Science, environment and possible futures

Charles Darwin (1809--1882) was a British naturalist. After a five-year voyage around the world aboard HMS Beagle, he published On the Origin of Species in 1859. In this book he explained the diversity of living species through natural selection: organisms that are better adapted to their environment tend to survive and reproduce. His theory transformed biology and remains a foundation of modern science.

Alexander Fleming (1881--1955) was a Scottish bacteriologist. In 1928, he noticed by chance that a mould growing on one of his laboratory dishes killed the surrounding bacteria. This observation led to the discovery of penicillin, the first widely used antibiotic. Later developed by other researchers, penicillin has saved millions of lives. Fleming shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1945.

In 1953, at the University of Cambridge, James Watson (American) and Francis Crick (British) described the double-helix structure of DNA, the molecule that carries genetic information. Their work relied in part on the X-ray images produced by the British chemist Rosalind Franklin (1920--1958), whose essential contribution was long overlooked. This discovery opened the way to modern genetics.

Alan Turing (1912--1954) was a British mathematician, considered one of the founders of computer science and artificial intelligence. During the Second World War he helped to break the German Enigma code. In 1950 he proposed the famous Turing test, a way of asking whether a machine can be said to ``think''. His question is still discussed today, in the age of AI.