Physics, chemistry, immunology, genetics, the discoveries that reshaped how the world heals and understands itself.
The 1954 field trial of Jonas Salk's polio vaccine involved over 1.8 million schoolchildren, 20,000 physicians and 220,000 volunteers. The children were called Polio Pioneers.
Read the full story →From the mid-1980s until his death in 1995, Jonas Salk worked on a vaccine and immune therapy against HIV, applying the killed-virus approach he had used against polio.
Read the full story →Before the national trial, Jonas Salk gave his killed-virus polio vaccine to volunteers including himself, his wife and their children. All developed antibodies with no ill effects.
Read the full story →For the rest of his life Jonas Salk campaigned for the vaccination of all children against disease, which he described as a moral commitment.
Read the full story →On 12 April 1955 Jonas Salk's polio vaccine was declared safe and effective. US polio cases fell from an average of over 45,000 a year to 910 by 1962.
Read the full story →From 1914 Joseph Goldberger of the US Public Health Service showed that pellagra, which killed about 100,000 Americans, was caused by a poor diet and not by germs, and that it could be prevented with better food.
Read the full story →In 1973 Joseph Goldstein and Michael Brown discovered the LDL receptor and showed that its absence causes familial hypercholesterolaemia, an inherited disease that brings heart attacks in childhood or middle age.
Read the full story →Joseph Stiglitz showed that the ideal supply of local public goods can be funded entirely by taxing the land rents those goods create, calling it the Henry George theorem.
Read the full story →Joseph Stiglitz shared the 2001 Nobel economics prize for showing how markets work when one side knows more than the other, including how insurers screen customers.
Read the full story →In 1984 Carl Shapiro and Joseph Stiglitz published a model showing how employers’ difficulty monitoring workers can keep wages high and leave some people unemployed.
Read the full story →In 1992 Joshua Lederberg co-chaired a landmark Institute of Medicine report warning that new and returning infectious diseases were a growing threat at a time when many thought infections were beaten.
Read the full story →At 21, Joshua Lederberg discovered that bacteria can mate and swap genes, a finding that explains how antibiotic resistance spreads and helped lay the groundwork for genetic engineering.
Read the full story →In 1971 the surgeon Judah Folkman proposed that tumours cannot grow without recruiting new blood vessels, an idea ridiculed for years that led to drugs such as Avastin and to treatments that save the sight of people with macular degeneration.
Read the full story →In 1964 Stanford physiologist Judith Graham Pool showed that slowly thawing frozen plasma in the cold leaves behind a precipitate rich in clotting factor VIII, giving the world cryoprecipitate, the first practical concentrate for treating hemophilia.
Read the full story →Julian Schwinger chose radar over the atomic bomb in the Second World War, developing the theory of microwave waveguides, and then worked out the physics of synchrotron radiation.
Read the full story →In 1946 Julius Axelrod, then a laboratory technician, found that the painkiller acetanilide works through a safer compound, acetaminophen, and recommended it instead; neither he nor his mentor ever thought to patent it.
Read the full story →In the late 1950s and early 1960s Julius Axelrod discovered that nerve cells soak up and reuse the chemical messengers they release, and that antidepressants block this reuptake, the principle behind modern drugs such as Prozac.
Read the full story →Julius Rosenwald gave $1,000 grants to the first 100 US counties to hire County Extension Agents, helping the Department of Agriculture launch a valuable rural programme.
Read the full story →Julius Rosenwald was the principal founder of Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, giving it over $5 million and serving as its president from 1927 to 1932.
Read the full story →Since 2005, World Blood Donor Day has been celebrated every 14 June, the birthday of Karl Landsteiner, who discovered the human blood groups.
Read the full story →In 1901 Karl Landsteiner showed that human blood falls into distinct groups, explaining why transfusions so often failed and making safe transfusion possible.
Read the full story →Karl Landsteiner discovered small molecules he named haptens and showed how chemistry shapes immune reactions, helping found the field of immunochemistry.
Read the full story →In 1927 Karl Landsteiner and Philip Levine discovered the M, N and P blood groups. The same year the types began to be used to help settle paternity cases.
Read the full story →In 1909 Karl Landsteiner and Erwin Popper showed that polio could be transmitted to monkeys, proving it was infectious and isolating the poliovirus.
Read the full story →Working from 1937, Karl Landsteiner and Alexander Wiener identified the Rhesus factor in blood, reported in 1940, enabling physicians to transfuse blood far more safely.
Read the full story →In 1954 Kenneth Arrow and Gérard Debreu published the first rigorous proof that a competitive economy can have a set of prices at which every market clears.
Read the full story →Kenneth Arrow's 1963 paper on uncertainty and medical care explained why health care markets behave differently, laying a foundation for health economics.
Read the full story →Kenneth Arrow's 1951 book Social Choice and Individual Values introduced his impossibility theorem and founded modern social choice theory.
Read the full story →Kenneth Arrow's 1962 papers on learning by doing and on markets for invention helped economists explain where innovation and growth come from.
Read the full story →Kenneth Arrow co-wrote a 1951 classic on optimal inventory policy and helped establish Stanford's operations research department in the early 1960s.
Read the full story →As a US Army Air Forces weather officer in the Second World War, Kenneth Arrow worked out flight paths that used prevailing winds to cut fuel use.
Read the full story →Konrad Bloch, a Jewish chemist forced out of Nazi Germany, traced every carbon atom in cholesterol back to acetate and worked out the main stages of how the body builds it, the pathway whose key step statin drugs block today.
Read the full story →Leo Szilard gave essential advice that, according to Theodore Puck and Philip Marcus, made their 1955 cloning of a human cell a reality.
Read the full story →Waiting at a London traffic light in September 1933, Leo Szilard conceived the nuclear chain reaction; that same year he helped found a group that found posts for 2,500 refugee scholars.
Read the full story →In 1934 at St Bartholomew's Hospital, Leo Szilard and Thomas Chalmers discovered the Szilard–Chalmers effect, widely used to prepare medical isotopes.
Read the full story →After the war Leo Szilard and Aaron Novick invented the chemostat for growing microbes and discovered feedback inhibition, a key way cells control their chemistry.
Read the full story →Leo Szilard filed the earliest known patent applications for the electron microscope (1928) and the cyclotron (1929), and one for the linear accelerator (1928).
Read the full story →Between 1926 and 1930 Leo Szilard worked with Albert Einstein on a refrigerator with no moving parts, patented in the United States in 1930.
Read the full story →In his Berlin research of the 1920s, Leo Szilard showed a deep connection between information and entropy, making him a founding figure of information theory.
Read the full story →In 1956 Leon Cooper showed that electrons in a metal can bind into pairs, the key that let him, John Bardeen and Robert Schrieffer explain superconductivity, the zero-resistance effect behind MRI magnets and many research instruments.
Read the full story →Nobel physicist Leon Lederman helped create the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, a free public residential high school for talented students from across Illinois, established in 1985.
Read the full story →As director of Fermilab, Leon Lederman started Saturday Morning Physics, a programme in which working physicists teach particle physics to high school students, and later helped organise an academy to retrain Chicago's science and mathematics teachers.
Read the full story →At MIT in 1977, Leonard Adleman’s job was to break the encryption schemes his colleagues Ron Rivest and Adi Shamir proposed; after he broke 42 of them, they found one he could not, and RSA became the world’s most widely used public-key system.
Read the full story →On October 29, 1969, a student in Leonard Kleinrock’s UCLA laboratory sent the first message over the ARPANET, the network that grew into the internet; the system crashed after two letters, so the first word was “lo”.
Read the full story →Kantorovich's book The Best Use of Economic Resources, drafted during the war and published in 1959, linked efficient planning to a rational system of prices.
Read the full story →In the late 1940s Leonid Kantorovich organised parallel calculations on punched-card machines and proposed computer designs based on large-block processing.
Read the full story →Leonid Kantorovich's paper Functional Analysis and Applied Mathematics showed how abstract mathematics could power numerical methods, earning a State Prize in 1949.
Read the full story →Leonid Kantorovich's work on the transportation problem gave mathematics the Monge-Kantorovich problem and the Kantorovich-Rubinstein metric.
Read the full story →Asked in 1938 to help a Leningrad plywood trust get more from its machines, Leonid Kantorovich devised the method now known as linear programming.
Read the full story →From 1948 to 1950, work guided by Leonid Kantorovich at the Leningrad Carriage-Building Works used linear programming to cut steel sheets with less waste.
Read the full story →In Novosibirsk from 1960, Leonid Kantorovich built a laboratory and school that trained a generation of mathematician-economists.
Read the full story →In 1946 Lev Landau predicted that waves in a plasma can lose energy without any collisions, an effect confirmed experimentally in 1964 and now called Landau damping.
Read the full story →In the late 1920s, while still a teenager, Lev Landau independently introduced the density matrix, a basic tool of quantum physics, alongside John von Neumann.
Read the full story →Lev Landau explained why liquid helium flows without friction below 2.17 K, introducing phonons and 'rotons'; it won him the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Read the full story →In 1956 Lev Landau introduced Fermi liquid theory, explaining why electrons in metals and atoms in liquid helium-3 behave almost like free particles.
Read the full story →Lev Landau and Vitaly Ginzburg created the Ginzburg–Landau theory of superconductivity, work that helped win Ginzburg and Landau's student Abrikosov the 2003 Nobel Prize.
Read the full story →In 1930 Lev Landau showed that electrons in a magnetic field occupy discrete energy levels, now called Landau levels, key to explaining the quantum Hall effect.
Read the full story →With his student Evgeny Lifshitz, Lev Landau began the ten-volume Course of Theoretical Physics, still used by graduate physics students worldwide.
Read the full story →Lev Landau's famous 'Theoretical Minimum' exams, passed by only 43 candidates from 1934 to 1961, created the Soviet Union's greatest school of theoretical physics.
Read the full story →Lev Landau's theory of second-order phase transitions introduced the 'order parameter', still a broad and powerful framework for how matter changes state.
Read the full story →“A friend is devoted at all times; a brother is born to share adversity.”