Who is the greatest American scientist of all time?
Physics, genetics, vaccines and spaceflight, all claimed under the same passport.
1Benjamin Franklin
Proved lightning was electrical, named positive and negative charge, and charted the Gulf Stream.
2Richard Feynman
Nobel-winning physicist who reworked quantum electrodynamics and explained it better than anyone.
3Edwin Hubble
Showed the universe is full of other galaxies and that it is expanding.
4Linus Pauling
The only person with two unshared Nobel Prizes, for chemical bonding and for peace.
5Barbara McClintock
Geneticist who discovered transposable elements in maize decades before the field caught up.
6J. Robert Oppenheimer
Theoretical physicist who led the Los Alamos laboratory during the Manhattan Project.
7Josiah Willard Gibbs
Founded chemical thermodynamics and statistical mechanics from a quiet post at Yale.
8Jonas Salk
Developed the first effective polio vaccine and declined to patent it.
9Carl Sagan
Planetary scientist who turned public science communication into a craft of its own.
10Rachel Carson
Marine biologist whose Silent Spring launched the modern environmental movement.
11James Watson
Co-authored the double-helix model of DNA with Francis Crick in 1953.
12Albert Einstein
Naturalised American who spent his last two decades at Princeton after reshaping physics.
13Maria Goeppert Mayer
Won the Nobel for the nuclear shell model, the second woman to take the physics prize.
14Charles Richard Drew
Surgeon whose blood-plasma research made large-scale blood banks possible.
15Katherine Johnson
NASA mathematician whose orbital calculations put American astronauts into space and back.
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