Past and Present Geek Heroes: 8 Innovators and Legends

Posted 11/17/2011 at 1:20pm | by Seamus Bellamy

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The adventures of Sherlock Holmes have been wowing us with his fierce intellect, uncanny forensic prowess and rampant drug abuse since 1887. In 1939, Batman hit the scene, filling the criminals of Gotham with dread thanks to his highly developed detective skills, an encyclopedic knowledge of multiple sciences, wicked gadgets and a deep grief-fuelled psychosis. Montgomery Scott —Scotty—the beloved Chief Engineer of the U.S.S Enterprise: Thanks to his knowledge of particle physics, warp theory and a lifetime’s worth of hands-on experience, he was able to pluck his crew mates from the clutches of a fiery death countless times. Sadly, he too had his faults: routinely lied to his superior officers about repair times and spent his off-hours soaking himself in scotch, whiskey and something green? Yeah…

Don’t we geeks deserve a better class of hero? If our heroes are flawed, can’t they at least be real people? We’d like to think so. There have been so many scientists, innovators and educators throughout history that deserve to be elevated higher than the fictional ideals we idolize and talk about on a daily basis. To give you an idea of what we’re talking about, we’ve put together a short list of eight real-life geek heroes who, while never doing battle with the Klingons, jumped from rooftop to rooftop or solved an crime that confounded Scotland Yard, still managed to make the lives of thousands—even millions of people in some cases—a little bit brighter.

Bill Gates

Love him or hate him, there’s no denying that William Henry Gates was one of the most influential thinkers and industrialists of the  20^th century. Gates is, despite his decades in the public eye something of an enigma: a man so intelligent that through his genius he was able to nurture Microsoft into one of the largest corporate entities the world has ever known, yet for all of his intellect has never managed to find a flattering haircut. Gate’s passion for technology and aggressive business tactics led to Microsoft powered products being baked into the desktop and portable computing hardware in the world today. While there were certainly a few missteps under Gate’s watch of the company (Microsoft Bob? Windows ME? We’re looking at you), and the odd BSOD there’s no denying that had it not been for his influence and vision, the computing world might well have been a much less user-friendly place than the one we all take for granted today.

Even before Gates decided to slowly phase himself out of from his position as Microsoft’s Big Kahuna in 2006, the nerd armour he’d worn while storming the ramparts of Silicon Valley for close to three decades had given way to a surprisingly soft pair of philantrophic footie pyjamas on several occasions.  In 1994, he sold a good chunk of his Microsoft stock and used the money to found the William H. Gates Foundation. Six years later, Gates and his wife Melinda opted to combine their charitable efforts and create the cleverly named Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which with it’s $37 billion endowment has done a tremendous amount of work to provide healthcare and education to the impovershed. Today, their Foundation is the largest transparently operated charity in the world. Anyone wishing to contribute to the foundation are encouraged to check into how their money will be spent and are given the means to do so. 

Bill Gates is a Geek Hero in the most basic of terms. With his burning passion for technology, and the occasional hankering for a game of bridge, Gates is most assuredly a geek. What makes him heroic aren’t his material passions, but his passion for something much more important: The improvement of mankind, a cause he and his spouse are so dedicated to, they were willing to invest their own fortunes in an effort to see notable change in the fortunes of thousands of men, women and children in their own lifetimes. Let’s see Batman pull that off. 

Dr. Frederick Banting

Sure, Canada might be best known its Tim Hortons Coffee, lousy winters, and snipers but for diabetics around the world Canada is also the country the gave birth to their salvation. Frederick Banting was born in a small rural town 37 miles north of Toronto in 1891, and by 1916, had graduated from medical school. Banting joined the Canadian Army Medical Corps and served overseas during the First Wold War with the 4^th Canadian Division in France where he spent two years trying to save the lives of wounded and dying soldiers. While operating on a patient, Banting himself was wounded by shrapnel from an exploding German shell. Just like Honey Badger, Banting didn’t care—he just kept on working. For his efforts, Dr. Banting was awarded with the Military Cross. 

While working as a part-time university instructor in 1920, Banting stumbled upon his life work while reading an old medical journal. After reading about the pancreatic secretions, he remembered that in medical school it had been discussed that the organ oozed a substance that was thought to regulate the amount of sugar in a body’s blood stream. With the aid of student research assistant by the name of Charles Best, Banting set to work to unravel the organ’s mysteries. By 1921 Banting had proven that insulin could control diabetes found in dogs. That same year, with the aid of a bio-chemist, Banting moved to human trials of the drug. Their first test subject was a 14 year old boy dying of diabetes. Using an insulin extract that Banting’s research team had pulled from the pancreas of an ox, the patient recovered, proving that their research had been a success. Since then, Banting’s discovery has not only saved the lives of millions of diabetics around the world, but also improved the overall quality of their lives. 

Now there’s a geek with some tight science that’s worth looking up to.

Galileo Galilei

Depending on who you ask, Galileo is credited as being the father of modern physics, the father of the modern science, or the father of modern observational astronomy. That’s a whole lotta baby daddy action for one man. Born in 1564, these days he’s best known for his belief in heliocentrisim—the belief that the earth, along with the rest of the planets in the solar system, revolve around a stationary sun.

Back in Galileo’s day, that was dangerous crazy talk. The Catholic Church had the last word in most matters back then, and as the Bible stated "the Lord set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved” it was their view point that the Sun and the rest of the universe rotated around the Earth.  The Church wasn’t thrilled to have anyone, no matter how intelligent they were, try to prove otherwise. In the face of an angry Pope, and an investigation by the Roman Inquisition that led the church to try him for suspicion of heresy in 1633, Galileo still maintained that his theory of a heliocentric solar system was correct. Due to his beliefs, Galileo was found“"vehemently suspect of heresy”, which in an era where the Catholic Church held a substantial amount of political power, was a bad thing. Galileo was sentenced to life in prison by the Inquisition, but later was communed to living under house arrest where he remained until his death in 1642 at the age of 77. Despite the fact that his belief in heliocentrisim was proven to be correct, it wasn’t until 400 years after his death that Galileo received an apology for how he had been treated by the Vatican.  

For his unflappable faith in science even in the face of serious social and personal repercussions, we’re declaring this telescope-loving science geek a hero. May he serve as a fearless example of dedication in the face of adversity to us all.

Louis Pasteur

Born as the son of a leather tanner in 1822, Louis Pasteur grew up to be an super geek of epic proportions. After a brief dalliance as a professor of physics in France, Pasteur became a professor of chemistry at the University of Strasbourg, where he - along with Ferdinand Cohn and Robert Koch - came to be regarded as one of the founders of microbiology. 

After watching three of his five children die of typhoid, Pasteur allowed the pain of his loss to drive him to find treatments and cures for a number of sicknesses and diseases like anthrax and Puerperal fever, as well as diseases in a wide variety of animals, and a vaccine for rabies. Additionally, Pasteur discovered that by heating foods like wine, beer, or milk to a specific temperature and then immediately cooling it, it was possible to slow the growth of harmful microbial growth. This process, which has come to be known as—you guessed it—pasteurization, not only ensures that the foods subjected to the process sour at a much slower rate but also are much less likely to contain viable pathogens which could harbour disease. 

When he wasn’t busy curing what ails us, Pasteur also managed to find the time to write a doctoral thesis on the polarization of light, proved that the germ theory of disease was correct and, if you believe what True Blood has to say, became a vampire, who in 1982, was hard at work trying to create a synthetic blood substitute which would allow vampires to finally forego feeding on their next door neighbours. If all that doesn’t have Geek Hero written all over it, what does?