The Looney Tune of Tompkins

He applied Quantum Mechanics to solve the problem of Nuclear Structure. He made fundamental contribtution in the fields of Physics and Astronomy (Cosmology), Chemistry (Stellar Nucleosynthesis) and Genetics. After the discovery of the structure of DNA by Watson and Crick, he realized that the sequence of nucleotides formed a code; hence the name Codon. He did pioneering work on RNA. Watson's "Genes, Girls and Gamow" pays tribute to his work and to his influence on him and other workers. He was the first to propose the Big Bang theory. He explained the radioactive decay of atoms and used the theory on the explosive beginning of the universe. He predicted the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. He also wrote a number of books to popularize science. And in spite of all these, the Nobel Prize eluded him.

A man who never took himself very seriously, he once submitted a paper with Hans Bethe's name in it, so that the authors would sound like Alpha, Beta, Gamma. He had no problem sharing his credit with others.

He submitted a paper to the scientific journal Nature (unless I'm mistaken) with CGH Tompkins, an imaginary character from his books, as a co-author. (Nature asked him to remove the name of Tompkins.)

A bronze plaque on a granite boulder at the George Washington University, where he worked for long time, details the scientific and literary accomplishments, whom his good friend Edward Teller described as follows:

"He was fantastic in his ideas. He was right, he was wrong. More often wrong than right. Always interesting; ... and when his idea was not wrong it was not only right, it was new."

Not bad, especially when this is being said about a person, who had forbidden one of his students from utlizing the famous Complimentarity principle, and on being told by the student that Bohr had routinely used it while he (the professor) had always avoided using it, had quoted the famous Latin saying, "Quod licet Jovi non licet bovi" (What is permitted to Jupiter is not permitted to the ox).

He was George Gamow (1904-1968).
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Sources:
http://www.survivalafterdeath.org/articles/koestler/physics.htm
http://citeseer.csail.mit.edu/499353.html
http://www.gwu.edu/~physics/gampag.htm
http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Gamow.html
http://www.colorado.edu/physics/Web/Gamow/life.html
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9035977
http://www.gwu.edu/~physics/gwmageh.htm
http://spaceinfo.jaxa.jp/note/kagaku/e/kag10_e.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gamow