• Question: who was the first person to study biology?

    Asked by Hayden on 14 Jan 2022.
    • Photo: Jonny Coates

      Jonny Coates answered on 14 Jan 2022:

      Ohh good question. I dont think we will ever really know the answer to this. But it depends on what you mean by study. Technically, farmers who were selecting crops and animals for the best traits were doing biology or those who knew which berries were safe to eat (though wouldn’t have known what was happening or why). But it was likely the Ancient Egytpians & Mesopotamians who first performed dedicated study of what we would consider biology and who’s work then influenced the Greeks (Aristotle is the father of biology) and Middle Eastern philosophers (Jim Al-Khalili has a good book about the history of science which reveals the key roles of the middle east that “Western science” often ignores).

    • Photo: Samuel Ellis

      Samuel Ellis answered on 14 Jan 2022:

      I agree with Jonny, various ancient cultures were already studying aspects of what we now consider science. And you could argue that the earliest humans learning how to predict the seasons and plant growth, what mushrooms were tasty or deadly, were already practicing some fundamentals of biology and passing it down through generations

    • Photo: Melanie Krause

      Melanie Krause answered on 14 Jan 2022:

      Edward Jenner was not the first person to study biology, but he is sort of the ‘father of vaccines’. He was the first one to conduct a proper scientific study where he used cowpox (that are usually harmless to people) and infected someone with it to see if they were protected from the much more dangerous smallpox. And it worked out. He published it in a scientific journal and that was the start of vaccine production.
      That said hundreds of years earlier the Chinese had already tried something similar, but never in an empirical study. So often we only know of the person who really published something first, even if it was common practise earlier.

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