Physics, chemistry, immunology, genetics, the discoveries that reshaped how the world heals and understands itself.
In 1958 Arthur Schawlow and Charles Townes published the theory of the optical maser, with Schawlow’s idea of a mirror at each end of the light-amplifying chamber; the laser built on those principles now carries internet traffic, scans barcodes and reshapes eyes in surgery.
Read the full story →Avram Hershko, a Holocaust survivor working in Haifa, discovered how cells tag unwanted proteins with ubiquitin for destruction, knowledge that underlies the multiple myeloma drug bortezomib.
Read the full story →After taking over the struggling LIGO project in 1994, Barry Barish got it built and in 1997 created the international LIGO Scientific Collaboration, which detected gravitational waves in 2015.
Read the full story →Baruch Blumberg and Irving Millman developed a blood test for hepatitis B. Blood banks began screening donations with it in 1971, cutting transfusion infections.
Read the full story →Baruch Blumberg identified the hepatitis B virus, developed its blood test and vaccine, and won the 1976 Nobel Prize. A colleague said he prevented more cancer deaths than anyone.
Read the full story →After hepatitis B vaccination was rolled out in China, infection among children fell from about 15 percent to about 1 percent within ten years, a measure of Baruch Blumberg's legacy.
Read the full story →In the 1960s Baruj Benacerraf discovered immune response genes within the major histocompatibility complex, the gene region that governs immune reactions and transplant matching.
Read the full story →Working with Clemens von Pirquet in Vienna, Béla Schick showed in 1905 that the immune system itself could make people sick, the insight behind the modern idea of allergy.
Read the full story →In 1913 Béla Schick published a simple skin test that showed which children were at risk of diphtheria, giving doctors a way to target protection against one of the deadliest childhood diseases.
Read the full story →Ben Bernanke shared the 2022 Nobel economics prize for showing how bank runs turned the 1930s downturn into the deep and prolonged Great Depression.
Read the full story →In the early 1950s Ben Mottelson and Aage Bohr united the two rival pictures of the atomic nucleus, showing that nuclei can be deformed and can rotate and vibrate as a whole, the framework nuclear physicists still use today.
Read the full story →Bernard Katz showed that nerve endings release their chemical messenger in fixed packets, each held in a tiny vesicle, the basic picture of the synapse on which modern neuroscience and nerve-acting medicines rest.
Read the full story →In 1961 Bernard Lown and his colleagues showed that a carefully shaped direct-current shock could safely stop a fatal heart rhythm, creating the defibrillator used in hospitals, ambulances and public places worldwide.
Read the full story →In 1962, aged 22, Brian Josephson predicted that electron pairs could tunnel between superconductors; Josephson junctions now set the world’s voltage standard, power SQUID sensors that locate epileptic seizures, and form the heart of superconducting quantum computers.
Read the full story →After a five-year hunt through thousands of mice, Bruce Beutler discovered in 1998 that the receptor TLR4 detects bacterial endotoxin, opening up the science of how the immune system first recognises infection.
Read the full story →In the early 1990s Bruce Beutler's laboratory in Dallas built a hybrid protein that neutralises the inflammatory molecule TNF; licensed to industry, it became etanercept (Enbrel), a widely used treatment for rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis.
Read the full story →While building the SPEAR collider at Stanford in the early 1970s, Burton Richter agreed to cut a port for its intense X-rays, creating the first modern synchrotron light source, a model for facilities that now serve thousands of biologists, chemists and engineers.
Read the full story →In 1951 Carl Djerassi's team at Syntex in Mexico City synthesised cortisone from a compound in a wild yam, using a cheaper raw material and about half as many steps.
Read the full story →In 1965 Carl Djerassi, Joshua Lederberg and Edward Feigenbaum devised DENDRAL at Stanford, one of the first uses of artificial intelligence in biomedical research.
Read the full story →As a 19-year-old chemist at CIBA in New Jersey in 1942–43, Carl Djerassi helped develop Pyribenzamine, one of the first commercial antihistamines and his first patent.
Read the full story →Carl Djerassi pioneered the use of mass spectrometry and optical rotatory dispersion to decode the structures of steroids and alkaloids, publishing more than 1,200 papers.
Read the full story →In 1968 Carl Djerassi founded Zoecon to control pests with modified insect hormones instead of broad poisons, work honoured with the US National Medal of Technology in 1991.
Read the full story →In 1980 Carl Sagan co-founded the Planetary Society and became its first president, building a public movement to support the exploration of space.
Read the full story →In the early 1960s Carl Sagan argued from radio data that Venus's surface was about 500 °C because of a greenhouse effect, a conclusion confirmed by Mariner 2 in 1962.
Read the full story →Carl Sagan invited a 17-year-old Neil deGrasse Tyson to Cornell and taught Bill Nye astronomy, inspiring a generation of scientists and science popularisers.
Read the full story →Many astronomers thought seasonal colour changes on Mars were spreading vegetation. Carl Sagan showed they were shifts in surface dust driven by windstorms.
Read the full story →At Carl Sagan's urging, Voyager 1 turned its camera homeward on February 14, 1990, and photographed Earth from about 6 billion kilometres away as a tiny pale blue dot.
Read the full story →Given just three weeks by NASA, Carl Sagan and Frank Drake designed the Pioneer plaque, a message to any alien finders, now leaving the solar system aboard two spacecraft.
Read the full story →In 1982 Carl Sagan published a petition in the journal Science supporting the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, signed by 70 scientists including seven Nobel laureates.
Read the full story →Carl Sagan was among the first to suggest that Saturn's moon Titan might have surface liquids and that Jupiter's moon Europa might hide an ocean of water beneath its ice.
Read the full story →For the Voyager probes launched in 1977, Carl Sagan chaired the committee that chose the Golden Record's contents, including greetings in 55 languages and 116 images of Earth.
Read the full story →Drawing on his study of Venus, Carl Sagan testified to the US Congress in 1985 that the greenhouse effect would change Earth's climate.
Read the full story →In 1912 the Warsaw-born biochemist Casimir Funk coined the word "vitamine" and proposed that missing nutrients cause diseases such as beriberi, scurvy, pellagra and rickets.
Read the full story →Casimir Funk's 1914 book Die Vitamine drew scientists into the new field, and within 35 years of his work all 13 known vitamins had been discovered.
Read the full story →Casimir Funk was an early investigator of pellagra and suggested that a change in how corn was milled lay behind outbreaks, an idea largely ignored at the time.
Read the full story →In 1923, with Rockefeller Foundation support, Casimir Funk returned to Poland to head biochemistry at the State Institute of Hygiene, where he improved the quality of insulin it produced.
Read the full story →After moving to the United States, Casimir Funk developed Oscodal, a vitamin A and D concentrate that was the first vitamin preparation accepted by the American Medical Association.
Read the full story →In his 1936 book Vitamin and Mineral Therapy, Casimir Funk warned that mild vitamin shortages could weaken the body's resistance to infection long before obvious disease appeared.
Read the full story →With Claudio Cuello, César Milstein used a monoclonal antibody in 1979 to detect substance P in the nervous system, laying foundations for studying neurological disease.
Read the full story →Studying the messenger RNA that encodes antibodies, César Milstein provided the first evidence that secreted antibody chains are first made with a signal sequence.
Read the full story →César Milstein foresaw that combining monoclonal antibodies with recombinant DNA technology could create new reagents, and he inspired the antibody engineering behind today's antibody drugs.
Read the full story →In 1975 César Milstein and Georges Köhler invented a way to make monoclonal antibodies, a technique that now underpins countless tests and treatments.
Read the full story →César Milstein demonstrated the importance of somatic hypermutation, the process by which antibody genes mutate during an infection to produce ever more effective antibodies.
Read the full story →By unfolding an enzyme and watching it fold itself back into working order, Christian Anfinsen showed that a protein’s amino acid sequence alone determines its three-dimensional shape, the idea behind modern protein structure prediction.
Read the full story →Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and his Paris group explained, and then surpassed, the unexpectedly low temperatures reached by laser cooling, work that underlies the fountain clocks that keep the world’s time.
Read the full story →Claude Cohen-Tannoudji turned his university lectures into Quantum Mechanics, written with Bernard Diu and Franck Laloë, a textbook that has taught the subject to generations of students around the world.
Read the full story →In 1982 Dan Shechtman saw atoms arranged in an ordered pattern that never repeats, a quasicrystal, and held to his evidence through years of ridicule until science changed the definition of a crystal.
Read the full story →Since 1987 Dan Shechtman’s Technological Entrepreneurship course at the Technion has taught some 10,000 Israeli engineers and scientists how to turn ideas into companies, and that failure is acceptable.
Read the full story →Kahneman and Tversky showed that two logically identical descriptions of a choice, such as lives saved versus lives lost, can lead people to opposite decisions.
Read the full story →Watching army officer candidates, Daniel Kahneman noticed that assessors stayed confident despite proof their predictions failed. He called it the illusion of validity, his first cognitive illusion.
Read the full story →At 21, Daniel Kahneman designed a structured interview for all Israeli combat recruits. It roughly tripled the interviews' predictive power and stayed in use for decades.
Read the full story →Daniel Kahneman showed that memories of painful experiences depend mostly on their worst moment and their end, the peak-end rule, a finding that can make medical procedures easier to bear.
Read the full story →Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's 1979 paper on prospect theory, showing how people really weigh gains and losses, became the most cited paper in economics.
Read the full story →With Jackson Beatty, Daniel Kahneman discovered that people's pupils dilate steadily as they hold more digits in memory, giving scientists a window onto mental effort.
Read the full story →When an Israeli flight instructor insisted that shouting worked better than praise, Daniel Kahneman realised he was seeing regression to the mean, the most satisfying eureka of his career.
Read the full story →Daniel Kahneman's 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow, describing fast intuitive and slow deliberate thinking, became an international bestseller and won major book awards.
Read the full story →In 1974 Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky published Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, showing how mental shortcuts lead to predictable errors.
Read the full story →In 1971 Daniel Nathans showed that a bacterial enzyme cuts DNA into precise, repeatable pieces, and used them to draw the first map of a genome, a technique at the root of genetic engineering.
Read the full story →SKYCovione, a COVID-19 vaccine built from computer-designed protein particles at David Baker’s Institute for Protein Design, was approved in South Korea in 2022 as the world’s first computationally designed protein medicine.
Read the full story →By asking why chili peppers burn, David Julius discovered TRPV1, the nerve sensor for painful heat, opening a new path toward painkillers that avoid the dangers of opioids.
Read the full story →“A friend is devoted at all times; a brother is born to share adversity.”