Do you have to be a b%$&*rd to succeed?

This is an idea I had a while back, that has been ramped up to the front of my mind through a recent post on Slow Leadership. The idea is to take some assessed list of the top 100 in a number of fields, such as scientists, composers, artists, political or business leaders or whatever and roughly drop them into one of two categories, b%$&*rd or saint. The next step is to go deeper into their biographies and have a closer look at whether or to what extent they sacrificed their humanity or behaviour IN ORDER TO succeed. "Great research, shame he beat his wife and kids." Brilliant painter, my dad, but I never saw him. He was a stranger to me." "My mum was one of the greatest musicians, and yet she always had time for us." What are the stories?

I planned to do all this myself and then share the results. But that's a bit short-sighted, what with blogs and wikis and so on. So I'm going to make a start here today. Here's the plan. First up are scientists. I've taken my first list of 100 from the book Quantum Leaps: 100 scientists who changed the world by Jon Balchin, (well worth having on your shelves). I'm going to post up his selections a century at a time, to invite comments on whether these are the 'best people' from their century. Starting with the 15th and 16th centuries. Once we get to the 20th century, I'll have a bit of a review. I should say that we will be around 20 short of a hundred, because I've left out those older than 15th century because I think it's going to be virtually impossible to get good enough biographical information about them.

So here are the first few:

15th century

Johannes Gutenberg
Leonardo da Vinci
Nicolas Copernicus

16th century

Andreas Vesalius
William Gilbert
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
Johannes Kepler
William Harvey
Johan van Helmont (doesn't have a wikipedia entry) (yet)
Rene Descartes

Who's missing? Where are the women? And which would you consider b%$&*rd or saint?