John Ennis Searles was born on October 15, 1840, in Bedford, Westchester, New York, son of Rev. John E. Searles.

He was a financier and businessman. He was educated at the New York Conference Seminary of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Searles began his career as a bookkeeper. In 1862, he became involved with the sugar trade and was employed with a West India shipping firm in New Haven, Connecticut. Searles organized the Havermeyer Sugar Refining Company in 1880 by consolidating two Havermeyer companies. In 1887, he became the organizing force in creating the Sugar Refineries Company known as the Sugar Trust. Searles persuaded competing refinery companies in the United States to consolidate operations into a single business controlling the price of sugar and labour in the United States. In 1891, the Sugar Trust was forced to reorganize into a corporation named the American Sugar Refining Company. He was secretary, treasurer, and chief executive officer of the company. He resigned in 1898. He was known as "The Sugar King of America". Searles was involved in many other endeavours, such as the formation of the American Cotton Company in 1896.

In 1862, he married Caroline A. Pettit (1838–1919), and they had five children. He died on October 24, 1908, in London, England, and is buried in Brooklyn, New York.

Samuel Hubbard Scudder was an American entomologist and palaeontologist, considered the founder of insect palaeontology. He came from a Congregationalist family with roots going back to Massachusetts Bay Colony Puritans. Educated at Boston Latin School, he graduated from Williams College in 1847 at the head of his class. He later earned a second bachelor's degree studying with the famous naturalist Louis Agassiz at Harvard. A prolific author of some 791 papers between 1858 and 1902, he contributed an addendum to George Mercer Dawson's Progress Report of the Canadian Geological Survey, 1875-76, on the rare extinct fossil species of ant, Aphaenogaster longaeva; the fossil was discovered in shale that Dawson had surveyed near Quesnel, B.C. Scudder also had contacts with Dawson through his work as staff palaeontologist for the US Geological Survey (1886-1892). Other palaeontological works included Index of Fossil Insects of the World (1891), but he also authored many works on present-day insects, notably Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) including the monumental Butterflies of the Eastern United States and Canada, and some 180 papers on Orthoptera (grasshoppers), describing 630 species in 106 genera.
As well as his extensive research, he filled many roles at scientific societies of the time, including as president of the Boston Society of Natural History (1880-1887) and as librarian for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
His son Gardner accompanied him on many field trips until contracting tuberculosis and dying in 1902. Scudder himself developed Parkinson's that same year, necessitating his retirement and leading to his death in 1911.

Walter de M. Scriver was born in Hemmingford, Quebec, and received his B.A. from McGill University in 1915. He served overseas from 1915-1918, returning to Montreal to earn his medical degree from McGill in 1921. He was Professor Medicine at McGill's Faculty of Medicine from 1952-1957 and physician-in-chief at the Royal Victoria Hospital. He specialized in the field of pharmacology and had a research interest in diabetes and kidney diseases. He was instrumental in founding the Quebec Division of the Canadian medical association and served as a member of its Executive Committee from 1947-1957.