Sharon Moalem
The author of Survival of the Sickest, Moalem is a physician, scientist, and biotechnology inventor who is an expert in a variety of scientific fields, including rare diseases. As such, he advocates for the…
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Aran Gordon
Gordon is a long-distance runner with hemochromatosis (an inherited disease in which the body stores too much iron). In 1997, as Gordon trains for the Marathon des Sables, a 150-mile race across the Sahara Desert…
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Charles Darwin
Darwin was a 19th-century biologist and the originator of the theory of natural selection, which he published in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species. The theory of natural selection, which is now…
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Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
Lamarck was an 18th- and 19th-century French biologist who is largely remembered for the theory of inherited acquired traits. The theory holds that a physical characteristic acquired by a parent can then be passed down…
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Alister Hardy
Hardy was the marine biologist who proposed the aquatic ape hypothesis. Hardy suggested that a band of woodland apes became isolated on an island and adapted to the water, and that these were humans’ predecessors…
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Get the entire Survival of the Sickest LitChart as a printable PDF.
Elaine Morgan
Morgan was a writer who became interested in evolution in the 1970s. She was skeptical of the savannah hypothesis, which stated that humans adapted due to conditions found in the savannah and the development of…
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David Barker
Barker was a British medical professor who examined the effect of junk food on epigenetic signals and childhood obesity. He suggested that when mothers eat junk food that lacks nutrients, the embryo may receive signals…
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Barbara McClintock
McClintock was a scientist who discovered “jumping genes” by studying corn genetics. McClintock found that when the corn was stressed, sequences of DNA moved from one place to another and triggered changes in…
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Paul Ewald
Ewald was a pioneer of evolutionary biology who focused on the transmission of diseases. He developed a theory that by making diseases (cholera, for example) more reliant on human transmission, they would evolve to be…
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Minor Characters
August Weissman
Weissman was a 19th-century biologist who divided the body’s cells into two categories: germ cells (egg and sperm cells) and somatic cells (all other kinds of cells). Weissman’s theory held that information in somatic cells is never passed on to germ cells, a concept called the Weissman barrier.
Edward Jenner
Jenner was a doctor living in 18th-century England who developed the first vaccine. He scraped a cowpox sore from a milkmaid and purposefully infected teenage boys with it, who as a result were protected from smallpox—a much more dangerous disease.
Carl Djerassi
Djerassi was a chemist who developed the first birth control pill, modeling its chemicals on the phytoestrogens in the Mexican yam.
Ken Storey
Storey is a biochemist who studied wood frogs and their ability to freeze in the winter before sparking back to life in the spring.
