I think you underestimate how many people used to die because of disease. Hilleman’s vaccines saved more lives than Stalin, Mao, and Hitler killed combined.
I believe the schism of Lennon from society is illustrative of the split of 60’s youth from mainstream society (i.e.“the establishment”)–and that is a defining paradigm shift of mid-20th Century Western Society. I’m probably referring to a few years before you are, however, when Lennon was still engaged with the world and a frequent polarizing figure in the news, not when he became a recluse in the Dakota building and started sucking on a baby pacifier.
Few, if any individuals, of course, are solely responsible for major historical shifts. Certainly, the Beatles/John Lennon didn’t create the counterculture; they may not even have been a major driving force behind it. But, who’s face is better suited to represent that movement?
I was a rabid fan of the Beatles at a young age. My parents gladly bought me their early albums as gifts, starting with Please Please Me. My mum, a WWII British war bride, married to my Army Air Corps yank dad (a perfect example of the Greatest Generation), was particularly proud to claim the Beatles as ones of her own. “They’re such nice and talented lads”, said she.
Then, when I was 10, with a little help from my older sister, I bought Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band…and that’s when all hell broke loose. “What’s the matter with those boys, they used to be so nice and respectful.” “What kind of weird clothes are they wearing?” “That’s not music, it’s just loud noise." “They’re not from my part of England; they’re from Liverpool, where the ruffians live.” <then, in the blink of an eye>* “What’s the matter with kid’s today?—they’re all turning into dirty hippies." *
I think the same criteria should be used to put a face on another defining moment in the 20th century—man’s first step into space. Who most deserves credit for getting us into space? Robert Goddard, no doubt. But, whose face should be representative of the space movement? Well, Yuri Gagarin is a contender…but with communism taking the back seat in the latter part of the 20th century, only an American will suffice: Neil Armstrong. Paradoxically, Armstrong’s fame is only lukewarm today, the age in which he lives and accomplished his feat, but I believe it will grow over the ages. It will be the name in the textbooks (or whatever students will use in the future) that kids will be memorizing as the first space pioneer for as long as our species survives.
Well, it only covers the last half, and only America, but Forrest Gump has to be in the running…what’s that?
Nah. Too many page faults.
Considering how brutal the past was I don’t think the 20th counted as the “bloodiest century yet known to man”, even ignoring natural deaths. Go back a thousand years and someone like Hitler or Stalin would barely stand out from the crowd if at all. Go back far enough to the really primitive societies, and you have a world where being murdered is the norm; even under Stalin or Mao, most people didn’t die of murder.
According to the book Scientists Greater than Einstein: The Greatest Lifesavers of the Twentieth Century, Hilleman and Borlaug both got schooled by Karl Landsteiner, the Viennese physician whose discovery of blood groups and work identifying and culturing various pathogens are said to have saved more than one billion lives.
I saw that work in a bookstore a couple of months back: it’s a nice exercise. Let’s assume that the combined toll of Hitler, Stalin and Mao was 30 million lives. (Better estimates are welcome.) Which scientists beat that threshold? I check the table of contents.:
David Nalin, who introduced Oral Rehydration Therapy, saved over 50 million lives.
Howard Florey, the inventor of penicillin, saved 80 million.
John Enders (and Maurice Hilleman) worked hard on vaccines which have saved 114 million.
Bill Foege, the eradicator of smallpox, saved over 122 million.
Norman Borlaug of Green Revolution fame saved 245 million.
And Karl Landsteiner, who discovered blood groups, led the way by saving over 1 billion, 38 million lives.
I guess we might also permit footnotes for Al Sommer (Vitamin A - six million), Winston Churchill, Akira Endo (Statins - five million), Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Paul Muller (DDT - 21 million due to malaria), and Frederick Banting (Insulin - 16 million lives).
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Oppenheimer
Single greatest influence was technic, not political.
This isn’t my full list. It’s just a number of people I think ought to be on any list.
Gavrilo Princip: He was the guy who almost completely failed to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand, but that only scratches the iceberg. The reason he killed the Archduke was because he was a Slavic nationalist who wanted to unite all the South Slav peoples in territories annexed by Austria-Hungary into a single nation with its own homeland. So, by doing him and doing a good job on why he sparked the First World War you get the beginning and the end of the century, not to mention a bunch of good ideas why the Soviet Union proper, and not just Yugoslavia, was so fissile there right at the end.
Sayyid Qutb: If you want to point to one guy for originating ‘Radical Islam’, you could do a lot worse than him. His doctrine of ‘takfir’, based on his claim that modern Muslims are apostates and therefore worthy of death, is hugely influential in all the really fucking scary Muslim groups, including the people who assassinated Sadat, and given that his views came, in part, due to the time he spent as an academic in 1940s America we get a really perfect culture clash narrative going. The big counterargument is that Islamist terrorism is such a Twenty-first Century thing, but I think the history of the Middle East alone gives the lie to that argument pretty effectively.
Alan Turing: Yeah, he’s a Computer Guy and the Twentieth was the Computer Century so case closed, right? Not quite: The Twentieth was also the first century since… Classical times?.. when gays could be out and active and annoying the bigots in the Western world without getting their skulls crushed by the local law enforcement. He was forced into suicide before that revolution really began to take hold but his life still touches on both computers and being undeniably queer, and being multi-disciplinary is what this project’s all about.
John Von Neumann: I’ll just let Wikipedia get this. He might be the Twentieth’s only Renaissance Man:
He also reinforces the stereotype of all the truly frighteningly competent mathematicians being Hungarian. (Must be the notation. Or the names.)
Nice contribution, Derleth.
… also economics. Von Neumann was scary smart.