Milton Wainwright

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Milton Wainwright
Born (1950-02-23) 23 February 1950 (age 74)
Nationality English
Citizenship British
Alma mater University of Nottingham
Known for"Alien Bugs", Neopanspermia
Scientific career
Fields Microbiology, Astrobiology
Institutions

Milton Wainwright (born 23 February 1950) is a British microbiologist who is known for his research into what he claims could be extraterrestrial life found in the stratosphere. [1] [2] [3]

Contents

Biography

Wainwright graduated from the University of Nottingham in the field of botany. He obtained a PhD from the same university in the field of mycology. From 1974 to 1975 he went to the National Research Council of Canada as postdoctoral fellow, where he obtained a qualification in environmental microbiology. From 1975 to 1986, he was a lecturer in microbiology at the University of Sheffield. [4]

Research

Wainwright's interests are in astrobiology and the history of science. [4]

In 2008, he claimed that the idea of natural selection is not original to Charles Darwin's or Alfred Russel Wallace's theory. [5] Also, he has claimed that the red rain in Kerala is a biological entity. [6] Wainwright has also written widely about the history of the discovery of penicillin (including that Adolf Hitler’s life was saved by the drug) and streptomycin [7] and on the hypothesis that bacteria and other non-virus microbes cause cancer. [8]

In the 1980s Wainwright interviewed Rutgers University faculty members for his 1990 book on antibiotics, Miracle Cure, asking questions about Albert Schatz, which piqued the curiosity of some professors, who made their own inquiries and spoke with Schatz. A group of them began to lobby for Schatz's rehabilitation, because they were convinced that Schatz had been the victim of an injustice when the 1952 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded solely to Selman Waksman. This culminated in Rutgers awarding Schatz the 1994 Rutgers University Medal, the university's highest honor. [9]

Wainwright identifies as an agnostic. [10]

Books

Honours and awards

Articles

See also

Related Research Articles

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Sir Alexander Fleming was a Scottish physician and microbiologist, best known for discovering the world's first broadly effective antibiotic substance, which he named penicillin. His discovery in 1928 of what was later named benzylpenicillin from the mould Penicillium rubens has been described as the "single greatest victory ever achieved over disease". For this discovery, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945 with Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Astrobiology</span> Science concerned with life in the universe

Astrobiology, is a scientific field within the life and environmental sciences that studies the origins, early evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe by investigating its deterministic conditions and contingent events. As a discipline, astrobiology is founded on the premise that life may exist beyond Earth.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Streptomycin</span> Aminoglycoside antibiotic

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Selman Waksman</span> Russian Jewish-American biochemist, microbiologist, and Nobel Laureate (1888–1973)

Selman Abraham Waksman was a Jewish Ukrainian inventor, Nobel Prize laureate, biochemist and microbiologist whose research into the decomposition of organisms that live in soil enabled the discovery of streptomycin and several other antibiotics. A professor of biochemistry and microbiology at Rutgers University for four decades, he discovered several antibiotics, and he introduced procedures that have led to the development of many others. The proceeds earned from the licensing of his patents funded a foundation for microbiological research, which established the Waksman Institute of Microbiology located at the Rutgers University Busch Campus in Piscataway, New Jersey (USA). In 1952, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for "ingenious, systematic, and successful studies of the soil microbes that led to the discovery of streptomycin." Waksman and his foundation later were sued by Albert Schatz, one of his Ph.D. students and the discoverer of streptomycin, for minimizing Schatz's role in the discovery.

Xenoarchaeology, a branch of xenology dealing with extraterrestrial cultures, is a hypothetical form of archaeology that exists mainly in works of science fiction. The field is concerned with the study of the material remains to reconstruct and interpret past life-ways of alien civilizations. Xenoarchaeology is not currently practiced by mainstream archaeologists due to the current lack of any material for the discipline to study.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chandra Wickramasinghe</span> British astronomer (born 1939)

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Albert Schatz (scientist)</span> American microbiologist and antibiotic discoverer (1920–2005)

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GodfreyLouis is a solid-state physicist from India. His hypotheses about the "red rain" phenomenon in Kerala have attracted controversy. In April 2008, he published a paper in which he hypothesised that samples of particles from the "blood-coloured" rain that fell in his state of Kerala, India in the summer of 2001 were the result of a comet disintegrating in the upper atmosphere which comprised mainly microbes from outer space. The paper drew much media interest. Other scientists disagreed early on with Louis' hypothesis regarding the red rain's origin. An earlier (2001) study by the Centre for Earth Science Studies, Kerala, India, reported that the red rain was the result of spores from local algae.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Waksman Institute of Microbiology</span>

The Waksman Institute of Microbiology is a research facility on the Busch Campus of Rutgers University. It is named after Selman Waksman, a student and then faculty member at Rutgers who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1952 for research which led to the discovery of streptomycin. The institute conducts research on microbial molecular genetics, developmental molecular genetics, plant molecular genetics, and structural and computational biology.

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References

  1. "'Alien Bugs' Discovered In Earth's Atmosphere". news.sky.com. Retrieved 29 December 2014.
  2. "The truth IS out there (above Cheshire, that is): British scientists claim to have found proof of alien life - Science - News - The Independent" . independent.co.uk. 19 September 2013. Archived from the original on 15 May 2022. Retrieved 29 December 2014.
  3. "Astrobiologists Claim to Have Found Extraterrestrial Life Form in Earth's Stratosphere | Space Exploration | Sci-News.com". sci-news.com. Retrieved 29 December 2014.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 University of Sheffield. "Milton Wainwright - Academic Staff - Molecular Biology and Biotechnology - The University of Sheffield". sheffield.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 29 December 2014.
  5. "wainwrightscience". wainwrightscience.blogspot.co.uk. Retrieved 29 December 2014.
  6. "It's raining aliens". tmcnet.com. Retrieved 29 December 2014.
  7. Wainwright, Milton (2004). "Hitler's Penicillin". Perspectives in Biology and Medicine. 47 (2): 189–198. doi:10.1353/pbm.2004.0037. PMID   15259203. S2CID   29450203. Project MUSE   54167.[ non-primary source needed ]
  8. "Biochemical Society Essays in Biochemistry". all-portland.net. Archived from the original on 29 December 2014. Retrieved 29 December 2014.
  9. Veronique Mistiaen (2 November 2002). "Time, and the great healer". The Guardian. Retrieved 6 September 2022.
  10. "Milton Wainwright". British Centre for Science Education.