They Changed Their World and Ours 8 Quiz

Answer: Auguste Comte

Isidore Marie Auguste Francois Xavier Comte (1798-1857) was born in Montpellier, France. Not much is known of his childhood, but after his formal education came to a halt when the Ecole Polytechnique closed for reorganization in 1816, Comte returned home for a while only to grow radically estranged from his parents and their Catholicism. He set off again for Paris and began work as a secretary for Henri de Saint-Simon, the political and economic theorist. Of course, Comte was also his pupil and was greatly influenced by Saint-Simon, until they also had a disagreement that led to Comte's striking out on his own.

Comte had published a few essays and continued to write and publish more, but in 1825, he married a seamstress, Caroline Massin, and this event marked the beginning a very tumultuous time in Comte's life. He had always seemed a little emotionally unstable, but after the stress of marriage and attempting to find work to gain financial security for a family, Comte seemed to be suffering bouts of depression and paranoia and was more and more prone to erratic behavior. Though he and Massin remained married for seventeen years before divorcing, they constantly fought, sometimes violently, and he believed Massin was having a series of extramarital affairs. Comte attempted to take his life on two separate occasions and was hospitalized at one point so that he might be "stabilized". After surviving his second attempt at suicide, Comte began to believe he was still alive because he had still some great purpose to achieve. It is at this point that he began work on the series of writings that would be compiled in the six volumes of his "Course of Positive Philosophy", the masterpiece that had such a tremendous impact on the rest of the world. Despite their troubled marriage, Massin stayed with Comte and supported him and worked as his secretary--with a few periods of marital separation.

A simple explanation of "The Course of Positive Philosophy" is that Comte argues that society and its understanding of the world move through stages: the theological stage (which relies on supernatural or religious explanations for life's phenomena), the metaphysical stage (which relies on abstract entities as explanations for life's phenomena and serves as a transitional stage to the final stage), and the positive stage (which relies on observation mixed with reason, in other words science, as a means to explain life's phenomena). Eventually, societies that reach this third stage evolve to a point when they no longer need to believe in an ultimate cause for everything or in absolute truths; instead, the people of these societies believe in "laws" that explain how everything in existence is the result of natural, not supernatural, causes. Comte hoped that people then would begin to live for the benefit of others by practicing what he called a "religion of humanity" that essentially served as a variation of humanism. About his own European society and his belief that it had reached the third stage, he wrote, "It is time to complete the vast intellectual operation begun by Bacon, Descartes, and Galileo, by constructing the system of general ideas which must henceforth prevail among the human race".

To fully appreciate Comte's impact, consider the following who credited Comte as their influence: Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, John Stuart Mill, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Of course, there were many others.

Answer: Raphael

Raffaelo Sanzio (1483-1520) was born in Urbino, Italy, a cultural center that supported and encouraged interest in the arts. Raphael's father, Giovanni Santi, was a painter himself, supported by the Duke of Urbino, and he taught Raphael the techniques of painting and introduced him to humanism at the Duke's court. However, his father died when Raphael was eleven years old, and the young genius took over his father's workshop and soon surpassed him. His work became so well known that he caught the attention of Perugino, to whom Raphael became apprenticed for four years. During this time, he developed his own unique style and created works such as "Mond Crucifixion", "The Three Graces", "The Knight's Dream", and "Marriage of the Virgin". In 1504, he left his apprenticeship and moved to Florence, where he was influenced by the works of da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Masaccio. It is at this time that Raphael created a series of paintings often referred to as "The Madonnas" and completed what some say is his most ambitious piece, "Entombment". In 1508, Raphael moved to Rome, where Pope Julius II became his patron. The highlights he achieved at this time were the humanist frescos in the Vatican's Stanza de Segnatura, such as "The Triumph of Religion" and "The School of Athens", the frescos in the Vatican's Stanza d'Eliodoro, such as "The Expulsion of Heliodorus" and "The Liberation of Saint Peter", and another series of "Madonna" paintings. By 1514, Raphael was able to hire a crew to assist him in his painting of frescos so that he was able to follow other pursuits, particularly in the art of architecture. The pope appointed Raphael the chief architect, and the artist created the design for a chapel in Sant' Elgio degli Orefici, for the Santa Maria del Popolo Chapel, and for an area within Saint Peter's Basilica.

His legacy was a huge impact through his mastery of High Renaissance classicism and, toward the end of his life, his experimentation with Mannerism, which would become a significant style during the Baroque period.

Raphael died on a date that was both Good Friday and most likely his thirty-seventh birthday. He had suffered for fifteen days from a mysterious ailment.

Answer: Ernest Rutherford

Ernest Rutherford, Fist Baron Rutherford of Nelson, (1871-1937) was born in Brightwater, New Zealand, near Nelson, to James Rutherford, a farmer from Scotland, and Martha Thompson from England. His invention of a new radio receiver at Canterbury College, University of New Zealand, won him a research scholarship to study and do research at Cambridge University in England under the guidance of J. J. Thomson. While there, he not only set a record for longest distance for the the reception of electromagnetic waves until it was beaten by Marconi, but he also was part of the team working with Thomson, who is credited with having discovered electrons, the first particle found to be smaller than an atom itself. After holding positions at a couple of scholastic institutions, including one in Canada, Rutherford became the chair of physics at the Victoria University of Manchester in 1907 and then replaced Thomson as Director of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University in 1919.

In 1914, Rutherford was knighted for his great accomplishments up to that point. While studying uranium in the late 1890s, he had discovered alpha and beta rays. Then, through experiments with thorium, he discovered emanating from the element a gaseous substance he referred to as thoron, which is now referred to as radon. Through his experiments and observations of this gas, he discovered the radioactive phenomenon known as an element's "half-life", and this discovery led to his "Theory of Atomic Disintegration". This theory was groundbreaking, for almost everyone believed that atoms were indestructible. Rutherford's theory not only proved this belief to be wrong but it also demonstrated that through radioactive decay these atoms were transmuting into other atoms, causing elements to devolve into other elements. He had also along the way discovered third radioactive ray, the gamma ray. Thus, in 1908, he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

However, his most significant work was still to come! Working with Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden, he carried out experiments of firing alpha particles through thin gold foil; they found that these particles were deflected. Rutherford's interpretation of the data concerning these deflections eventually led him to create in 1911 the model of the atom as we currently understand it. He deduced that an atom must consist of a charged nucleus about which electrons revolved. Then, by 1920, further experiments of his had helped him discover new subatomic particles--protons. He theorized that the nucleus was composed of protons and some other subatomic particles that gave the nucleus of the atom its mass.

Eventually, an individual working under him--James Chadwick--discovered the neutron subatomic particle, and then two others under Rutherford's leadership--John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton--split an atom with a particle accelerator.

Answer: David Ricardo

David Ricardo (1772-1823) was born in London, the third of seventeen children of a Jewish family originally from Portugal that had settled in England by immigrating from the Netherlands. His father, Abraham, was a stockbroker, and he was following in his father's footsteps by the age of 14. However, when Ricardo married a woman of the Quaker faith and then converted to Unitarianism, he was disowned by his parents, who never spoke to him again. Striking out on his own, he went to work for the prestigious Lubbocks and Forster, and that is where he eventually made the bulk of his fortune from his investments based on his speculations about the outcome of Waterloo. He immediately retired at the age of thirty-seven following the events of Waterloo and bought Gatcombe Park in Gloucestershire, an estate now owned by Princess Anne, the Princess Royal of England.

Ricardo's ideas make him one of the most important and influential political economists to emerge from the nineteenth century. For one, he made the argument that the value of a product lay not in how much an employer paid an employee to make that product but rather in a quantifiable amount of labor the employee devoted toward the making of that product. Furthermore, as the employer did not base the employee's wages on the value of the employee's labor, the employer was exploiting employees to make a profit. One can obviously see the influence Ricardo's theory had on socialists and communists alike, and Karl Marx was obviously one individual very much interested in what Ricardo was arguing. He also argued that wages stabilized at the lowest possible amount--or a subsistence level--because employers, when given a choice between paying wages and retaining profit from revenue, will keep the profit and pay the lowest amount possible to his or her employees. In other words, the higher the cost of wages, the lower the profit the employer can claim. Because of this tendency, Ricardo argued that the government must do something to keep poverty in check and lower the number of poor people, and one of Ricardo's primary strategies was to discourage birth and early marriages among the poor. Yet another theory of his was that of comparative advantage, which is the position that nations that practice free trade are more efficient at allocating global resources. Thus, he challenged the previously predominant idea of mercantilism, which was that the purpose of international trade was to accumulate gold and silver through trade surpluses. He argued that strategic industry specialization coupled with free trade always produced greater profits and success overall. Tariffs and duties were counterproductive. Finally, his theory concerning the idea of "rent" led to land-reform movements in both Europe and the United States. His argument was that increased economic development led to the need for more land, which in turn led to the cultivation of land previously believed valueless from an agricultural point of view. Thus, landowners suddenly had a method of profiting from those who sought to develop their industries.

Ricardo was a contemporary and friend of Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill, and Jeremy Bentham. One can only imagine the conversations and debates that arose among them.

Ricardo's books published in lifetime are "The High Price of Bullion, a Proof of the Depreciation of Bank Notes" (1810), "Essay on the Influence of a Low Price of Corn on the Profits of Stock" (1815), and "On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation" (1817). Also, volumes now exist that are collections of the articles and letters he wrote over his lifetime.

Ricardo died at the age of 51 after an ear infection created septicaemia, which concentrated in his brain.

Answer: Saladin

An-Nasir Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub (1138-1193) was born in Tikrit of present-day Iraq to parents of Kurdish ancestry and who practiced the Sunni Islamic faith. In his late twenties, he accompanied his uncle in 1164 to Egypt to quell discord between rival factions there. After a few miltary victories over rival Islamic forces and European Crusader forces, he was appointed vizier of Egypt by al-Adid, the Fatimid caliph. In 1171, al-Adid died, and Saladin abolished the Fatimid Caliphate and realigned Egypt with the Sunni Abbasid Caliphate based in Baghdad.

Eventually, he rose to greater power by successfully defeating pro-Fatimid rebellions and conquering the west coast of present-day Saudi Arabia and Yemen, a large part of present-day Iraq, and Palestine (which included Jerusalem). He also escaped two attempts on his life by the Assassins, the greatly feard Islamic sect once referred to as the Nizari Ismailis.

Perhaps, that for which he is most celebrated is his decisive victory as the leader of the Ayyubid forces over the Crusaders at the Battle of Hattin in 1187. This essentially led to the recapture of Jerusalem, which in turn spurred the Third Crusade. Spearheaded by English rulers, a tax for raising revenue for the support of this crusade was even called the "Saladin Tithe". Richard the Lionheart eventually encountered the armies of Saladin at the Battle of Arsuf, which resulted in heavy losses for Saladin. At this point, Richard I's forces controlled a stretch of the Palestinian coast from Tyre to Jaffa. In 1192, at the Battle of Jaffa, Saladin's forces occupied Jaffa and nearly reclaimed it when Richard's armies arrived in time to defeat Saladin's armies and recapture the city. Eventually, a truce was formed between Richard and Saladin that allowed for Crusader control of Palestine from Tyre to Jaffa and safe passage of unarmed Christians making pilgrimages to Jerusalem. While Saladin seemed to have granted some unfavorable concessions, the end result was a firm Islamic conrol of Jerusalem.

Saladin died in 1193 having given away almost all of his wealth to the poor. In fact, at his death he had only one gold piece and forty pieces of silver in his possession, not enough to pay for his own funeral.

Answer: Vasco da Gama

Vasco da Gama (c. 1460s-1524) set sail from Lisbon in July of 1497 with four ships and 170 men to prove what previous collected data suggested--a sea route existed that would carry ships around the Cape of Good Hope and up the coast of Africa to a point where those ships could then sail east to Asian markets. Da Gama reached Calicut, India, in 1498, thus establishing the first ocean link between Europe and Asia. Along the way, he landed in the vicinity of present-day Mozambique and antagonized the Muslim population there by firing canons into their city as he departed, then reached the vicinity of present-day Kenya and pirated loot from Arab merchant ships, and then came to rest at the port of Malindi, where he contracted a pilot to assist him and his men as they sailed east from that point to Calicut.

There, da Gama managed to insult the Hindu monarch as he had nothing of great value to offer him as tribute. Tension rose between them, and da Gama was unable to leave any faction of men behind. However, he left Calicut with enough goods that when sold back in Portugal were sixty times more than the cost of the expedition itself. Unfortunately, however, da Gama's journey cost a couple of ships and over half his men.

Nevertheless, da Gama was rewarded by being made a Dom or lord and by being given the original title of Admiral of the Seas of Arabia, Persia, India, and all the Orient. Eventually, he set sail for Calicut again--this time with 15 ships and 800 men on a mission of vengeance, for Calicut had attacked a Portuguese factory set up there by Pedro Alvares Cabral and killed 70 Portuguese. Da Gama struck Calicut with such violence and cruelty--he bombarded the unfortified city for two days, destroyed Calicut's warships, captured merchant ships and cut off the crews' hands and ears and noses, and locked around 400 Muslim pilgrims (including women, children, and infants) on board a ship that he burned--that his reputation in India was forever marred. Of course, the result for Portugal was a wide-open west coast of India with various ports and factories set up to establish Portugal as the primary European supplier of spices for a few decades.

In 1524, da Gama was appointed Viceroy or Governor of Portuguese India and ennobled as the first Count of Vidigueria, the first time in Portugal a non-noble was given the rank of count. He set sail for a third voyage to India, but after he arrived that same year, he died of malaria on Christmas Eve. However, his journeys had sparked the explosion of the Portuguese Empire that would at one point include parts of Africa (including parts of Angola, Mozambique, and Madagascar), parts of Asia (including Bahrain, Ceylon, the Maldives, cities in India, Macau in China, and Timor) and of course Brazil and Uruguay in South America. Most importantly, da Gama's initial voyage to India opened the door to a global multiculturalism and a colonization of the world outside of Europe that had not been experienced previously.

Answer: Thomas Hunt Morgan

Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866-1945) was born in Lexington, Kentucky. He completed his B.S. degree at the State College of Kentucky (now the University of Kentucky) and then his doctorate at the recently founded Johns Hopkins University, the first research-oriented American university. In 1890, he became an associate professor at Bryn Mawr College, where he accomplished groundbreaking research in the field of embryology by studying the embryos of ctenophora, invertebrate marine animals. By 1904, Morgan was a professor of experimental zoology at Columbia University, where he began focusing his research on heredity and evolution. Gregor Mendel's ideas concerning heredity had recently been rediscovered or re-emphasized, and Hugo de Vries, the Dutch geneticist, had recently posited the mutation theory of evolution. These ideas spurred Morgan forward in his own research. Morgan opted to use Drosophila melanogaster or the fruit fly for his experiments in mutation and heredity because this species of fly had a gestation period of about twelve days. Thus, he created his famous Fly Room, and his successful use of fruit flies greatly popularized this species' use for many other experiments. More to the point, however, his crossbreeding experiments to find inherited mutations and his use of chemically and radioactively induced mutations eventually led to his discovery that genes were carried on material called chromosomes, which are the mechanical basis for heredity.

In 1928, Morgan moved to California to create a Division of Biology at the California Institute of Technology, which would eventually produce seven other Nobel Prize winners, including Linus Pauling.

The results of Morgan's work had tremendous effects on science. Mutation, heredity, and natural selection became the foundation of our understanding of evolution. Furthermore, Morgan laid the foundation for the field of genetics and set it on its modern course, which included a better understanding of inherited disease.

In 1904, Morgan married Lillian Vaughan Sampson, the significant experimental biologist whose research concerning the genetics of the fruit fly was tremendously beneficial to Morgan's own experiments. They had four children, and their daughter Isabel Morgan became a virologist specializing in the research of polio at Johns Hopkins University.

Answer: James D. Watson

James Dewey Watson was born in 1928 in Chicago, Illinois. Sharing his father's love for birdwatching, he originally planned to pursue a career in ornithology. However, after reading Erwin Schrodinger's book "What Is Life?", he decided to focus on genetics instead.

He studied at the University of Chicago and then Indiana University, where he completed his PhD under the guidance of Salvador Luria, who would eventually win a Nobel Prize himself in 1969. It was under Luria's influence that Watson became attracted to molecular biology. Furthermore, it was at Indiana University that Watson teamed with Max Delbruck and others to form the "Phage Group", a group of researchers who were beginning to explore beyond Thomas Hunt Morgan's fruit fly specimens by using microscopic ones, particularly viruses known as bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria). Through his experiments, research, and study of others' theories, Watson was narrowing down the possible components of a gene to self-replicating proteins or to DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid). He was leaning toward proteins with DNA having merely a structural role when he heard a discussion in Italy by Maurice Wilkins, a New Zealand-born British molecular biologist, that pushed him more toward the idea tha DNA played the primary role. In March of 1953, Watson was doing research in England with Francis Crick, the British molecular biologist. Together, Watson and Crick would use X-ray diffraction data collected by Rosalind Franklin (British chemist and X-ray crystallographer), Raymond Gosling (British X-Ray crystallographer), and Maurice Wilkins to deduce the double-helix structure of a DNA molecule.

Watson, Crick, and Wilkins were jointly awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Franklin was considered ineligible at that time because she was deceased, having died in 1958 of ovarian cancer. I'm not certain why Gosling was overlooked; perhaps, his being an assistant to Franklin contributed to his being deemed as someone having played a lesser role.

Watson went on to work at Harvard University, where he did research on RNA and its role in the transference of genetic information. He also wrote a few textbooks on DNA and cellular biology, some of which are still in use. In 1968, he published his famous book "The Double Helix", which tells of his personal experiences on the journey to discovering the double helix structure of DNA. That same year he also moved to New York to become director of a small Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which grew to a huge research facility under his supervision. Today, the CSHL is one of the leading research institutes studying the genetic basis of human cancer--thanks to Watson's interest in the disease.

Answer: Joseph Lister

Joseph Lister, 1st Baron Lister (1827-1912) was born in a Quaker home in West Ham, Essex, England, and his father was a successful innovator of compound microscope lenses. He received a B.A. in botany at University College, London, one of few colleges accepting individuals of the Quaker faith at that time. Then, he entered the Royal College of Surgeons before becoming an assistant to surgeon James Syme at the University of Edinburgh. He converted to the Anglican (Episcopal) Church and married Syme's daughter Agnes. During their three-month-long honeymoon, they visited various medical institutions in Germany and France, and Agnes Lister became such an enthusiast of the field of medicine that she became Lister's lab assistant for the remainder of her life.

While a professor of surgery at the University of Glasgow, Lister became aware of Pasteur's studies about micro-organisms and food spoilage. Pasteur explained that exposure to certain chemical solutions often killed most micro-organisms. Lister began searching for such a solution, but, of course, what solution was potent enough to kill a germ but not kill the host of that germ at the same time? He finally was made aware of carbolic acid or phenol and its efficiency in the treatment of sewage, so he began experimenting with the creation of a salve containing a percentage of carbolic acid. The result was nearly miraculous. Surgeons and students under his guidance began washing their hands with a solution containing carbolic acid, their surgical instruments had also to be cleaned with the substance, and wounds were dressed with the salve. Infections stopped happening, wounds started healing, and more and more people began living instead of dying after surgery. Medical cases that were once deemed hopeless were no longer deemed so, and Lister became universally revered in his own lifetime. Queen Victoria created him a Baronet in 1883 and then promoted him to Baron in 1897. In 1902, Lister saved Edward VII's life by guiding those who performed an appendectomy for the king.

He also revolutionized many other surgical practices, some which seem quite elementary to us today. Surgeons began wearing clean clothes, gowns, and smocks instead of the blood-stained items they had been wearing as a source of pride. They also began wearing clean gloves over their sterile hands. Surgical instruments were now used that were not made of porous materials, and surgical rooms were sprayed with antiseptic.

Oddly, many doctors and scientists were critical of Lister's obsession with cleanliness at first; in fact, many ridiculed him. However, in the end, none could argue with the statistics demonstrating how many of his patients lived while so many of theirs did not. Furthermore, Lister's experiments, practices, and success rates did wonders for the advancement of the germ theory of disease and infection.

Answer: B. F. Skinner

Burrhus Frederic Skinner (1904-1990) grew up in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, the son of Grace and William Skinner. His home was a religious one; however, while still a youth, Skinner rejected Christianity and became an atheist after the words of a mentor failed to alleviate his fear of hell. He eventually attended Hamilton College in New York with the goal of becoming a writer of fiction, a goal he eventually decided to give up, despite encouragement from the poet Robert Frost, because he felt he had nothing to say or at least because he had no real world experience from which he could say something important. Nevertheless, he did become a prolific writer of non-fiction--20 books and 180 articles--and, of course, he did publish his famous utopian novel "Walden Two" in 1948. The book tells of a fictional experimental community whose members live very contentedly because they have established a society based on scientific guidance and reasoning and they raise their children with conditioning that focuses on positive reinforcement. Furthermore, the community mirrors the peaceful, stress-free, non-commercial, fulfilling lifestyle advocated by Henry David Thoreau in the original nineteenth-century masterpiece "Walden".

In 1931, Skinner earned a PhD from Harvard University and eventually moved onward to teach at a couple of different universities before finding his way back to Harvard, where he became a tenured professor. Over the course of his life, Skinner made a strong case for what he called "radical behaviorism", the theory that all behavior--whether physical or mental--is the result of conditioning and reinforcement. He rejected cognitive science, including the theories of Freud, and argued that our thoughts and feelings did not lead us to do what we do because our thoughts and feelings are behaviors themselves caused by conditioning and reinforcement. He essentially rejected the existence of free will.

Skinner was responsible for many other groundbreaking ideas. He described a dual system of conditioning consisting of respondent conditioning, reflexive behavior resulting from stimuli from the phenomena of the outside world (like Pavlov's dogs salivating at the sound of a bell), and operant conditioning, voluntary behavior because of an expectation of a reward or a punishment (like rats that open a door in a box because they believe food is on the other side or a kid that won't touch a stove because she burned herself by touching one once before). Of course, sometimes the conditioning occurred as a combination of all of this. For example, rats when subjected to a bright light then went to a door to open it and then were rewarded with food. This created a path that operated with a stimulus that led to a response and then that response led to a reinforcement.

Skinner invented several items to assist him in his study of behavior. He created the "Skinner Box" or the operant conditioning chamber with either a lever for rats or a disk in a wall for pigeons. He created what was called the "Air Crib", which essentially conditioned infants or toddlers to cry less often. He created a "Teaching Machine" that rewarded students who were giving correct answers or learning information correctly. He even created the "Pigeon-guided Missile" that relied on pigeons housed in compartments in the nose of a missile that would peck at images of the target on a screen.

Other important books of his are "Verbal Behavior", published in 1957, and "Beyond Freedom and Dignity", published in 1971. The latter book is highly controversial because Skinner argues that human beings attempting to create a better society will have to let go of their notion that they are agents of free will.