Vocation : Science : Biology

Joseph Paul Gaimard (31 January 1793 – 10 December 1858) was a French naval surgeon and naturalist.

Ernest Marc Louis de Gonzague Doudart de Lagrée (French pronunciation: [ɛʁnɛst dudaʁ də laɡʁe]; March 31, 1823 – March 12, 1868) was the leader of the French Mekong Expedition of 1866-1868.He was born in Saint-Vincent-de-Mercuze near Grenoble, France, and graduated from the École Polytechnique. He joined the navy and served in the Crimean War, then took up a post in Indochina in the hope that the climate would help his chronically ulcerated throat. It did not, and throughout the Mekong expedition he was often in severe pain.
The expedition left Saigon on June 5, 1866. In addition to his ulcers, Doudart de Lagrée suffered from fever, amoebic dysentery and infected wounds caused by leeches, as the expeditioners had to walk barefoot once they had worn out their supply of shoes. By the time the expedition reached Dongchuan, in Yunnan, China, he was too sick to be moved, and his second-in-command Francis Garnier took command. Garnier led the expedition to Dali, leaving Doudart de Lagrée in the care of the doctor. He died from an abscess on his liver. The doctor removed his heart to return it to France, while Doudart de Lagrée was buried in Dongchuan.
Ernest Doudart de Lagrée was also an entomologist. Insect collections made by him in Africa are conserved in Muséum national d'histoire naturelle in Paris.

Bernard Ogilvie Dodge (18 April 1872 – 9 August 1960) was an American botanist and pioneer researcher on heredity in fungi. Dodge was the author of over 150 papers dealing with the life histories, cytology, morphology, pathology and genetics of fungi, and with insects and other animal pests of plants. He made the first studies of sexual reproduction in the common bread mold, Neurospora.Dodge's work on the genetics of Neurospora laid the groundwork for the discoveries that earned George Wells Beadle and Edward Lawrie Tatum the Nobel Prize in 1958.

Léon Bertrand (born 11 May 1951) is a French politician. Previously a professor of physics and biology, he was Mayor of Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni from 1983 until 2018. He was elected to the French National Assembly for the Rally for the Republic representing French Guiana's 2nd constituency in 1988 and was reelected at every election till 2007.

Alain Bombard (French pronunciation: [alɛ̃ bɔ̃baʁ]; Paris, 27 October 1924 – Paris, 19 July 2005) was a French biologist, physician and politician famous for sailing in a small boat across the Atlantic Ocean without provision. He theorized that a human being could very well survive the trip across the ocean without provisions and decided to test his theory himself in order to save thousands of lives of people lost at sea.He was a Member of the European Parliament from the Socialist Party for France from 1981 to 1994.

François Gros (French pronunciation: [fʁɑ̃swa ɡʁo]; 24 April 1925 – 18 February 2022) was a French biologist and one of the pioneers of cellular biochemistry in France. His scientific career concerned genes and their role in regulating cellular functions.Honorary professor at the Collège de France, member of the Institute of France, he was also director of the Pasteur Institute (1976–1982) and advisor to Prime Ministers Pierre Mauroy and Laurent Fabius (1981–1985).Elected correspondent (1977) then member (1979) of the French Academy of Sciences, he was permanent secretary from 1991 to 2000.Gros died on 18 February 2022, at the age of 96.

Laurent Nottale (born 29 July 1952) is an astrophysicist, a retired director of research at CNRS, and a researcher at the Paris Observatory. He is the author and inventor of the theory of scale relativity, which aims to unify quantum physics and relativity theory.

Marie-Louis-Georges Colomb (Lure, Haute-Saône, 25 May 1856 – Nyons, 3 January 1945) was a French botanist, science populariser, and a pioneer of French comics, known as bandes dessinées .
Under the pseudonym Christophe (playing on "Christophe Colomb", the French name for Columbus), Colomb created comics that were popular among the French intelligentsia, yet were published in Le Petit Français illustré, a children's paper. His popular L'idée fixe du savant Cosinus (1893–1899) featured a brilliant, absent-minded scientist. His other comics included La Famille Fenouillard (probably the first French comic, 1889); Le Sapeur Camember (1890–1896); Les Malices de Plick et Plock (1893–1904); and Le Baron de Cramoisy (1899).
Colomb's works were comic sketches exploring the quirks of his title characters. Images to him were more vital than words in communicating with children (the dialogue and Colomb's editorial remarks were always outside the picture frame). His frames have been said to anticipate the "visual grammar" of movies and television.Colomb retired as Deputy Director of the Sorbonne's botanical laboratory.
Novelist Marcel Proust was a student of Colomb in his youth, and seems to have taken an interest in botany from him—Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) presents botanical knowledge and speculation to such an extent that botany "constitutes an alternative lens through which the human world of the novel can be viewed."