Physics, chemistry, immunology, genetics, the discoveries that reshaped how the world heals and understands itself.
In October 1934 Henrietta Szold laid the cornerstone of the Rothschild-Hadassah-University Hospital on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem, a centre of medical care and training.
Read the full story →Herbert C. Brown helped discover a practical way to make sodium borohydride and then developed hydroboration, giving chemists some of the most widely used tools for building medicines and other molecules.
Read the full story →Mathematician Herbert Hauptman supplied the probability theory that let him and Jerome Karle estimate the lost phases of X-ray waves directly from measured data, then spent four decades in Buffalo extending the method to larger and larger molecules.
Read the full story →Herbert Simon’s 1947 book Administrative Behavior and later work argued that people and organisations, unable to know every option, settle for choices that are good enough, an idea that reshaped management and became a pillar of behavioural economics.
Read the full story →In 1955–56 Herbert Simon, Allen Newell and Cliff Shaw built the Logic Theorist, a program that proved mathematical theorems by heuristic search and helped launch the field of artificial intelligence.
Read the full story →Hermann Minkowski helped organise the first International Congress of Mathematicians in Zurich in 1897, chairing its arithmetic and algebra section.
Read the full story →At Göttingen Hermann Minkowski worked out a four-dimensional treatment of electrodynamics, recasting the laws of electricity and magnetism for moving bodies.
Read the full story →Hermann Minkowski created the 'geometry of numbers', solving problems about whole numbers by picturing them as points in a grid, published from 1896.
Read the full story →In a 1908 lecture Hermann Minkowski, once Einstein's teacher, showed that relativity is best understood in a single four-dimensional 'spacetime', the language of modern physics.
Read the full story →In a January 1900 letter, Hermann Minkowski urged David Hilbert to sketch the problems future mathematicians should tackle, inspiring Hilbert's celebrated 23 problems.
Read the full story →The Minkowski sum, a way of adding shapes named after Hermann Minkowski, is used in robot motion planning, collision detection and machining.
Read the full story →Hilde Bruch, a Jewish pediatrician who fled Nazi Germany, spent decades studying people who starve themselves, and her books Eating Disorders (1973) and The Golden Cage (1978) laid the foundations of modern care for anorexia nervosa.
Read the full story →Against the scientific consensus, Howard Temin argued that some viruses copy their RNA genes into DNA, and in 1970 he proved it by finding reverse transcriptase, later the first target of HIV medicines.
Read the full story →In 1937 Ilya Frank and Igor Tamm explained why fast particles make transparent materials glow blue, turning Cherenkov radiation into a tool now used in particle detectors, neutrino observatories, gamma-ray telescopes, nuclear safeguards and medical imaging.
Read the full story →Ilya Prigogine showed that systems kept far from equilibrium by a flow of energy can organize themselves into new ordered structures, a theory now used to understand living cells, chemical oscillations and other self-organizing systems.
Read the full story →Between 1979 and 1983 Irwin Rose, working with Avram Hershko and Aaron Ciechanover in his Philadelphia laboratory, showed how cells tag unwanted proteins with ubiquitin for destruction, knowledge that led to cancer drugs such as bortezomib.
Read the full story →Isidor Isaac Rabi and Norman Ramsey rallied nine universities to found Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, established in 1947.
Read the full story →Precise measurements by Isidor Isaac Rabi's group in the late 1930s showed the deuteron has an electric quadrupole moment, a key clue to the nuclear force.
Read the full story →After Sputnik in 1957, Isidor Isaac Rabi's advice to President Eisenhower helped create the President's Science Advisory Committee.
Read the full story →In 1937 Isidor Isaac Rabi's Columbia team invented the molecular-beam magnetic resonance method, winning him the 1944 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Read the full story →At MIT's Radiation Laboratory during the Second World War, Isidor Isaac Rabi led research that pushed radar to sharper 3-centimetre wavelengths.
Read the full story →In 1949 Isidor Isaac Rabi joined Enrico Fermi on the AEC's advisory committee in opposing the hydrogen bomb on moral as well as technical grounds.
Read the full story →At a UNESCO meeting in Florence in June 1950, Isidor Isaac Rabi called for regional laboratories to rebuild European science; in 1952 European nations created CERN’s provisional council.
Read the full story →In a 1945 lecture Isidor Isaac Rabi proposed using the magnetic resonance of atoms to keep time; his colleagues soon built the first atomic clocks.
Read the full story →Isidor Isaac Rabi's magnetic resonance research led to MRI; in his final illness he was examined in a scanner descended from his own experiments.
Read the full story →In 1972 and 1973 Michael Kosterlitz and David Thouless explained how thin, flat materials can change phase through pairs of tiny whirlpools, the first topological phase transition and the starting point of today’s research on topological materials for electronics and quantum computing.
Read the full story →In 1962 Jack Steinberger, Leon Lederman and Melvin Schwartz made the first beam of high-energy neutrinos and used it to show that the neutrino born with a muon is a different particle from the one born with an electron.
Read the full story →In 1973 the mathematician Jacob Bronowski wrote and presented The Ascent of Man, a 13-part BBC series that told the history of science as a human adventure and set the pattern for science television.
Read the full story →In 1977 and 1978 Jacob Ziv and Abraham Lempel of the Technion published the Lempel-Ziv compression methods, which became the basis of ZIP archives, GIF and PNG images and much of the data compression used today.
Read the full story →James Franck actively advanced the careers of women physicists, notably Hertha Sponer and Hilde Levi, at a time when few women held research posts.
Read the full story →In 1925 James Franck proposed the mechanism, later developed by Edward Condon into the Franck–Condon principle, that governs how molecules absorb and emit light.
Read the full story →From 1920 to 1933 James Franck and Max Born made Göttingen a world centre of quantum physics, training scientists such as Blackett, Condon and Oppenheimer.
Read the full story →In 1914 James Franck and Gustav Hertz showed electrons lose exactly 4.9 electronvolts to mercury atoms, proving atomic energy is quantised; they won the 1925 Nobel Prize.
Read the full story →From the 1930s James Franck studied how plants turn light into chemical energy, heading Chicago's Photosynthesis Research Group until 1956.
Read the full story →James Rothman found the SNARE proteins that zip a cell’s tiny transport bubbles onto their targets, the machinery that releases insulin and nerve signals and that botulinum toxin destroys.
Read the full story →Between 1967 and the mid-1970s Jerome Friedman, Henry Kendall and Richard Taylor fired electrons from Stanford’s two-mile accelerator at protons and neutrons and found hard, point-like quarks inside them.
Read the full story →In 1964 Detroit chemist Jerome Horwitz synthesised AZT as a possible cancer drug; in 1987 it became the first approved treatment for HIV, and he also first made two more HIV drugs.
Read the full story →Jerome Horwitz kept working on cancer drugs into his eighties, sharing a $900,000 NCI grant for solid-tumour drugs and retiring from Wayne State in 2005 at 86.
Read the full story →Dideoxycytidine (ddC), first made in Jerome Horwitz's lab in the 1960s, was approved by the FDA in 1992 as one of the earliest HIV/AIDS treatments.
Read the full story →In the early 1960s Jerome Horwitz rejected random drug screening and designed 'fraudulent nucleosides' to trick cells into stopping DNA copying.
Read the full story →Stavudine (d4T), first created by Jerome Horwitz in the 1960s, was approved for HIV in 1994 and became widely used in developing countries for its low cost.
Read the full story →In 1964 Jerome Horwitz and colleagues first made X-gal, the compound that turns bacteria blue and lets biologists spot engineered DNA at a glance.
Read the full story →Working at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory from the late 1940s, chemist Jerome Karle and mathematician Herbert Hauptman developed the direct methods that recover the missing phases in X-ray crystallography, turning the determination of molecular structures from a years-long struggle into a routine task.
Read the full story →John Polanyi developed infrared chemiluminescence, a way to see how a chemical reaction shares out its energy, work that led directly to the idea of the chemical laser.
Read the full story →Chemist John Polanyi founded Canada’s Pugwash group of scientists in 1960 and has spent decades arguing, in print and in public, for a world without nuclear weapons.
Read the full story →In 1971 John Vane showed that aspirin blocks the body’s production of prostaglandins, explaining a drug used for 70 years and opening the way to daily low-dose aspirin for heart protection.
Read the full story →Experiments in John Vane’s London laboratory with lungs and Brazilian snake venom, and his advice to the drug company Squibb, led to captopril, the first of the ACE inhibitors now taken by millions for blood pressure and heart failure.
Read the full story →In 1955 John von Neumann noted that carbon dioxide from burning coal and oil might already have changed the atmosphere enough to cause general warming.
Read the full story →John von Neumann's 1932 papers on ergodic theory were so important that Paul Halmos said they alone would have guaranteed him mathematical immortality.
Read the full story →In 1950 John von Neumann and Jule Charney used ENIAC to make the first numerical weather forecasts; in 1955 routine computer forecasting began in the US.
Read the full story →John von Neumann proved the minimax theorem in 1928 and, with Oskar Morgenstern, published Theory of Games and Economic Behavior in 1944, founding game theory.
Read the full story →The IAS machine John von Neumann built in Princeton from 1946 became the blueprint for early computers worldwide, and its design shaped IBM's first scientific computers.
Read the full story →In 1945 John von Neumann invented merge sort, one of the most widely used methods for putting data in order, in what Donald Knuth called his first computer program.
Read the full story →With Stanislaw Ulam, John von Neumann helped develop the Monte Carlo method, using random numbers on computers to solve problems too complex for direct calculation.
Read the full story →In his 1932 book Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, John von Neumann set out the first rigorous mathematical framework for quantum theory.
Read the full story →In the late 1940s John von Neumann designed a self-reproducing 'universal constructor' and, with Stanislaw Ulam, created the field of cellular automata.
Read the full story →John von Neumann's 1945 report on the EDVAC gave the first published description of the stored-program computer, the design behind almost every computer since.
Read the full story →Asked who owned the patent on his polio vaccine, Jonas Salk answered: 'Well, the people I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?'
Read the full story →In 1963 Jonas Salk opened the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, a research centre designed by architect Louis Kahn.
Read the full story →Before polio, Jonas Salk worked with Thomas Francis Jr. at the University of Michigan on an army-commissioned influenza vaccine that was soon widely used at army bases.
Read the full story →“A friend is devoted at all times; a brother is born to share adversity.”