Physics, chemistry, immunology, genetics, the discoveries that reshaped how the world heals and understands itself.
Stanley Cohen's genetic engineering grew out of a medical question: how bacteria share genes that make them resistant to antibiotics.
Read the full story →Stanley Cohen's plasmid pSC101, cut at a single site by Boyer's enzyme and carrying a tetracycline-resistance gene, became the vehicle for the first DNA cloning experiments in 1973.
Read the full story →After inventing DNA cloning, Stanley Cohen developed techniques that use reporter genes to follow how genes behave in the cells of animals and other complex organisms.
Read the full story →Stanley Cohen signed the 1974 letter calling for a voluntary pause on some recombinant DNA experiments until their risks could be assessed, and took part in the 1975 Asilomar conference.
Read the full story →In 1972 Stanley Cohen’s Stanford lab showed that a calcium chloride treatment lets E. coli take up plasmid DNA and pass it on to their offspring.
Read the full story →The RA 27/3 rubella vaccine that Stanley Plotkin developed at the Wistar Institute in the 1960s is the rubella part of MMR vaccines worldwide, and it helped the Americas become the first region declared free of endemic rubella.
Read the full story →Stanley Prusiner's group showed that a mutation in the prion gene causes inherited brain disease, and reproduced the illness in genetically engineered mice.
Read the full story →In 1999 Stanley Prusiner founded the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases at the University of California, San Francisco, to study illnesses caused by misfolded proteins.
Read the full story →In 2014 Stanley Prusiner published Madness and Memory, his account of discovering prions and of the long scientific battle over an idea once dismissed as heresy.
Read the full story →In 1984 Stanley Prusiner's team showed that the gene for the prion protein is found in all animals tested, including humans, a startling result that reshaped the understanding of brain disease.
Read the full story →In 1982 Stanley Prusiner identified prions, infectious proteins with no DNA or RNA, an idea met with scepticism that won him the 1997 Nobel Prize.
Read the full story →The Nobel Assembly said Stanley Prusiner's discovery of prions could furnish the basis for understanding other dementias such as Alzheimer's disease and for developing new treatments.
Read the full story →Stanley Prusiner's work showed that the disease-causing prion protein is extraordinarily stable, resisting enzymes, solvents and temperatures above 100°C, explaining why prions are so hard to kill.
Read the full story →In 1979 Steven Weinberg's folk theorem launched the modern view that quantum field theories are effective theories, valid at particular energy scales, an idea now used across physics.
Read the full story →In 1967 Steven Weinberg's three-page paper A Model of Leptons showed that electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force are two faces of one force, now among the most cited papers in physics.
Read the full story →In 1978 Steven Weinberg, and separately Frank Wilczek, realised that a proposed symmetry implied a new particle, the axion, now a leading candidate for the universe's dark matter.
Read the full story →Steven Weinberg's electroweak theory predicted a new kind of weak interaction, the neutral current, which was discovered in 1973, and the Higgs boson, found in 2012.
Read the full story →Steven Weinberg's 1977 book The First Three Minutes explained to a wide public how physics can reconstruct the earliest moments of the universe, winning a science writing award.
Read the full story →In 1961 Sydney Brenner, with François Jacob and Matthew Meselson, showed experimentally that short-lived messenger RNA carries a gene's instructions to the cell's protein factories, and the same year helped show the genetic code is read in triplets.
Read the full story →Beginning in the early 1960s, Sydney Brenner made the millimetre-long worm Caenorhabditis elegans a model for studying how genes build a body and nervous system, work that led to the discovery of genes controlling cell death in humans too.
Read the full story →In 1933 Tadeus Reichstein combined bacteria and chemistry to make vitamin C on an industrial scale, the Reichstein process that made the vitamin affordable worldwide.
Read the full story →Working in Basel in the late 1930s and 1940s, Tadeus Reichstein isolated about thirty adrenal hormones, including cortisone, opening the way to steroid medicines for inflammation.
Read the full story →On May 16, 1960, at a Hughes laboratory in Malibu, Theodore Maiman fired the first laser, a pink ruby crystal inside a coiled flash lamp.
Read the full story →Vera Rubin discovered galaxies in which some stars and gas orbit in the opposite direction to the rest, evidence that galaxies grow by merging with smaller systems.
Read the full story →In 1965 Vera Rubin became the first woman permitted to observe at the Palomar Observatory, and when told it had no women's bathroom, she taped a paper skirt to the men's room sign.
Read the full story →In her 1954 doctoral thesis under George Gamow, Vera Rubin concluded that galaxies clump together rather than being scattered randomly, an idea ignored for two decades before it became central.
Read the full story →Measuring how fast stars orbit in spiral galaxies, Vera Rubin and Kent Ford found that the outer stars move far too fast, persuasive evidence that galaxies are held together by invisible dark matter.
Read the full story →In 1968 Vitaly Ginzburg founded the Department of Problems of Physics and Astrophysics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, which he headed for decades.
Read the full story →Vitaly Ginzburg was among the scientists who helped end the dominance of Trofim Lysenko, the politically connected opponent of genetics, allowing modern genetic science to return to the Soviet Union.
Read the full story →In 1950 Vitaly Ginzburg and Lev Landau published the Ginzburg–Landau theory of superconductivity, which became fundamental to all later work on superconductors and won Ginzburg the 2003 Nobel Prize.
Read the full story →For three decades Vitaly Ginzburg compiled and updated a list of the most important unsolved problems in physics, publishing 30 problems for the 21st century in 1999.
Read the full story →Vitaly Ginzburg developed a theory of the origin of cosmic rays, the high-energy particles that rain on Earth from space, work honoured by the cosmic ray physicists' Ó Ceallaigh Medal.
Read the full story →During the Second World War and after, Vitaly Ginzburg developed the theory of how electromagnetic waves travel through plasmas such as the ionosphere, vital for long-distance radio.
Read the full story →Superconducting magnets in hospital MRI scanners and particle accelerators rely on type-II superconductors, whose behaviour is described by the theory Vitaly Ginzburg helped create.
Read the full story →From the mid-1950s Vitaly Ginzburg ran a weekly Wednesday physics seminar in Moscow that drew scientists from across the city and beyond, closing it at its 1,700th session in November 2001.
Read the full story →When bubonic plague struck Bombay in 1896, Waldemar Haffkine built a vaccine in about three months in a college corridor, injected himself first, and saw it given to some four million people in India within a few years.
Read the full story →In 1977 Walter Gilbert and Allan Maxam published a fast chemical method for reading the sequence of DNA, one of the two techniques that opened the age of genetic sequencing.
Read the full story →Walter Kohn's density functional theory, developed in 1964 and 1965, made it practical to calculate the properties of molecules and materials, and is now one of the most widely used methods in chemistry.
Read the full story →William Stein and Stanford Moore turned a two-week manual analysis into an overnight automated run, then used their machine to decode the first complete enzyme sequence.
Read the full story →In 1925 Wolfgang Pauli formulated the rule that no two electrons can occupy the same quantum state, a principle that explains the shell structure of atoms, the periodic table, the stability of matter and the behaviour of electrons in semiconductors.
Read the full story →In 1968 Zhores Alferov’s laboratory in Leningrad made the first semiconductor heterostructure laser that worked continuously at room temperature, the kind of device that now carries the internet through optical fibres.
Read the full story →“A friend is devoted at all times; a brother is born to share adversity.”