Physics, chemistry, immunology, genetics, the discoveries that reshaped how the world heals and understands itself.
Working with chick embryos during the war, Rita Levi-Montalcini found that young nerve cells die when the tissue they should connect to is missing, a key insight into how nervous systems form.
Read the full story →Nerve growth factor, discovered by Rita Levi-Montalcini and Stanley Cohen, revealed a whole class of signalling molecules, and their 1986 Nobel Prize honoured the discovery of growth factors.
Read the full story →Raised in a home where her father ruled out university for his daughters, Rita Levi-Montalcini persuaded him at twenty to let her study medicine, and went on to win a Nobel Prize.
Read the full story →With Robert Burns Woodward, Holocaust survivor Roald Hoffmann worked out the rules of orbital symmetry that let chemists predict whether, and how, a whole class of reactions will proceed.
Read the full story →Around 1990–91 Robert Aumann helped found the Center for Rationality at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a game theory centre drawing members from more than a dozen departments.
Read the full story →In his 1976 paper Agreeing to Disagree, Robert Aumann gave the first formal definition of common knowledge and proved that rational people sharing the same starting beliefs cannot agree to disagree.
Read the full story →Robert Aumann was the first to define correlated equilibrium, a broader idea than the Nash equilibrium that shows how a shared signal or mediator can help rivals coordinate.
Read the full story →Robert Aumann, trained in pure mathematics, turned to game theory in the 1950s to solve a practical problem: how to defend a city against bombers when most of them are decoys.
Read the full story →Robert Aumann proved that repeated encounters can make cooperation between rivals rational, work on conflict and cooperation that earned him the 2005 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.
Read the full story →In the mid-1960s Robert Aumann and Michael Maschler developed the theory of repeated games with incomplete information for a US agency preparing arms control talks with the Soviet Union.
Read the full story →With Lloyd Shapley, Robert Aumann wrote Values of Non-Atomic Games in 1974, extending game theory to markets and elections with huge numbers of players and giving rise to the Aumann–Shapley value.
Read the full story →Robert Aumann's doctoral students at the Hebrew University include Sergiu Hart, Abraham Neyman, David Schmeidler and Yair Tauman, each a leading figure in game theory.
Read the full story →In Vienna in the early 1900s, Robert Bárány discovered that warm and cold water in the ear trigger opposite eye movements, explained how the inner ear senses motion, and created a test of each ear’s balance organ that doctors still use for patients with vertigo.
Read the full story →After a technician’s mistake in 1978, Robert Furchgott discovered that the inner lining of blood vessels releases a relaxing factor, which he and Louis Ignarro identified in 1986 as nitric oxide, explaining how nitroglycerin eases chest pain.
Read the full story →In the mid-1950s Robert Hofstadter bounced high-energy electrons off atomic nuclei at Stanford and showed that the proton and neutron are not points but have a size and inner structure, opening the road to the discovery of quarks.
Read the full story →In 1948 Robert Hofstadter discovered that sodium iodide with a trace of thallium makes an excellent gamma-ray detector; the same crystal is still the heart of the gamma cameras hospitals use for heart, lung and SPECT scans.
Read the full story →In 1973 and 1974 Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf designed TCP/IP, the open set of rules that lets any network in the world join the internet.
Read the full story →Starting in the early 1970s, cardiologist Robert Lefkowitz found ways to detect, purify and finally clone the adrenaline receptor, revealing the family of receptors through which about half of all medicines work.
Read the full story →In 1974 Roger Kornberg proposed the nucleosome, the bead of proteins wrapped in DNA that packages the genome of every plant and animal, laying the foundation for the modern science of epigenetics.
Read the full story →Roger Kornberg solved the atomic structure of RNA polymerase II, the machine that reads our genes, and found the Mediator complex that tells it when to start, giving medicine a detailed map of how genes are controlled.
Read the full story →Using a humidity-controlled X-ray camera she adapted herself, Rosalind Franklin showed that DNA exists in two forms, A and B, clearing up confusion that had blurred earlier images.
Read the full story →Working in Paris from 1947, Rosalind Franklin used X-ray diffraction to study carbons and coined the terms graphitising and non-graphitising carbon, distinctions still used by materials scientists.
Read the full story →Diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 1956, Rosalind Franklin kept leading her research team, publishing seven papers that year and six in 1957 while undergoing treatment.
Read the full story →Aaron Klug, Rosalind Franklin's closest Birkbeck colleague, continued her virus research, won the 1982 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and credited her example of tackling large, difficult problems.
Read the full story →Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray work at King’s College London, including Photo 51 taken on 2 May 1952, provided crucial evidence for DNA’s double-helix structure.
Read the full story →In the mid-1950s Rosalind Franklin's team at Birkbeck won substantial funding from the United States to study the structure of the polio virus, then a feared cause of childhood paralysis.
Read the full story →At Birkbeck College, Rosalind Franklin's team showed how tobacco mosaic virus is built, with its RNA wound inside a helical protein coat, publishing seventeen papers in five years.
Read the full story →During the Second World War, Rosalind Franklin studied the microscopic pores of coal for the British Coal Utilisation Research Association, work that earned her a Cambridge PhD in 1945.
Read the full story →Rosalyn Yalow and Solomon Berson developed radioimmunoassay, a technique using radioactive tracers to measure tiny amounts of hormones and other substances in blood.
Read the full story →When Rosalyn Yalow began graduate study at the University of Illinois engineering college in the 1940s, she was the only woman among 400 members, and the first since 1917.
Read the full story →Despite its huge commercial potential, Rosalyn Yalow and Solomon Berson refused to patent radioimmunoassay, so laboratories everywhere could use it freely.
Read the full story →Rosalyn Yalow's radioimmunoassay was used to diagnose underactive thyroid glands early in babies, allowing treatment that prevents intellectual disabilities.
Read the full story →Radioimmunoassay, developed by Rosalyn Yalow and Solomon Berson, made it possible to screen donated blood for hepatitis, protecting transfusion patients.
Read the full story →In 1963 Roy Glauber published the first full quantum theory of how light is detected, explaining what makes laser light different from lamplight and founding the field of quantum optics behind today’s quantum communication and computing.
Read the full story →Rudolph Marcus’s 1956 theory of electron transfer explains reactions from photosynthesis to rust, and is used to design solar cells, catalysts and clean-energy technology.
Read the full story →Ruth Arnon and her colleagues set out to cause a multiple sclerosis-like disease in animals; their molecule blocked it instead, and after nearly 30 years of work it became Copaxone.
Read the full story →In 1967 Ruth Nussenzweig showed that mice immunised with radiation-weakened malaria parasites were protected from malaria, and her later discovery with Victor Nussenzweig of the parasite’s CSP protein led to today’s malaria vaccines for children.
Read the full story →A Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany working as an unpaid assistant at Columbia, Salome Gluecksohn-Waelsch traced inherited mouse defects back into the embryo and founded mammalian developmental genetics, the science of how genes direct development.
Read the full story →Inspired by a slot machine, Salvador Luria designed the 1943 experiment that proved bacteria mutate at random, the basic insight behind how we understand and fight drug resistance.
Read the full story →Using exploding stars as cosmic yardsticks, Saul Perlmutter's Supernova Cosmology Project found in 1997 and 1998 that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, revealing the mysterious dark energy.
Read the full story →Nobel laureate Saul Perlmutter, with a philosopher and a psychologist, created a Berkeley course and a 2024 book, Third Millennium Thinking, that teach the public the tools scientists use to avoid fooling themselves.
Read the full story →In 1940 Selman Waksman and H. Boyd Woodruff isolated actinomycin from soil bacteria. Actinomycin D became the first antibiotic shown to have anti-cancer activity.
Read the full story →Selman Waksman's search of soil microbes produced streptomycin, the first antibiotic effective against tuberculosis, and he gave the word 'antibiotic' its modern meaning.
Read the full story →Selman Waksman's laboratory at Rutgers isolated more than 15 antibiotics, including actinomycin, streptomycin and neomycin, and developed methods that led to many more.
Read the full story →In 1949 Selman Waksman and his student Hubert Lechevalier discovered neomycin at Rutgers. It is still used today in creams, ointments and eye drops.
Read the full story →In 1931 Selman Waksman organised the division of Marine Bacteriology at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, studying how bacteria recycle nutrients in the sea.
Read the full story →Serge Haroche trapped single particles of light between superconducting mirrors and measured them again and again without destroying them, showing that individual quantum systems can be controlled, a foundation for quantum computing.
Read the full story →Trying to make poker over the phone cheat-proof, Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali invented probabilistic encryption, the foundation of how data is protected online today.
Read the full story →In 1985 Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Micali and Charles Rackoff showed how to prove a statement is true while revealing nothing else, an idea now used to protect privacy online.
Read the full story →In 1961 Sheldon Glashow proposed the mathematical structure, SU(2) × U(1), that unites electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force, the basis of the electroweak theory at the heart of the Standard Model of particle physics.
Read the full story →Sidney Altman showed that a piece of RNA, with no protein at all, can drive a chemical reaction in the cell, overturning the rule that only proteins are enzymes.
Read the full story →As a neurologist, Sigmund Freud published several papers on cerebral palsy and challenged the prevailing view that it was caused only by lack of oxygen at birth.
Read the full story →Before psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud spent six years in Ernst Brücke's laboratory studying nerve cells, work that proved seminal for the discovery of the neuron in the 1890s.
Read the full story →In The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), Sigmund Freud argued that dreams have meaning and set out his model of the unconscious mind.
Read the full story →Sigmund Freud's 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia” distinguished normal grief, painful but inevitable, from depression, laying groundwork for later study of grief and depression.
Read the full story →In his first book, On Aphasia (1891), Sigmund Freud coined the term agnosia and warned against linking each brain function too rigidly to one location.
Read the full story →Sigmund Freud developed free association, in which patients talk freely about whatever comes to mind. His talking cure set the basic format for all later psychotherapy.
Read the full story →From 1906 Simon Flexner, director of the Rockefeller Institute, supplied an antiserum against epidemic meningitis that, injected around the spinal cord, cut the death rate from about 75 per cent to about 25 per cent.
Read the full story →In 1973 Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer first moved genes between organisms, inventing recombinant DNA, the technique behind human insulin and the biotechnology industry.
Read the full story →Beyond his Stanford laboratory, Stanley Cohen helped develop research collaboration with Taiwan's Institute of Molecular Biology and a biotechnology industry in Taiwan.
Read the full story →“A friend is devoted at all times; a brother is born to share adversity.”