Word: scientists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Germany successfully launches the V-2, a surface-to-surface missile developed with the help of rocket scientist Wernher von Braun...
Back in Switzerland, the young scientist began watching children play, scrupulously recording their words and actions as their minds raced to find reasons for why things are the way they are. In one of his most famous experiments, Piaget asked children, "What makes the wind?" A typical Piaget dialogue...
Silent Spring, serialized in the New Yorker in June 1962, gored corporate oxen all over the country. Even before publication, Carson was violently assailed by threats of lawsuits and derision, including suggestions that this meticulous scientist was a "hysterical woman" unqualified to write such a book. A huge counterattack was organized and led by Monsanto, Velsicol, American Cyanamid--indeed, the whole chemical industry--duly supported by the Agriculture Department as well as the more cautious in the media. (TIME's reviewer deplored Carson's "oversimplifications and downright errors...Many of the scary generalizations--and there are lots of them...
...year's end, Audubon and National Parks Magazine had published additional excerpts from the book, and all but the most self-serving of Carson's attackers were backing rapidly toward safer ground. In their ugly campaign to reduce a brave scientist's protest to a matter of public relations, the chemical interests had only increased public awareness. Silent Spring became a runaway best seller, with international reverberations. Nearly 40 years later, it is still regarded as the cornerstone of the new environmentalism. Carson was not a born crusader but an intelligent and dedicated woman who rose heroically to the occasion...
...Joseph Stalin's favorite scientist, and it's easy to see why. Lysenko was a peasant-born agronomist and Marxist ideologue who rejected Mendel's ideas because they contradicted the doctrine of dialectical materialism. He offered instead to solve the Soviet Union's chronic crop failures through a process he called vernalization, by which he would "train" spring wheat to be winter wheat and thus increase the number of annual harvests. Lysenko believed all living organisms passed on to succeeding generations characteristics acquired in their lifetime. This untested theory was at odds with what Lysenko scathingly called "alien bourgeois" genetics...