Physics, chemistry, immunology, genetics, the discoveries that reshaped how the world heals and understands itself.
Lev Vygotsky's idea of the zone of proximal development, the gap between what a child can do alone and with guidance, changed how teachers around the world plan lessons and help pupils learn.
Read the full story →Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch were the first to explain how a uranium nucleus splits, and in a 1939 paper in Nature they named the process "fission".
Read the full story →In 1922 Lise Meitner explained why atoms emit electrons with signature energies. The process is now called the Auger–Meitner effect after her and Pierre Auger.
Read the full story →In 1926 Lise Meitner became the first woman university professor of physics in Germany, after starting her Berlin career as an unpaid guest in a converted woodshop.
Read the full story →Working almost alone during the First World War, Lise Meitner isolated the long-lived isotope of element 91 by December 1917 and named the element protactinium.
Read the full story →On 29 July 1948, the day the London Olympics opened, the refugee neurosurgeon Ludwig Guttmann held an archery contest for 16 paralysed patients at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, the start of what became the Paralympic Games.
Read the full story →In 2016 the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative gave $600 million to create Biohub, a research centre in San Francisco linking scientists at UCSF, UC Berkeley and Stanford.
Read the full story →In 2016 Mark Zuckerberg co-founded Breakthrough Starshot with Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking, a research project to develop tiny light-sail spacecraft that could reach another star.
Read the full story →In the late 1980s Marshall Nirenberg's laboratory discovered four new homeobox genes in fruit flies, NK-1 to NK-4, which help control nervous system development.
Read the full story →In the early 1970s Marshall Nirenberg and Werner Klee showed how morphine suppresses a nerve-cell enzyme and how cells compensate, explaining tolerance and withdrawal.
Read the full story →In 1964 and 1965 Marshall Nirenberg's lab, with postdoc Philip Leder, devised a filter-binding method that revealed the exact letter order of genetic code words.
Read the full story →From the late 1960s Marshall Nirenberg built a bank of neuroblastoma cell lines with chosen nerve traits and supplied them to scientists worldwide for decades.
Read the full story →In the 1961–62 'coding race' against Severo Ochoa's large lab, many NIH scientists set aside their own work to help Marshall Nirenberg decipher the genetic code.
Read the full story →At 3 a.m. on 27 May 1961, Marshall Nirenberg's NIH experiment showed that the RNA 'word' UUU codes for phenylalanine, the first codon ever deciphered.
Read the full story →In 1994 Martin Chalfie showed that a green glowing protein from a jellyfish could light up chosen genes and cells in living organisms, giving scientists everywhere a way to watch disease and development as they happen.
Read the full story →In 1976 Martin Hellman and Whitfield Diffie published New Directions in Cryptography, introducing public-key cryptography and digital signatures, the ideas that now secure most internet communication.
Read the full story →In 1977 Martin Karplus’s group published the first computer simulation of a protein in motion, founding a method now used worldwide to understand disease and design medicines.
Read the full story →At Stanford in the mid-1970s Martin Perl found the tau lepton, a heavy cousin of the electron, revealing that nature builds matter in three families of particles.
Read the full story →Working at the National Institutes of Health around 1970, Martin Rodbell discovered that cells pass hormone signals inward through a separate 'transducer' switched on by GTP, the system later identified as G proteins.
Read the full story →In 1912 Max Born and Theodore von Kármán founded lattice dynamics, explaining how atomic vibrations set a solid's properties; Born later wrote the classic text on it.
Read the full story →Driven out of Germany in 1933, Max Born became Tait Professor at Edinburgh in 1936 and built a research group made up mostly of refugees from Europe.
Read the full story →At Göttingen in the 1920s Max Born supervised Oppenheimer, Maria Goeppert Mayer, Max Delbrück and others, while Pauli, Heisenberg, Fermi and Wigner served as his assistants.
Read the full story →A chance meeting between Max Born and Fritz Haber around 1918 produced the Born–Haber cycle, a method chemistry students still use to analyse ionic compounds.
Read the full story →In 1925 Max Born recognised Heisenberg's new physics as matrix algebra and found its key law, the commutation relation now carved on his gravestone.
Read the full story →In 1926 Max Born proposed that the quantum wave function gives the probability of finding a particle, the Born rule, winning a share of the 1954 Nobel Prize.
Read the full story →Max Born and Emil Wolf wrote Principles of Optics, published in 1959, which became a standard reference on the physics of light for generations of scientists.
Read the full story →In 1947 Max Perutz obtained Medical Research Council support for a small unit to study biological molecules; Watson and Crick built their DNA model there in 1953.
Read the full story →In 1938 Max Perutz joined a three-man expedition to study how snow becomes glacier ice in Switzerland, work that made him an expert on glaciers.
Read the full story →In 1970 Max Perutz proposed how haemoglobin works as a molecular machine, switching shape to pick up oxygen in the lungs and release it in the tissues.
Read the full story →Max Perutz studied how changes in haemoglobin's amino acids alter its function, hoping to find drugs for genetic blood disorders such as sickle cell anaemia.
Read the full story →In 1953 Max Perutz showed that attaching heavy atoms such as mercury to protein crystals solves the X-ray 'phase problem', making protein crystallography possible.
Read the full story →In his final years Max Perutz studied Huntington's disease, showing that its age of onset is linked to the number of glutamine repeats, which form a 'polar zipper'.
Read the full story →Max Perutz founded and chaired the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge from 1962 to 1979; its scientists have shared 12 Nobel Prizes.
Read the full story →In 1959, 22 years after he began, Max Perutz determined the structure of haemoglobin, the blood's oxygen carrier, sharing the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Read the full story →Using radioactive carbon-14 as a tracer, Melvin Calvin and his Berkeley colleagues mapped the cycle of reactions by which plants capture carbon dioxide from the air and turn it into sugar.
Read the full story →One evening in late 1959 Melvin Schwartz realised that neutrinos from decaying pions could be made into a beam; the 1962 experiment that followed found a second kind of neutrino and launched accelerator neutrino physics.
Read the full story →Michael Levitt pioneered computer simulations of proteins in the 1970s, a foundation of modern drug design, and helped design one of the first humanised antibody medicines.
Read the full story →Michael Rosbash and Jeffrey Hall showed that a protein switches off its own gene in a daily loop, the clockwork behind our sleep, hormones and metabolism, and the key to understanding jet lag and sleep disorders.
Read the full story →Michael Brown’s work with Joseph Goldstein on the LDL receptor, and later on the SREBP switch inside cells, explained how statin drugs lower blood cholesterol and prevent heart attacks.
Read the full story →After his mentor died of a heart rhythm disorder, Holocaust survivor Michel Mirowski teamed up with Morton Mower in Baltimore to build a defibrillator small enough to live inside the body; the first was implanted in a patient in 1980.
Read the full story →Milton Friedman's 1953 essay The Case for Flexible Exchange Rates argued for floating currencies at a time when most experts thought the idea unrealistic.
Read the full story →In their 1963 Monetary History of the United States, Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz argued that a collapse in the money supply turned a downturn into the Great Depression.
Read the full story →In 1968 Milton Friedman argued that inflation cannot permanently reduce unemployment, a theory that anticipated the stagflation of the 1970s.
Read the full story →In his 1957 book A Theory of the Consumption Function, Milton Friedman introduced the permanent income hypothesis, which he considered his best scientific work.
Read the full story →During the Second World War, Milton Friedman and colleagues at Columbia developed sequential sampling, which became the standard method of quality control inspection.
Read the full story →Niels Bohr campaigned from 1917 for an Institute of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen. It opened in 1921 and became a world centre of quantum mechanics.
Read the full story →Niels Bohr pledged his support for CERN in 1952, and its Theory Group was based at his Copenhagen institute until 1957. A later CERN chief said his backing was essential.
Read the full story →In 1913 Niels Bohr published a trilogy of papers proposing that electrons occupy fixed energy levels and jump between them, the Bohr model of the atom.
Read the full story →Niels Bohr predicted the properties of an undiscovered element resembling zirconium. Researchers in Copenhagen found it in 1923 and named it hafnium after the city's Latin name.
Read the full story →Working at a cholera research laboratory in Dacca in the 1960s, Norbert Hirschhorn led some of the first clinical studies showing that a glucose and salt solution could replace much of the intravenous fluid that cholera patients needed, an early step toward oral rehydration therapy.
Read the full story →Recovering from a broken hip in the early 1960s, Norbert Wiener suggested to his surgeon that an artificial limb could be driven by the body's own electrical signals, starting the collaboration that produced the Boston Arm.
Read the full story →In August 1949 the founder of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, wrote to auto workers' leader Walter Reuther warning that automatic machines could create 'the factory without employees', and refused to help a company build them.
Read the full story →In 1902 Otto Loewi proved that animals can rebuild their own proteins from amino acids, the products of protein breakdown, an essential finding for nutrition science.
Read the full story →After watching patients with tuberculosis and pneumonia die for lack of any treatment in 1897–98, Otto Loewi abandoned clinical work to research how drugs act.
Read the full story →In a classic 1905 paper, Otto Loewi and Alfred Fröhlich showed that small doses of cocaine strengthen the body's responses to adrenaline and sympathetic nerves.
Read the full story →In 1921 Otto Loewi dreamed up a two-frog-heart experiment that proved, for the first time, that nerves communicate by releasing chemicals.
Read the full story →As professor of pharmacology at Graz from 1909 to 1938, Otto Loewi became a celebrated lecturer whose associates included researchers from the United States.
Read the full story →Otto Loewi showed that his 'Vagusstoff' is acetylcholine, the first known neurotransmitter, and that an adrenaline-like substance works at sympathetic nerves.
Read the full story →Otto Loewi found that adrenaline dilates the pupils of dogs without a pancreas; surgeons adapted this 'Loewi test' to help diagnose acute pancreatitis.
Read the full story →Otto Meyerhof showed how working muscle breaks sugar down to lactic acid and recovers with oxygen, then rebuilt the whole chain of reactions, glycolysis, in a test tube, revealing the first stage by which nearly every living cell gets energy from food.
Read the full story →“A friend is devoted at all times; a brother is born to share adversity.”