Special Agent Dana Katherine Scully, M.D. born February 23, 1964. She is an FBI Special Agent, partnered on the X-Files with Special Agent Fox Mulder. They work out of a cramped basement office at FBI headquarters to investigate unsolved cases labeled "X-Files". In contrast to Fox Mulder's credulous "believer" character, Scully is the skeptic, choosing to base her beliefs on what science can prove. She was known to escape death several times over the course of the show.

Dana Scully is 5'3" 160 cm and has blue-green eyes. Her work as an FBI agent takes up a major part of her life, and as a result she rarely dates or spends time with friends. She lives in Georgetown, in Washington, DC.

Early Life

Scully was born on February 23, 1964, to Margaret and William Scully, into a close-knit Catholic family. She has an older brother, William Jr., an older sister, Melissa, and a younger brother, Charles, who is never seen on the show except in flashbacks. Her father was an officer in the Navy, and she grew up in Annapolis and later in San Diego. As a young girl, Scully's favorite book was Moby-Dick and she came to nickname her father Ahab from the book, and in return, he called her Starbuck.

She attended University of Maryland, and earned a B.S. in Physics. Her undergraduate thesis was titled "Einstein's Twin Paradox: A New Interpretation." While finishing medical school, she was recruited by the FBI, which she accepted, mostly because she felt she could distinguish herself there. Upon being partnered with Fox Mulder, she maintained her medical skills by acting as a forensic pathologist, often performing or consulting on autopsies of victims on X-Files cases.

Faith

Throughout the series, her Catholic faith served as a cornerstone in her life, although at times a contradiction to her otherwise rigid skepticism. Upon her career in science and medicine, she drifted from her Catholic upbringing but remained somewhat entrenched in her faith.

Scully almost always wears a golden cross necklace, given to her by her mother as a Christmas or birthday present when she was a teen. Upon her abduction  it was the only item left behind in Duane Barry's getaway car. Mulder wore it in her absence until she miraculously reappeared in a DC hospital. After she recovered, he returned the cross to her.

The abduction visibly tested the limits of her faith, when she began to exhibit symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder on a case involving a murdering fetishist named Donnie Pfaster. This psychological revitalization continues after Pfaster escaped from prison five years later and again attempted to kill her in her home, ending only after she fatally shot him, while Mulder had Pfaster covered. She struggled with what motivated her actions to kill Pfaster, and questioned whether it was God compelling her to kill Pfaster, or something else.
About a year after the first Donnie Pfaster incident, Scully was further conflicted when protecting a young stigmatic by the name of Kevin Kryder, whose life was threatened by a psychotic, apparently suffering from Jerusalem syndrome. Skeptical of the boy's claims but unable to deny what she has seen, Scully was unable to respond when the boy prophetically asked, "Are you the one who was sent to protect me?", implying Scully's intervention was the direct work of God. As a result of their experiences on the Kryder case, the philosophy of faith and religion caused a disagreement between Mulder and Scully that continued through out the duration of their work together.

Some time later, the cancer diagnosis forced Scully to begin contemplating her own mortality. However, she resisted the gentle prodding from her family priest, Father McCue, to resume attending church services. When the severity of her illness increased, and pushed her to the brink of death, Scully finally requested ministry from Father McCue, and chose to accept her remission as a miracle.

Upon the sudden discovery of her daughter Emily Sim, Scully gave the little girl her cross to wear while she petitioned to adopt her. Before her funeral, Scully retrieved the cross from Emily's casket.

Sometime after her recovery, Scully began to regularly attend Mass again. At the request of Father McCue, Scully got involved in a case concerning a paraplegic girl who was found dead in a kneeling position with her palms outstretched and eye sockets charred. After Scully discovered the girl was part of a set of quadruplets and two more were murdered, Father McCue shared with her the story of the seraphim and the nephilim, which Scully interpreted as a possible explanation for the deformations and deaths of the girls. Scully continued to have visions of Emily, and when the last girl died, Scully believed she was returning the girl to God. Upon her return to D.C., she went to confession to gain peace of mind and acceptance for Emily's death.

Mulder and Scully frequently disagreed on matters of religion. Scully is more inclined to believe that God has a hand in people's actions, while Mulder seems to believe that people are responsible for their own behavior.

Work on the X-Files

Scully initially instructed at the FBI Academy in Quantico. Mulder's investigations into the paranormal were steadily increasing his profile to members of The Syndicate to the point where his notoriety prevented them from simply killing him. A strategy was devised to invalidate his work, and in the spring of 1992, Scully was assigned to debunk his investigations by disproving them with science. Instead, she observed the evidence objectively and honestly. The Syndicate soon dropped this endeavor, and Scully remained part of the X-Files office, providing an intelligent, empirical opposite to Mulder's more maverick character. Over the years of working as a team, they exhibited a comfortable working relationship, each bringing important parts to their intriguing, and usually dangerous, investigations.

In 1994, after two years of working together, the Syndicate decided the agents were getting too close to the truth and the X-Files investigations were closed. Mulder and Scully were sent to work in different sections.

Scully was kidnapped by a mental patient named Duane Barry, an ex-FBI agent and multiple alien abductee. To prevent his own abduction, he traded her to a military covert operation. Scully was missing for several weeks before mysteriously turning up in a D.C. area hospital, comatose. Walter Skinner ordered the X-Files reopened to investigate her disappearance. When Scully awakened, she voluntarily returned to her position almost immediately. Her abduction experience would later come to serve in an important capacity to the X-Files mythology.

In 1995 The Syndicate have been keeping track of the agents notice that Scully had become as much of a threat as Mulder, attempted to have her murdered but their assassins inadvertently killed her sister, Melissa. Scully pursued her sister's murder case after the FBI dropped it from influence by the Syndicate, and tracked down the killer. However, the hit man was soon himself murdered by conspiracy operatives, leaving Scully without any justice for her sister, but strengthening her continuing search for the truth. Also that year, Scully discovered a tiny microchip implanted in the back of her neck during her abduction. She had it removed and subsequently developed an inoperable, cancerous, nasopharyngeal tumor. Scully's cancer miraculously went into remission several months later when Mulder broke into The Pentagon to retrieve a replacement chip. Scully also learned that her abduction resulted in her inability to conceive children, as her ova had apparently been harvested.

Scully's convictions were proven while visiting her brother in California during the Christmas holidays of 1997. She received a phone call from a voice that sounded identical to Melissa's which led her to a house in the middle of an investigation of the hours-old suicide of the homeowner's wife. There, Scully met the deceased's three-year-old adopted daughter, Emily, who looked exactly like a childhood picture of Melissa. Convinced that she was Melissa's biological daughter, she ordered a series of DNA comparison tests. However, Scully was shocked to discover that not Melissa, but she herself was actually Emily's mother. When the adoptive father was killed by Alien Bounty Hunters, Scully immediately petitioned for custody. Unfortunately, Emily was terminally ill with a rare form of anemia, and died shortly after Scully discovered her existence. In actuality, Emily was one of several alien/human hybrids created using alien DNA and harvested ova from other abductees.

In the X-Files movie The X-Files: Fight the Future, Scully was infected by the Black Oil virus after being stung by a carrier bee, and taken to a secret laboratory in Antarctica. Mulder located her, administered a weak vaccine, and rescued her.

Despite her previous diagnosis, Scully was unwilling to accept her infertility and decided to attempt in-vitro fertilization. She asked Mulder to be the donor, but initial results were negative. However, in the spring of 2000, Mulder was abducted at the same time Scully discovered she was pregnant. It was later revealed that she and Mulder had begun a sexual relationship shortly before these events.

Special Agent John Doggett was assigned to find Mulder. The search soon proved fruitless, and Doggett was assigned to work with Scully on the X-Files. After eight years of investigating unexplained phenomena, Scully had slowly become more open to believing in the paranormal, and Doggett took her place as "the skeptic". Scully worked late into her pregnancy. However, even after Mulder's return, she remained anxious and fearful of her unborn child's origins and fate. Hunted down by agents of the conspiracy, she fled with the help of Doggett and Monica Reyes, shortly before giving birth in a remote area of Georgia. She named the boy William after Mulder's father.

After William's birth, Mulder voluntarily went into hiding, believing that his living with Scully and William put them at risk. Scully also left fieldwork to teach Forensics, turning over the X-Files division to Doggett and Reyes. Shortly after, she learned that she and William were under surveillance by the New Syndicate. In 2002, after William was kidnapped but eventually found safe, Scully felt she could no longer provide the safety he needed, and gave him up for adoption.

In the series finale, Scully helped Mulder escape a bogus imprisonment and death sentence, and the two ran away as fugitives to New Mexico, where they had a final confrontation with Cigarette Smoking Man. Scully and Mulder are currently on the run from the New Syndicate, to protect themselves and expose the truth about the government conspiracy to cover up the threat of alien colonization.

Credited to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:The_X-Files_characters