June 16th, 2008 -- Posted in Who |
The Biography of Howard Gardner
Howard Gardner is the John H. and Elisabeth A.
Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the
Harvard Graduate School of Education. Among
numerous honors, Gardner received a MacArthur
Prize Fellowship in 1981. In 1990, he was the first
American to receive the University of Louisville’s
Grawemeyer Award in Education and in 2000 he
received a Fellowship from the John S. Guggenheim
Memorial Foundation. He has received honorary
degrees from twenty-two colleges and universities,
including institutions in Chile, Ireland, Israel, and
Italy. In 2004 he was named an Honorary Professor
at East China Normal University in Shanghai. In
2005 he was selected by Foreign Policy and
Prospect magazines as one of 100 most influential
public intellectuals in the world. He has been
elected a member of the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical
Society, the National Academy of Education, and
most recently (2007) the London-based Royal
Society for the Encouragement of Arts,
Manufactures, and Commerce. He serves on a
number of boards, including the Spencer
Foundation and New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
continue reading »
May 27th, 2008 -- Posted in Who |
Sir Alexander Fleming was born at Lochfield near Darvel in Ayrshire, Scotland on August 6th, 1881. He attended Louden Moor School, Darvel School, and Kilmarnock Academy before moving to London where he attended the Polytechnic. He spent four years in a shipping office before entering St. Mary’s Medical School, London University. He qualified with distinction in 1906 and began research at St. Mary’s under Sir Almroth Wright, a pioneer in vaccine therapy. He gained M.B., B.S., (London), with Gold Medal in 1908, and became a lecturer at St. Mary’s until 1914. He served throughout World War I as a captain in the Army Medical Corps, being mentioned in dispatches, and in 1918 he returned to St.Mary’s. He was elected Professor of the School in 1928 and Emeritus Professor of Bacteriology, University of London in 1948. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1943 and knighted in 1944.
Early in his medical life, Fleming became interested in the natural bacterial action of the blood and in antiseptics. He was able to continue his studies throughout his military career and on demobilization he settled to work on antibacterial substances which would not be toxic to animal tissues. In 1921, he discovered in «tissues and secretions» an important bacteriolytic substance which he named Lysozyme. About this time, he devised sensitivity titration methods and assays in human blood and other body fluids, which he subsequently used for the titration of penicillin. In 1928, while working on influenza virus, he observed that mould had developed accidently on a staphylococcus culture plate and that the mould had created a bacteria-free circle around itself. He was inspired to further experiment and he found that a mould culture prevented growth of staphylococci, even when diluted 800 times. He named the active substance penicillin.
continue reading »