E. Franklin, and co-workers...."[22]

In some cases, awards have arguably omitted similar discoveries made earlier. For example, the 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "the discovery and development of conductive organic polymers" (1977) ignored the much earlier discovery of highly-conductive charge transfer complex polymers: the 1963 series of papers by Weiss, et al. reported even higher conductivity in similarly iodine-doped oxidized polypyrrole.[23][24]