Franz Boas (July 9, 1858 – December 21, 1942) was a German-American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology".Like many such pioneers, he trained in other disciplines; he received his doctorate in physics, and did post-doctoral work in geography. He is famed for applying the scientific method to the study of human cultures and societies, a field which was previously based on the formulation of grand theories around anecdotal knowledge.

Carl Edward Sagan (November 9, 1934 – December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer and astrochemist and a highly successful popularizer of astronomy, astrophysics, and other natural sciences. He pioneered exobiology and promoted the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

Oliver Wolf Sacks (born July 9, 1933, London) is a United States-based British neurologist who has written popular books about his patients, the most famous of which is Awakenings, which was adapted into a film starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro.

Sacks considers that his literary style follows the tradition of 19th-century "clinical anecdotes," a literary style that included informal case histories, following the writings of Alexander Luria.Sacks is a childhood friend of Jonathan Miller and a cousin of Robert Aumann and the late Abba Eban.

Stephen Jay Gould (September 10, 1941 – May 20, 2002) was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was also one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation, leading many commentators to call him "America's unofficial evolutionist laureate." Gould spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Roger David Kornberg (born April 24, 1947(1947-04-24)) is an American biochemist and professor of structural biology at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Kornberg was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2006 "for his studies of the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription" which explains the process by which genetic information from DNA is copied to RNA. His father, Arthur Kornberg, who was also a professor at Stanford University, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1959.

He also holds an honorary doctorate from Umeå University in Sweden.

William Henry Fox Talbot (February 11, 1800 – September 17, 1877) was the inventor of the negative/positive photographic process, the precursor to most photographic processes of the 19th and 20th centuries. He was also a noted photographer who made major contributions to the development of photography as an artistic medium. His work in the 1850s, on photo-mechanical reproduction led to the creation of the photoglyphic engraving process, the precursor to photogravure. He is, however, also remembered as the holder of a patent which, some say, affected the early development of commercial photography in England. Talbot also made some important early photographs of Oxford, Paris and York - see "Nathaniel Whittock's bird's-eye view of the City of York in the 1850's" by Hugh Murray.