Physics, chemistry, immunology, genetics, the discoveries that reshaped how the world heals and understands itself.
Around 1930 Otto Stern's Hamburg laboratory diffracted beams of helium atoms and hydrogen molecules off crystals, proving that entire atoms, not just electrons, travel as waves.
Read the full story →In February 1922 the Stern–Gerlach experiment split a beam of silver atoms cleanly in two, the first direct proof that quantum rules govern how atoms behave in a magnetic field.
Read the full story →Isidor Rabi learned the molecular-beam technique in Otto Stern's Hamburg lab, and built on it the magnetic resonance method behind NMR, MRI and atomic clocks.
Read the full story →In 1920 Otto Stern measured the speed of silver atoms in a vacuum, turning molecular beams, first used by Louis Dunoyer in 1911, into a precise tool for studying single atoms.
Read the full story →In 1933 Otto Stern, Otto Frisch and Immanuel Estermann measured the proton's magnetism and found it unexpectedly large, the first sign that the proton has inner structure.
Read the full story →Otto Wallach brought order to the terpenes, the fragrant molecules of essential oils, and never patented his discoveries, putting them at industry’s disposal free of charge.
Read the full story →Beginning in 1922, Otto Warburg discovered that tumour cells break down glucose into lactic acid even when oxygen is plentiful, a hallmark of cancer now called the Warburg effect.
Read the full story →PET scans locate cancers by tracking a radioactive form of glucose that tumours absorb in excess, putting Otto Warburg's century-old discovery to work in hospitals every day.
Read the full story →Otto Warburg showed that carbon monoxide blocks cell breathing and that light lifts the block, and used this trick to read the chemical signature of the respiratory enzyme.
Read the full story →Otto Warburg introduced the thin tissue-slice technique in 1923 and refined manometric methods for measuring how living tissue consumes oxygen, tools used in labs for decades.
Read the full story →Otto Warburg identified the iron-containing enzyme that lets living cells use oxygen, winning the unshared 1931 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Read the full story →Working at the Naples marine station before the First World War, Otto Warburg showed that a sea urchin egg's respiration rises sharply the moment it is fertilised.
Read the full story →In the 1930s Otto Warburg discovered the yellow enzymes and identified flavin and nicotinamide as the active parts of the enzymes that move hydrogen in living cells.
Read the full story →At RAND in the early 1960s Paul Baran worked out how to send data in small blocks across a mesh of routes, an idea that, with Donald Davies’s, became the basis of the internet.
Read the full story →In 1971 and 1972 Paul Berg and his Stanford colleagues joined DNA from two different organisms into a single molecule for the first time, the founding step of genetic engineering.
Read the full story →Paul Berg held back his own experiment, led a 1974 call for a voluntary pause on risky gene-splicing work, and co-organised the 1975 Asilomar conference that wrote the first safety rules for genetic engineering.
Read the full story →While still a young scientist, Paul Ehrlich named and characterised the mast cell, the immune cell now known to drive allergic reactions.
Read the full story →Paul Ehrlich summed up a basic law of pharmacology in four Latin words, corpora non agunt nisi fixata: a drug acts only when it is bound to its target.
Read the full story →Paul Ehrlich noticed that dyes injected into the bloodstream coloured nearly every organ except the brain, an early clue to the blood-brain barrier that protects our nervous system.
Read the full story →Using the new synthetic dyes of the 1870s and 1880s, Paul Ehrlich learned to tell the different kinds of white blood cells apart, laying the foundations of modern blood science.
Read the full story →The day after Robert Koch announced the tuberculosis bacterium in March 1882, Paul Ehrlich improved Koch's method of staining it, making the deadly germ far easier to detect.
Read the full story →Paul Ehrlich imagined a "magic bullet" that would strike disease without harming the patient, and in 1909 his lab found Salvarsan, the first modern antimicrobial drug and first cure for syphilis.
Read the full story →Noticing that malaria parasites soak up methylene blue, Paul Ehrlich tried the dye as a treatment, and two patients' fevers subsided, an early step toward designed synthetic drugs.
Read the full story →Paul Ehrlich's side-chain theory proposed that cells carry receptors that bind specific toxins, an idea about antibodies that helped earn him the 1908 Nobel Prize.
Read the full story →Working with Emil von Behring in the 1890s, Paul Ehrlich devised ways to measure the strength of diphtheria antitoxin, so doctors could give children safe, reliable doses.
Read the full story →Screening over 100 dyes in Frankfurt, Paul Ehrlich’s team found trypan red, which killed trypanosomes in infected animals, an early chemotherapy victory that led to arsenic drugs.
Read the full story →As a graduate student interning at the Federal Reserve, Paul Krugman wrote A Model of Balance of Payments Crises, explaining speculative attacks on currencies.
Read the full story →With Elhanan Helpman of Tel Aviv University, Paul Krugman wrote Market Structure and Foreign Trade, the book that brought the new trade theory together.
Read the full story →In a seminal 1991 paper, Increasing Returns and Economic Geography, Paul Krugman began the field that explains why industries and people cluster in cities.
Read the full story →In 1978 and 1979 Paul Krugman built models showing how economies of scale and consumers' taste for variety drive trade between similar countries.
Read the full story →With his wife, the economist Robin Wells, Paul Krugman wrote college textbooks on microeconomics (2004) and macroeconomics (2005).
Read the full story →When Paul Samuelson joined MIT in 1940, its economics department trained no graduate students; within two decades it ranked first in the field.
Read the full story →Paul Samuelson's Economics: An Introductory Analysis, first published in 1948, became the best-selling economics textbook of all time, translated into 40 languages.
Read the full story →Paul Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis, published in 1947 from his Harvard thesis, showed how mathematics could make economics a rigorous science.
Read the full story →Paul Samuelson pioneered the revealed preference approach to consumer choice and showed how to allocate resources between public and private goods.
Read the full story →Peter Goldmark's spinning-wheel color television lost the broadcasting race, but its small, simple cameras served hospitals and schools and later sent NASA's Apollo color pictures from space.
Read the full story →Annoyed by a Brahms concerto chopped across six 78 rpm discs, CBS engineer Peter Goldmark led the team that created the long-playing record in 1948.
Read the full story →Rainer Weiss worked out in the late 1960s and early 1970s how laser interferometers kilometres long could detect gravitational waves, the design that became LIGO and made the first detection in 2015.
Read the full story →In 1973 Ralph Steinman and Zanvil Cohn at Rockefeller University described a new kind of immune cell, the dendritic cell, which Steinman went on to show is the sentinel that switches on the body's targeted defences.
Read the full story →By finding the genes that let yeast cells export proteins, Randy Schekman gave industry a way to make yeast secrete human insulin and hepatitis B vaccine, which are now used around the world.
Read the full story →To spur progress toward nanotechnology, Richard Feynman offered two $1,000 prizes for miniaturisation challenges. William McLellan and Tom Newman claimed them.
Read the full story →On the commission investigating the 1986 Challenger disaster, Richard Feynman dipped a sample of O-ring material in ice water on live TV to show it lost resilience in the cold.
Read the full story →Richard Feynman devised simple pictures, now called Feynman diagrams, to represent the mathematics of how subatomic particles interact. They remain widely used today.
Read the full story →At Caltech in the 1950s, Richard Feynman gave a quantum mechanical explanation of superfluidity, the frictionless flow of supercooled liquid helium.
Read the full story →In the early 1960s Richard Feynman spent three years rethinking Caltech's introductory physics course. His lectures became The Feynman Lectures on Physics, a classic still read today.
Read the full story →Richard Feynman was one of the first scientists to conceive of quantum computers, arguing that only a machine following quantum rules could efficiently simulate nature.
Read the full story →In a 1959 Caltech lecture, There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom, Richard Feynman imagined machines and writing on the scale of atoms, introducing the concept of nanotechnology.
Read the full story →In 1915 Mount Sinai surgeon Richard Lewisohn worked out how much sodium citrate could be added to donated blood to stop it clotting without harming the patient, a step that let blood be collected, stored and given later.
Read the full story →While purifying chlorophyll, Richard Willstätter found yellow by-products that turned out to be carotenoids, beginning the scientific study of the pigments in carrots, tomatoes and egg yolks.
Read the full story →Richard Willstätter discovered that most red, purple and blue flowers owe their colour to three related pigments, and that acidity or alkalinity in the sap helps decide the shade.
Read the full story →After studying chlorophyll from more than 200 kinds of plants, Richard Willstätter showed it is always a mix of two pigments, chlorophyll a and chlorophyll b, in a ratio of about three to one.
Read the full story →As a young doctoral student in Munich, Richard Willstätter showed that the accepted chemical structure of cocaine was wrong, launching his career in the chemistry of plant alkaloids.
Read the full story →Richard Willstätter synthesised cyclooctatetraene, a ring of eight carbon atoms, and showed it does not behave like benzene, an important test of ideas about chemical stability.
Read the full story →In the 1920s Richard Willstätter developed methods to purify enzymes and helped establish that they are chemical substances that can be studied with the tools of chemistry.
Read the full story →Refusing to work on poison gas, Richard Willstätter instead designed a protective gas mask filter in about five weeks in 1915, shielding soldiers from chlorine and phosgene.
Read the full story →Richard Willstätter showed that magnesium is an essential part of chlorophyll, the green pigment plants use to capture sunlight, work that won him the 1915 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Read the full story →Barred from her university by Italy's 1938 racial laws, Rita Levi-Montalcini built a lab in her bedroom; that work led to the discovery of nerve growth factor and a Nobel Prize.
Read the full story →In 2002, at the age of ninety-three, Rita Levi-Montalcini founded the European Brain Research Institute in Rome and served as its president.
Read the full story →In the 1990s, then in her eighties, Rita Levi-Montalcini was one of the first scientists to point out the importance of the mast cell in human disease.
Read the full story →In 1952 Rita Levi-Montalcini flew to Rio de Janeiro with two tumour-bearing mice in her handbag, and the experiment she ran there gave the first definitive evidence of nerve growth factor.
Read the full story →“A friend is devoted at all times; a brother is born to share adversity.”