#4 Bill Moggridge

Died: September 8, 2012

William Grant "Bill" Moggridge, RDI was born on June 25, 1943. He was a British designer, author and educator who cofounded the design company IDEO and was director of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York.

He was a pioneer in adopting a human-centered approach in design, and championed interaction design as a mainstream design discipline. Among his achievements, he designed the first laptop computer, the GRiD Compass, was honored for Lifetime Achievement from the National Design Awards and given the Prince Philip Designers Prize. He was also bestowed with Royal Designer for Industry (RDI) honor in 2006, a distinction established by the British Royal Society of Arts.

Bill Moggridge died on September 8, 2012 of cancer, aged 69.

#3 Renato Dulbecco

Died: February 19, 2012

Renato Dulbecco was born on February 22, 1914. He was an Italian-born American virologist who won the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on oncogenes, which are genes in viruses that cause cancer when they infect animal cells.

He died on February 19, 2012 aged 97 in La Jolla, California.