Physics, chemistry, immunology, genetics, the discoveries that reshaped how the world heals and understands itself.
Fritz Haber's 1898 textbook on technical electrochemistry and his discovery that controlling electrode potential yields specific products became classics of the field.
Read the full story →In 1913 Fritz Haber unveiled a firedamp whistle that used sound to warn miners of explosive methane, and he also devised a quartz-thread gauge for very low gas pressures.
Read the full story →In 1909 Fritz Haber and Robert Le Rossignol became the first to synthesise ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen, solving a problem chemists had pursued for decades.
Read the full story →Fritz Haber's 1905 book Thermodynamics of Technical Gas Reactions was later regarded as a model of accuracy and critical insight in chemical thermodynamics.
Read the full story →Fritz Lipmann showed in 1941 that cells store and spend energy through the ‘energy-rich’ phosphate bonds of ATP, then discovered coenzyme A, the molecule that links the breakdown of food to the building of fats and cholesterol.
Read the full story →In 1891 Gabriel Lippmann announced the first photographs to record colour directly through light interference, a method that foreshadowed holography and won him the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Read the full story →Gabriel Lippmann’s capillary electrometer, a hair-thin tube of mercury that moves with tiny voltages, was the instrument Augustus Waller used in 1887 to record the first electrocardiogram of a human heart.
Read the full story →Gary Ruvkun showed how a tiny RNA switches off a gene and then found let-7, the first microRNA shared with humans, revealing a system of gene control now studied for cancer diagnosis and treatment.
Read the full story →In 1947 George Dantzig invented the simplex method of linear programming, a way to find the cheapest or most productive plan among countless possibilities that is now used in airlines, refineries, factories, power systems and food production.
Read the full story →In 1923 George de Hevesy published the first use of a radioactive tracer in a living organism, following lead-212 through the roots, stems and leaves of broad beans.
Read the full story →Guided by Niels Bohr's atomic theory, George de Hevesy and Dirk Coster found the missing element 72 in Copenhagen and named it hafnium, after the city's Latin name.
Read the full story →When the Nazis invaded Denmark, chemist George de Hevesy dissolved two colleagues' gold Nobel medals in acid to protect them; after the war the gold was recovered and the medals recast.
Read the full story →In early 1913, with Friedrich Paneth at the Vienna Institute for Radium Research, George de Hevesy carried out the first radioactive-tracer experiment.
Read the full story →After fleeing to Sweden in 1943, George de Hevesy used labelled atoms to study how X-rays affect nucleic acids in tumours and how iron moves in healthy and cancerous tissue.
Read the full story →In 1936 George de Hevesy invented neutron activation analysis, identifying tiny traces of elements by bombarding a sample with neutrons and measuring the radioactivity produced.
Read the full story →With Rockefeller Foundation support, George de Hevesy developed X-ray fluorescence analysis, a way to identify the elements in a sample from the X-rays they emit.
Read the full story →George Olah proposed the “methanol economy,” in which carbon dioxide captured from smokestacks or the air is recycled into methanol fuel, and a pioneering Icelandic plant that does this bears his name.
Read the full story →By using superacids to trap carbocations long enough to study them, George Olah unlocked chemistry that refiners use to make higher-octane, cleaner-burning petrol.
Read the full story →By finding vitamin A inside the retina and tracing how light changes it, George Wald explained night blindness and mapped the chemistry of sight that eye medicine still uses.
Read the full story →Shocked that few French primary schools taught science, Georges Charpak co-founded La main à la pâte in 1996, a programme that helps teachers teach science through experiments and has spread to many countries.
Read the full story →Georges Charpak’s wire chamber, invented to track particles at CERN, became the heart of the EOS imaging system, which takes full-body X-rays of standing patients with far less radiation.
Read the full story →Gerald Edelman split antibodies into their chains and in 1969 published the first complete sequence of an antibody, showing how the immune system’s key molecules recognise invaders.
Read the full story →In the early 1950s Gertrude Elion synthesised 6-mercaptopurine, one of the first effective drugs against acute leukaemia, then almost always fatal in children.
Read the full story →In the 1970s Gertrude Elion's group developed acyclovir, the first selective and effective antiviral drug, which attacks herpes viruses while sparing healthy cells.
Read the full story →Allopurinol, developed in Gertrude Elion's laboratory, blocks the build-up of uric acid and remains a mainstay treatment for gout.
Read the full story →Gertrude Elion's laboratory produced azathioprine, the first widely used drug to stop the body rejecting a transplanted kidney from an unrelated donor.
Read the full story →After Gertrude Elion retired in 1983, scientists she had trained, using her methods, developed AZT, one of the first drugs used to treat HIV/AIDS.
Read the full story →Gertrude Elion's work with George Hitchings contributed to pyrimethamine against malaria and trimethoprim against bacterial infections.
Read the full story →From 1971 Gertrude Elion taught at Duke University, mentoring medical and graduate students and publishing more than 25 papers with them.
Read the full story →Turned away from graduate funding, Gertrude Elion never completed a PhD, yet her rational drug design produced leukaemia, transplant and antiviral drugs and won the 1988 Nobel Prize.
Read the full story →Gerty and Carl Cori worked out how sugar travels between muscles and liver, the Cori cycle, and found the first step in breaking down the body’s sugar stores, earning the 1947 Nobel Prize.
Read the full story →In 1952 Gerty Cori showed that children with one form of glycogen storage disease lack a single liver enzyme, the first proof that an enzyme defect can cause a human disease.
Read the full story →In 1944 Gregory Pincus organised the Laurentian Hormone Conference and edited its first 23 volumes of proceedings, a key forum for endocrinology.
Read the full story →In 1934, at 31, Gregory Pincus achieved in vitro fertilisation of rabbit eggs, more than four decades before the first human IVF baby.
Read the full story →Working from a struggling independent lab, Gregory Pincus led the research that produced the first oral contraceptive, approved by the US FDA in 1960.
Read the full story →During the Second World War Gregory Pincus and Hudson Hoagland studied stress and fatigue for the US Navy and air forces, measuring hormones in pilots.
Read the full story →The Worcester Foundation, co-founded by Gregory Pincus in 1944, became an international centre for steroid hormone research, hosting over 300 foreign scientists.
Read the full story →As a 23-year-old Harvard graduate student, H. David Politzer showed in 1973 that the force between quarks weakens when they are close together, the discovery that made quantum chromodynamics work.
Read the full story →By studying a millimetre-long worm, H. Robert Horvitz discovered the genes that control programmed cell death, a pathway that cancer drugs such as venetoclax now switch back on to kill leukaemia cells.
Read the full story →Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Hans Bethe campaigned for the peaceful use of nuclear energy, calling nuclear electricity 'a necessity, not merely an option'.
Read the full story →While working with Enrico Fermi in Rome in 1931, Hans Bethe devised the Bethe ansatz, a method for exactly solving certain quantum many-body problems.
Read the full story →In 1936–37 Hans Bethe, with Robert Bacher and Stanley Livingston, wrote three review articles so complete they became known as 'Bethe's Bible'.
Read the full story →In 1938–39 Hans Bethe worked out the nuclear reactions that power the Sun and stars, work that won him the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Read the full story →In 1930 Hans Bethe derived a formula for how fast charged particles lose energy passing through matter, still used across physics today.
Read the full story →In 1968 Hans Bethe and Richard Garwin argued that missile defences could be defeated by simple decoys, an argument that helped lead to the 1972 ABM Treaty.
Read the full story →Hans Bethe served on the President's Science Advisory Committee from 1956 to 1964 and helped bring about the 1963 treaty banning atmospheric nuclear tests.
Read the full story →In 1947, on a train to Schenectady, Hans Bethe calculated the Lamb shift, showing quantum electrodynamics could work and opening modern particle physics.
Read the full story →At the age of 85, Hans Bethe wrote an important paper on the solar neutrino problem, helping establish that neutrinos change type on their way from the Sun.
Read the full story →In 1937, four years after the Nazis dismissed him, Hans Krebs worked out the citric acid cycle, the chain of reactions by which almost every living cell turns food into energy.
Read the full story →In 1976 Harold Varmus and J. Michael Bishop discovered that a cancer-causing gene carried by a virus was really a normal cell gene, revealing that cancer arises from damage to genes we all carry.
Read the full story →As director of the National Institutes of Health, Nobel laureate Harold Varmus helped create PubMed Central, a free online library of research papers, and co-founded the open-access publisher PLOS.
Read the full story →In 1985 Harry Kroto and colleagues discovered C60, a football-shaped cage of carbon atoms, revealing a new form of carbon and opening the road to nanotubes and graphene.
Read the full story →Nobel chemist Harry Kroto founded the Vega Science Trust and GEOSET to put high-quality science films and lessons online free for anyone, anywhere.
Read the full story →Harry Markowitz developed the buddy memory allocation method, included in the first version of his SIMSCRIPT language, a technique for managing computer memory.
Read the full story →Harry Markowitz developed the critical line algorithm, published in 1956, to compute the efficient frontier, the set of portfolios giving the best return for each level of risk.
Read the full story →In the early 1960s Harry Markowitz returned to RAND to develop SIMSCRIPT, a programming language that made computer simulations much faster to build.
Read the full story →At RAND in the 1950s Harry Markowitz saw that big economic models were mostly zeros, and devised sparse matrix techniques now standard for solving huge systems of equations.
Read the full story →By following transfusion patients and storing their blood for years, NIH physician Harvey Alter proved that an unknown virus, later named hepatitis C, was causing most hepatitis after transfusions, work that led to blood screening and, eventually, a cure.
Read the full story →Henri Kagan, a French Jewish chemist who survived the war in hiding as a child, created catalysts, reagents and insights that help chemists produce the single mirror-image form of a medicine, the form that works.
Read the full story →On June 26, 1886, Henri Moissan became the first person to isolate the element fluorine, using an electrolytic method that is still the basis of commercial fluorine production.
Read the full story →“A friend is devoted at all times; a brother is born to share adversity.”