Genius of Britain: The Scientists Who Changed the World is a five-part 2010 television documentary presented by leading British scientific figures, which charts the history of some of Britain's most important scientists and innovators.[1]
An Englishnatural philosopher, anatomist and astronomer, as well as a pioneering architect, who as founding president of the Royal Society pioneered practical experimentation and secured the society's royal patronage.
An Anglo-Irishnatural philosopher and pioneering chemist, who with the assistance Robert Hooke developed the air pump to discover the properties of air and its importance to life, which he demonstrated to the Royal Society.
A Scottishsurgeon and anatomist who collected specimens, preserved at the Hunterian Museum, and made accurate maps of the body and how the parts interact and function, which brought surgery out of the Middle Ages and put it on a scientific basis.
An Englishphysician, scientist and pioneering immunologist, trained by John Hunter, who deliberately infected a boy first with cowpox and then with smallpox in a pioneering experiment which led to the development of the world's first vaccine.
A Britishnatural philosopher and chemist who discovered and investigated the properties of hydrogen, which he called inflammable air, paving the way for hydrogen balloons and bombs, and working with Joseph Priestley discovered the composition of water.
An Englishnatural philosopher, theologian and chemist who investigated the properties of air, inventing soda water and discovering oxygen in the process, and working with Henry Cavendish discovered the composition of water.
A British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, and biologist. He is best known for independently conceiving the theory of evolution through natural selection; his paper on the subject was jointly published with some of Charles Darwin's writings in 1858.
A British mathematical physicist who formulated the classical theory of electromagnetic radiation, bringing together for the first time electricity, magnetism, and light as manifestations of the same phenomenon.
A British pioneer of radar technology who demonstrated the first practical radio system for detecting aircraft when he successfully bounced a radio wave from a BBC short-wave transmitter off a Handley Page Heyford aircraft.
A British Royal Air Force (RAF) engineer air officer. He is credited with single-handedly inventing the turbojet engine. Whittle's jet engines were developed some years earlier than those of Germany's Hans von Ohain who was the designer of the first operational turbojet engine.
A British chemist and X-ray crystallographer who made contributions to the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), RNA (ribonucleic acid), viruses, coal, and graphite.
A British astronomer noted primarily for the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis, but also for his often controversial stances on other scientific matters—in particular his rejection of the "Big Bang" theory, a term coined by him on BBC radio, and his promotion of panspermia as the origin of life on Earth.
A British evolutionary biologist, whose theoretical work expounding a rigorous genetic basis for the existence of altruism provided an insight that was a key part of the development of a gene-centric view of evolution.