I bumped into a cool site that lists the scientists whose discoveries have saved the most lives.

There are over 100 scientists named and divided into “clubs” such as the 100,000 club. I’ll share a few here and encourage you to check out the rest right at ScienceHeroes.com.

Coming in at the “bottom” with an estimated 50,000 lives saved are Edward Patrick and Henry Heimlich. (I bet you can figure out what they figured out.)

The Heimlich maneuver.

Samuel Kountz, the first African American transplant surgeon, pioneered kidney transplants. His work is credited with helping save the lives of over 227,000 people.

Swedish engineer, Nils Bohlin, worked for Volvo to improve the seat belt and his design has saved over a million lives.

Russian Vasilii Kolesov endured incredible conditions in war ravaged Russia throughout the first half of the 20th century. Then, in 1964, he performed the first bypass surgery on a human. Lives since saved using this technique:  2.6 million

Canadians Frederick Banting and Charles Best have saved over 16 million lives for discovering insulin.

And Christian Zoeller’s tetanus vaccine has saved over 52 million!

Topping the 100 million mark, Polish immigrant Abel Wolman and American Linn Enslow are credited for saving 177 million lives due to their discovery which, according to Life Magazine in 1997, was “probably the most significant public health advance of the millennium.” It was purifying water via chlorination.

Finally, we go into the billion club.

German Richard Lewisohn and Austrian Karl Landsteiner “teamed up” to perfect blood transfusions. Landsteiner discovered blood types, and later Lewisohn devised the method which has been used to save an estimated 1,094,000,000 lives.

Last but certainly not least, Germans Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch worked together to “fix” nitrogen, meaning taking nitrogen from the atmosphere and getting it into usable form for fertilizer. After countless experiments, Haber discovered a process for synthesizing nitrogen-rich ammonia. Then Bosch used his skill to allow the method to be used on a large scale. The Haber-Bosch process is still used today (discovered in 1909) and is responsible for allowing the population boom of the 20th century. The site states, according to author Vaclav Smil, the Haber-Bosch process “has been of greater fundamental importance to the modern world than…the airplane, nuclear energy, space flight, or television.”

Lives saved (or perhaps better stated: made possible): over 2.7 billion.

We honor the guy who jumped in front of the subway to save another person. We celebrate the pilot who landed a hobbling aircraft to safety. We don’t know who any of these scientists are.

It is a bit of apples to oranges, though. These scientists didn’t risk their lives (that I’m aware of) to create these breakthroughs. We can also better relate to the experiences of these two men, because easier to imagine our response if seeing someone on a train track or if a plane is going down. The courage and “keeping it cool” these two must have had! Finally, the numbers for the scientists are huge because they keep growing. They have a sort of “residual life-savings” continuing to pay dividends as we keep using their inventions.

Nonetheless, the stories of these scientists are full of blood, sweat, and tears. Some conducted literally thousands of experiments. Their determination helped us all to grow up in a better world that might never have been so if not for their efforts:

 

Thank you, awesome scientists, for helping humanity reach new plateaus,

-Brandon