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100 Scientists Who Shaped World History

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100 Scientists Who Shaped World History showcases great men and women of science who significantly contributed to our understanding of the physical world around us. These biographies are designed so that the scientific ideas presented in them are totally accessible for the non-specialist general reader with an interest in science and science history. All fields of science and scientific inquiry are represented. Highly recommended for school and community library collections, 100 Scientists Who Shaped World History is enhanced with more than 100 illustrates, locator maps, a fun trivia quiz, timeline, index, and suggested projects.

This is a book that is fatally marred by the author's need to be politically correct for its intended audience--public school libraries. Rather than making an honest effort at discovering a representative list of the 100 scientists who have made the genuinely great strides toward our understanding of our world, he has produced a bogus list that the fearful ladies of the pedagogical world will thrust on our gullible youth, the better to keep them from having the dangerous thought that white European males have dominated the sciences.

How else to explain the presence of George Washington Carver, whose claim to fame was that he was "born a slave" in 1866. Really. The Emancipation Proclamation was effective in 1863, the 13th amendment passed in 1865, and the Civil War ended in 1866. Is this a stretcher? And was he really an accomplished scientist? Ha! PC follies for the gullible.

And in the list we find Sigmund Freud, of all people! Freud was not even a scientist. He never produced any data that could be statistically analyzed, graphed, or replicated. Only introspective self-delusions were his stock in trade. His theories on human psychology are entirely discredited today--who among us believes that a boy's love for his mother is sexual, and that little girls are messed up because they mourn for what is missing between their legs? Why him, but not Nostradamus or Madam Blavatsky, or the inventor of homeopathy, whoever he is?

To include Margaret Mead here is absurd in light of her shoddy work in Samoa, devastatingly discredited by Derek Freeman. Her "work," mostly printed up in Redbook, a popular magazine for ladies, has sunk into a well deserved oblivion.

The list includes eleven women, who range from comparatively minor figures to relative nonentities, and are clearly out of their league. Science has been an overwhelmingly white male enterprise, and it is dishonest to pretend otherwise.

And not to include Robert Koch, Willard Gibbs, E. O. Wilson, R. A. Fisher, or even Chandrasekar, and others, who generated whole new scientific fields, is a disgrace.

Perhaps it does not contain all the names it should. And perhaps it does include a few women for whom could be substituted male scientists who had achieved more, but in general this is a fine introductory anthology to the work of distinguished scientists.
A caveat however is in the fact that much scientific work is team work, especially today. If Watson is on the list why isn't Crick?
Three great minds not on the list are John von Neumann, Norbert Weiner, and Kurt Godel.
There too is no real representation of scientists working in the past forty years, arguably the most revolutionary period in the ' life- sciences' Mankind has ever known.
Still it tells the story of a fair share of Mankind's greatest scientists to this point.

This is a good book

Yes, George Washington Carver was an accomplished scientist.

His work developed 325 products from peanuts, 108 applications for sweet potatoes, and 75 products from pecans, including a substitute for rubber and more that 500 dyes and pigments.

And it is believed that he was born in 1865 though that is not recorded.