There are theorists like James Clerk Maxwell and Lord Kelvin, James Watt and his steam engine, John Logie Baird and his mechanical TV and modern heroes, like James Black and Ian Donald, whose contributions to medicine are still saving lives.
Scotland is renowned for its contribution to engineering, science and medicine over the centuries, with great inventors, researchers and entrepreneurs.
Name: CHARLES MACINTOSH Born: 29 Dec, 1766, Glasgow Died: 25 July, 1843 Dunchattan, near Glasgow Claim to fame: Invented waterproof fabric
THE son of a fabric merchant, Macintosh was responsible for many innovations. As well as creating the first waterproof fabric, he invented a bleaching powder, a way of dying calico, preserving citric acid for use on ships and commercially producing yeast. He pioneered a quick way of converting iron into steel using carbon gases.
His real claim to fame began when he looked for commercial uses for naphthalene; finding it could dissolve rubber, he had the idea of trying to invent a new kind of fabric which could withstand rain. By inserting liquidised rubber between two sheets of woollen fibre, he created a fabric which was effectively waterproof. The first waterproof coats went stiff in cold weather and sticky in the sun. But Macintosh persisted and a business partner came up with the idea of vulcanised rubber, which was resistant to changes in temperature.
Macs became hugely popular and the name of the inventor is forever associated with coats which could keep out the rain.
Name: IAN WILMUT Born: 7 July, 1944, Hampton Lucy, near Warwick
Claim to fame: Supervised the team at the Roslin Institute, near Edinburgh, which created Dolly, the world's first mammal cloned from an adult cell
PRESERVED forever in a glass case at the Royal Museum of Scotland, the sheep named in honour of country music legend Dolly Parton appears at first sight to be an unremarkable farmyard animal.
But the birth of Dolly the sheep at a laboratory near Edinburgh in 1996 marked a huge leap forward in biotechnology. Even the taciturn Ian Wilmut, supervisor of the group of scientists behind her birth, was moved to write: "She might reasonably claim to be the most extraordinary creature ever born."
In The Second Creation, the book he co-wrote with Keith Campbell and Colin Tudge, Wilmut says: "Dolly has transformed my life. As the science and technology that produced her is swept up into the grand stream of biotechnology, she will touch everybody's lives."
As the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell, the birth of Dolly on 6 July, 1996, blew open the field of genetic engineering and quashed a widely held scientific belief that adult cells did not have the potential to reproduce. For Wilmut, who had been inspired to become a scientist after watching his father struggle with diabetes, the success of his team meant scientists had a powerful new weapon in the battle against inherited and degenerative diseases.
As part of his PhD research at Cambridge, he had been instrumental in the birth of Frosty, the first cow born from a frozen embryo. At Roslin, he became the head of a laboratory at the forefront of genetic research.
The quest to reproduce animals by cloning had been under way since the 1950s, when geneticists successfully cloned frogs, and it was stepped up in the 1980s, when mice were born from single-sex parents.
Cloned sheep Megan and Morag were born at the Roslin Institute in 1995 from cultured embryo cells. But Dolly's birth was the breakthrough that sent shockwaves round the world.
Scientists took a cell from the udder of a six-year-old Finn-Dorset ewe and used the nucleus to fertilise an egg from a Blackface ewe, using a mild electric current to accentuate the process. A key factor was the understanding of the cycle of the donor nucleus, which the team, particularly cell biologist Dr Keith Campbell, had investigated intensely in the 1990s.
The embryo was "grown" in culture for seven days before being transferred to the womb of her Blackface mother.
Anxious their creation was in good health, the team waited until the following year to announce their success. In a matter of hours, Dolly became famous across the world - an iconic figure in the history of science.
Today, a whole string of other species of mammals have been successfully cloned, including the Copy-Cat developed by Californian company Genetic Savings and Clone to recreate deceased pets to the exact genetic template of their predecessors.
But many believe the real benefits will come from transgenics and "pharming", allowing scientists to create genetically engineered livestock whose milk and meat will have medical benefits.
In 1997, Wilmut announced the birth of Polly, a transgenic lamb engineered so that her milk would contain the human blood clotting factor IX. Calves Charlie and George - announced in January 1998 - were created from foetal cells in the US to produce the human serum albumin, which is used in blood transfusions, in their milk.
The birth of Dolly led to a huge boom in funding for genetic engineering projects around the world. The potential benefits of research into new methods of growing and modifying cells may eventually create fresh solutions for degenerative diseases such as Parkinson's, diabetes, heart disease and hepatitis.
As Roger Highfield wrote in his book After Dolly: "These primal cells are the stuff of which medical dreams are made."
Name: JOHN BOYD DUNLOP Born: 5 February, 1840, Dreghorn, Ayrshire Died: 23 October, 1921, Dublin, Ireland Claim to fame: Developed the pneumatic tyre
IT WAS the complaints of his nine-year-old-son, John, who was shaken to bits as he drove his tricycle around the cobbled streets of Belfast that led John Boyd Dunlop to develop the pneumatic tyre.
While his name has become world famous as an inventor, Dunlop, who was born in Scotland, was a vet, with an successful practice in Belfast. He was also a mechanically minded man and a devoted parent.
He made a rubber tube fixed to a wooden wheel with linen and tested it by hurling it along the street outside his house. Dunlop noticed it moved along the cobbles more quickly than a similar wheel fitted with a standard solid rubber tyre.
In February 1888, he worked out how to fix rubber tyres to John's tricycle and immediately realised the new design would have a wider appeal. He patented the device later that year and went into business with a Belfast firm, which began marketing bikes and tricycles fitted with the inflatable tyres.
It later emerged Robert William Thomson, of Leith, had filed a patent for a pneumatic tyre in 1845 - 40 years before Dunlop. Some feel Thomson was unfairly denied his place in history and that his reputation should be restored. However, it was only after Dunlop perfected his tyre that the invention became widely adopted. With his combination of mechanical ingenuity and business acumen, he was the first to develop a practical and commercially-viable pneumatic tyre.
-- Edited by Rabbie Downunder at 03:23, 2007-09-13
