# Who is the greatest American scientist of all time?

> Physics, genetics, vaccines and spaceflight, all claimed under the same passport.

*By YPB Team · Published August 11, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/who-is-the-greatest-american-scientist-of-all-time*

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## Current results (0 votes)

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

Tags: usa, science, scientists