Physics, chemistry, immunology, genetics, the discoveries that reshaped how the world heals and understands itself.
David Julius's laboratory used menthol, the cooling chemical in mint, to identify TRPM8, the main sensor that lets our nerves detect cold, a discovery now guiding research into nerve pain.
Read the full story →In 1971 and 1972, in the low-temperature laboratory David Lee had built at Cornell, his team found that liquid helium-3 becomes a frictionless superfluid about two thousandths of a degree above absolute zero.
Read the full story →At Easter 1947 Dennis Gabor, a Jewish-born refugee engineer working in Rugby, England, conceived holography, a way of recording light waves themselves; it now protects banknotes, cards and passports and helps engineers measure stress and vibration.
Read the full story →In 1952 Donald Glaser invented the bubble chamber, a superheated liquid in which particles leave trails of bubbles, giving physicists their main window on the subatomic world for two decades and revealing a zoo of new particles.
Read the full story →In 1971 the physicist Donald Glaser co-founded Cetus Corporation, the first biotechnology company, which developed the cancer drug interleukin-2 and was where Kary Mullis invented PCR, the DNA-copying technique used in labs, clinics and courtrooms worldwide.
Read the full story →After the space shuttle Columbia broke apart in 2003, Nobel physicist Douglas Osheroff served on the accident investigation board and studied why insulating foam broke off the shuttle’s fuel tank.
Read the full story →In 2005 Drew Weissman and Katalin Karikó showed that chemically modifying the bases in lab-made mRNA almost abolished the inflammatory reaction it caused, a key step toward mRNA vaccines.
Read the full story →Drew Weissman and Katalin Karikó helped overcome a second obstacle to mRNA medicine by packaging the fragile molecule in lipid nanoparticles that protect it until it reaches its target.
Read the full story →Drew Weissman's laboratory at Penn is researching next-generation mRNA vaccines, including a pan-coronavirus vaccine, plus gene editing and treatments for inflammatory diseases.
Read the full story →Drew Weissman's work became the key foundation of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, both approved in December 2020 with protection of around 95%.
Read the full story →In 1955 Edmond Fischer and Edwin Krebs found that cells switch proteins on and off by adding and removing phosphate, the mechanism now targeted by more than 75 cancer drugs including imatinib.
Read the full story →In 1882 Élie Metchnikoff pushed tangerine thorns into starfish larvae and saw wandering cells swarm around them, the discovery that white blood cells defend the body by devouring invaders.
Read the full story →Between 1907 and 1926 Emile Berliner worked on vertical flight, built a light rotary engine, tested a tail rotor by 1910 and demonstrated a helicopter to the US Navy in 1922.
Read the full story →Émile Durkheim gave the study of society its own rules, its own university department and its own journal, turning sociology into a discipline taught around the world.
Read the full story →In his 1897 book Suicide, Émile Durkheim used statistics to show that suicide rates rise and fall with how connected and supported people are, not only with private despair.
Read the full story →In 1937 Emilio Segrè and Carlo Perrier identified technetium, the first artificially made element, and in 1938 Segrè and Glenn Seaborg isolated technetium-99m, which is now used in tens of millions of medical imaging procedures every year.
Read the full story →In 1915 Emmy Noether solved the finite basis problem for finite groups, proving a degree limit now called Noether's bound. A last open case was settled only in 2000 and 2001.
Read the full story →With Richard Brauer and Helmut Hasse, Emmy Noether proved the Brauer–Hasse–Noether theorem, which allows all central division algebras over a number field to be classified.
Read the full story →Attending lectures by Pavel Alexandrov and Heinz Hopf in 1926–27, Emmy Noether suggested the idea of homology groups, helping turn combinatorial topology into algebraic topology.
Read the full story →In her 1921 paper Idealtheorie in Ringbereichen, Emmy Noether turned the theory of ideals into a powerful general tool, and objects with her chain condition are still called Noetherian.
Read the full story →Emmy Noether's Göttingen circle, the Noether boys, included doctoral students such as Grete Hermann, Ernst Witt, Max Deuring and Jacob Levitzki, who later taught in Jerusalem.
Read the full story →In 1918 Emmy Noether proved that every continuous symmetry in physics comes with a conserved quantity, tying conservation of energy and momentum to symmetry.
Read the full story →Emmy Noether gave the first general representation theory of groups and algebras, combining scattered earlier results into a single theory of modules and ideals.
Read the full story →One of only two women among 986 students at Erlangen, Emmy Noether earned her doctorate in 1907 and then worked at the university's Mathematical Institute for seven years without pay.
Read the full story →Studying a giant sea snail, Eric Kandel showed that memories are stored as changes in the connections between nerve cells, and that lasting memories need new genes, proteins and synapses.
Read the full story →In 1942 Ernst Chain and Edward Abraham proposed that penicillin contains a beta-lactam ring, a structure Dorothy Hodgkin confirmed by X-ray crystallography in 1945.
Read the full story →After building a research centre in Rome, Ernst Chain returned to Britain in 1964 to found Imperial College London's biochemistry department, specialising in fermentation technology.
Read the full story →On August 24, 1940, Florey, Chain and their Oxford colleagues reported penicillin's curative power in The Lancet, a paper that electrified researchers around the world.
Read the full story →On May 25, 1940, the Oxford team infected eight mice with streptococci and treated four with penicillin. Sixteen and a half hours later only the treated mice were alive.
Read the full story →At Oxford, Ernst Chain and Edward Abraham found a way to purify and concentrate penicillin, turning Fleming's fragile mould juice into a usable drug.
Read the full story →Eugene Wigner's 1931 book Group Theory and Its Application to the Quantum Mechanics of Atomic Spectra made the mathematics of symmetry usable by a generation of physicists.
Read the full story →In his 1927 paper On the Conservation Laws of Quantum Mechanics, Eugene Wigner introduced parity, the mirror symmetry of quantum systems, now a basic idea in physics.
Read the full story →In 1932 Eugene Wigner introduced the Wigner function, a way of picturing quantum states in classical-style phase space now used in quantum optics, chemistry and signal processing.
Read the full story →With his student Frederick Seitz, Eugene Wigner gave his name to the Wigner–Seitz cell, a standard way of dividing up a crystal lattice used throughout solid-state physics.
Read the full story →In Copenhagen in the early 1930s, Felix Bloch refined Hans Bethe’s theory of how charged particles lose energy in matter, work remembered in the Bethe–Bloch formula.
Read the full story →In 1946 Felix Bloch wrote the Bloch equations for nuclear magnetisation, introducing the T1 and T2 relaxation times that later helped make MRI a powerful medical tool.
Read the full story →In 1954 Felix Bloch became the first director-general of CERN, the new European laboratory for particle physics, as construction began on its site at Meyrin near Geneva.
Read the full story →In 1939, working with Luis Alvarez at the Berkeley cyclotron, Felix Bloch measured the neutron's magnetic moment to about one percent accuracy, a theorist turned experimenter.
Read the full story →Chemical shift experiments in Felix Bloch's own laboratory helped turn nuclear magnetic resonance into the most important spectroscopic tool in chemistry.
Read the full story →In 1946 Felix Bloch, William Hansen and Martin Packard at Stanford developed nuclear induction, one of the two founding methods of nuclear magnetic resonance.
Read the full story →Felix Bloch described the boundaries between magnetic domains, now called Bloch walls, and proposed spin waves, partly in a paper written in hospital after a climbing accident.
Read the full story →In his 1928 thesis as Werner Heisenberg's first graduate student, Felix Bloch showed how electrons travel as waves through a crystal, founding the quantum theory of solids.
Read the full story →Ferdinand Cohn sorted bacteria into groups by shape and used his journal to publish Robert Koch's 1876 proof that a single bacterium causes anthrax, helping found the science of germs.
Read the full story →Ferdinand Cohn discovered that some bacteria form tough, heat-resistant spores, explaining why boiling alone does not always sterilise and pointing the way to proper sterilisation.
Read the full story →Franco Modigliani’s 1944 doctoral paper, “Liquidity Preference and the Theory of Interest and Money”, integrated Keynes’s revolution with classical economics.
Read the full story →With his student Richard Brumberg, Franco Modigliani developed the life-cycle hypothesis of saving in 1953–54, a key reason for his 1985 Nobel Prize.
Read the full story →In the late 1960s Franco Modigliani led the design of a large model of the US economy for the Federal Reserve, a tool that guided monetary policy for decades.
Read the full story →In 1975 Franco Modigliani and his former student Lucas Papademos introduced the NIRU, the non-inflationary rate of unemployment, a concept still debated in monetary policy.
Read the full story →At Carnegie Tech, Franco Modigliani and Emile Grunberg published a paper on predicting social events when people react to predictions, a pillar of rational expectations theory.
Read the full story →In 1964 François Englert and Robert Brout showed how a field filling empty space gives elementary particles their mass, the idea at the heart of the Standard Model that was confirmed when CERN found the Higgs boson in 2012.
Read the full story →In 1961 François Jacob, Sydney Brenner and Matthew Meselson proved that short-lived messenger RNA carries genetic instructions to the cell’s protein factories, the molecule behind today’s mRNA vaccines.
Read the full story →With Jacques Monod, François Jacob showed in 1961 that cells control their genes with switches and repressor proteins, the first working model of gene regulation.
Read the full story →At Columbia, Franz Boas trained a generation of anthropologists and, working with Indigenous partners, recorded Native American languages and traditions in their own words.
Read the full story →Franz Boas's study of immigrant families showed that supposedly fixed racial traits like head shape changed within a generation, undermining the scientific racism of his day.
Read the full story →In 1956, beside a nuclear reactor in South Carolina, Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan detected the neutrino, a particle many physicists thought could never be observed.
Read the full story →Frederick Reines spent decades preparing to catch neutrinos from a supernova, and in February 1987 the IMB detector he helped build recorded them from Supernova 1987A, launching neutrino astronomy.
Read the full story →Fritz Haber observed that the adsorbing power of a solid can come from unsaturated valence forces on its surface, an idea on which Irving Langmuir founded his theory of adsorption.
Read the full story →Scaled up by Carl Bosch from 1913, Fritz Haber's ammonia process made cheap fertiliser possible. Food grown with it is estimated to support nearly half the world's population.
Read the full story →With his colleague Cremer, Fritz Haber invented the glass electrode for measuring the acidity of liquids, a device his Nobel biography describes as now widely used.
Read the full story →In the 1920s Fritz Haber reorganised his Berlin-Dahlem institute, giving directors such as James Franck and Michael Polanyi full freedom and making it an international centre of science.
Read the full story →“A friend is devoted at all times; a brother is born to share adversity.”