Scientists From Alabama

Eugene Sledge was a US Marine, author, and university professor. He is remembered for chronicling his Second World War combat experiences in a memoir titled With the Old Breed, which was used as source material for a television documentary miniseries titled The War. The memoir also inspired the 2010 HBO miniseries, The Pacific, where Sledge was played by Joseph Mazzello.

Percy Lavon Julian was an American chemist whose work paved the way for the production of birth control pills and corticosteroids. Julian went on to start his own company which helped reduce the price of steroid intermediates. In 1973, Percy Lavon Julian was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences and became the first African-American to receive this honor.

Nobel Prize-winning American pediatrician and virologist Frederick Chapman Robbins is best remembered for his pathbreaking research on the poliomyelitis virus, which later helped in the development of polio vaccines. He also taught pediatrics at the Case Western Reserve University and worked with the US Army’s virus and rickettsia lab.