Short answers, pulled from the story.
Dmitri Mendeleev was a Russian chemist, born in 1834, known for formulating the periodic law and creating a version of the periodic table of elements. He used the periodic law to correct accepted properties of known elements and to predict three undiscovered ones: germanium, gallium, and scandium.
In his the 6th of March 1869 presentation to the Russian Chemical Society, Mendeleev arranged elements by atomic weight and valence and left gaps for elements not yet found. He predicted ekaaluminium, ekasilicon, and ekaboron, which were later identified as gallium, germanium, and scandium. Gallium was found in 1875 and germanium in 1886, fitting perfectly into the missing spaces.
In 1906 the Nobel Committee for Chemistry recommended Mendeleev for the prize, but at the full academy meeting Peter Klason proposed Henri Moissan instead, and Svante Arrhenius pressed for Mendeleev's rejection. The academy chose Moissan by a margin of one vote, and Arrhenius's opposition frustrated Mendeleev's 1907 nominations as well.
No, Mendeleev did not set the 40% standard strength of vodka. The Russian government introduced that standard in 1843, when Mendeleev was nine years old. His 1865 doctoral dissertation discussed only medical-strength alcohol concentrations over 70%, and he never wrote anything about vodka.
Mendeleev was born in the village of Verkhnie Aremzyani, near Tobolsk in Siberia, as the youngest of 17 siblings. After his father became blind and lost his teaching position, his mother restarted the family glass factory, and when Mendeleev was 13 his father died and the factory burned down.
The synthetic element mendelevium, with the symbol Md and atomic number 101, was named in his honor and is made by bombarding einsteinium with alpha particles. A large lunar impact crater named Mendeleev lies on the far side of the Moon, and institutions including the D. Mendeleyev University of Chemical Technology of Russia bear his name.
Dmitri Mendeleev died in 1907 at the age of 72 in Saint Petersburg from influenza. His last words to his physician were "Doctor, you have science, I have faith," and he was buried at the Literatorskie Mostki cemetery.