A is for Avogadro
Around him you’d feel dumber
And if you think you’re smarter than him
Then he has got your number
B is for the Bohrs
Christian, Aage, and Niels, to recollect
Two got Nobel prizes
And one, the Bohr effect
C is for Marie Curie
A genius that’s for sure
For her radioactivity
Had a strong allure
D is for Darwin, Charles by name
Who rode the Beagle to great fame
The father of evolution, with Wallace, a rival
He described the fittest and their survival
E is the letter for Einstein
To him no one compared
E is also for energy
Equal to M C squared
F is for Rosalind Franklin
The genius of DNA
And the one from whom Watson / Crick
Pilfered data one day
G is for Galileo Galilei
Famous for planet research
He discovered Jupiter’s moons
And offended the Catholic church
H is for Herschel and Hubble
But if we cannot choose both
Let’s give it instead to Hippocrates
Famous for his oath
I is for Ibn al-Haytham
Who studied light and sight
Laying down the foundations
For optics to be done right
J is for James Prescott Joule
Who found in work the heat within
And that is why today there is
A unit named for him
K is for Johannes Kepler
The first person to come to grips
With the fact that planetary orbits
Take the form of an ellipse
L is for Antoine Lavoisier
Chemistry’s father who sweated
All through the French revolution
At which he got beheaded
M is for Mendel and Mendeleev
Seeing order in things exotic
Mendel found genes in peas
And Mendeleev the table periodic
N is for Isaac Newton
For his time, so far ahead
Famous for math and gravity
And an apple upon his head
O is for Hans Christian Ørstead
A scientist theoretical
Whose work on electric currents
Taught us the electromagnetical
P is for Linus Pauling
A renaissance man was he
From macromolecular structure
To his work on vitamin C
Q is for Adolphe Quetelet
With keen social science ideology
Who probably is most well known
As a founder of sociology
R is the letter of Ramanujan
In mathematics, the best of the lot
A genius by all criteria
And most incredibly, self-taught
S is for Schwann and Schleiden
Who showed, beyond all doubt,
That every living organism
Is built from cells throughout
T is for Thomson, J.J. to this friends
Who in chemistry knew the ropes
Discovering the electron
And the things we call isotopes
U is for Urey
Who showed biochemicals could start
From chemistry and patience
Plus a little spark
V is the letter for Volta
Who lit up the night
Illuminating the future
With a slow, steady light
W is for Alfred Wegener
A geoscientist who caused a rift
Proposing a land called Pangea
That split from continental drift
X is for the X-rays
Passing through bone and skin
Letting doctors see everything
Otherwise hidden within
Y is for Rosalyn Yalow
Twas the Nobel she did win
Developing radioimmunoassays
And our knowledge of insulin
Z is for Frits Zernike
Who helped cell biologists cope
By enabling them to better see cells
With his phase contrast microscope
0 Comments