Physics, chemistry, immunology, genetics, the discoveries that reshaped how the world heals and understands itself.
As a graduate student in Haifa, Aaron Ciechanover helped discover that cells mark unwanted proteins for destruction with a small tag called ubiquitin, knowledge that underlies cancer drugs such as bortezomib.
Read the full story →In 1985 Aaron Klug’s laboratory discovered zinc finger proteins, small DNA-gripping units that his team learned to redesign, leading to zinc finger nucleases and the first attempt to edit a gene inside a patient’s body.
Read the full story →In a 1919 paper, Baltimore engineer Abel Wolman and chemist Linn Enslow showed how to measure how much chlorine a water supply absorbs and calculate the dose needed to disinfect it, a method adopted around the world.
Read the full story →After visiting all 155 medical schools in the United States and Canada, Abraham Flexner published a 1910 report that led medicine to adopt the science-based, hospital-trained education doctors still receive today.
Read the full story →Abraham Jacobi, a Jewish refugee doctor from Westphalia, held New York’s first chair of children’s diseases from 1860, opened what is regarded as the first children’s clinic in the United States, and later founded the first pediatrics department at a general hospital, at Mount Sinai.
Read the full story →During the Second World War, Abraham Wald created sequential analysis, a way to check evidence after each test and stop as soon as it is conclusive, often with far fewer observations.
Read the full story →Barred from academic jobs in 1930s Vienna, Abraham Wald turned to economics and produced some of the first rigorous proofs that a competitive economic equilibrium can exist.
Read the full story →Abraham Wald escaped Austria in 1938; of nine relatives left behind, all but one were murdered at Auschwitz. In America he put his mathematics to work for the Allied war effort.
Read the full story →In a 1939 paper and his 1950 book Statistical Decision Functions, Abraham Wald recast statistics as the problem of making decisions under uncertainty when mistakes have costs.
Read the full story →During the Second World War, statistician Abraham Wald showed how to judge bomber damage from planes that returned, a classic lesson in survivorship bias.
Read the full story →The Wald test, the Wald–Wolfowitz runs test, Wald's equation and the Wald distribution are among the everyday statistical tools that bear Abraham Wald's name.
Read the full story →Ada Yonath spent two decades solving the structure of the ribosome, the cell's protein factory, work that showed how many antibiotics kill bacteria and won the 2009 Nobel Prize.
Read the full story →In 2000 and 2001 Ada Yonath's team solved the structures of both ribosomal subunits and showed that the ribosome is a ribozyme, with a symmetrical RNA core that builds proteins.
Read the full story →In 1998 Adam Riess led the paper in which the High-z Supernova Search Team reported that distant exploding stars were fainter than expected, showing that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
Read the full story →In 1979 Israeli cryptographer Adi Shamir showed how to split a secret into pieces so that only an agreed number of them together can rebuild it, a method now used to protect some of the world’s most valuable digital keys.
Read the full story →Adolf von Baeyer spent years working out how to make indigo and what its structure was, research that let industry replace a costly crop with a cheap, pure synthetic dye.
Read the full story →In 1977 Alan Heeger, Alan MacDiarmid and Hideki Shirakawa showed that a plastic could conduct electricity like a metal, founding the field of organic electronics used in OLED screens, sensors and flexible solar cells.
Read the full story →In 1892–93 in Paris, Albert Michelson measured the international prototype metre in wavelengths of cadmium's red light, showing a unit of length could be defined by nature.
Read the full story →In 1892 Albert Michelson became the first head of physics at the newly founded University of Chicago, leading it until 1929 and making it one of America's leading centres of physics.
Read the full story →The interferometer Albert Michelson invented in 1881 became one of physics' most important instruments; the LIGO detectors that first caught gravitational waves in 2015 are Michelson interferometers.
Read the full story →In 1920 Albert Michelson and Francis Pease measured the diameter of the red giant Betelgeuse, the first time the size of any star other than the Sun had been measured.
Read the full story →In 1887 Albert Michelson and Edward Morley found no trace of the supposed "aether", a result that became one of the classic foundations of Einstein's theory of relativity.
Read the full story →Using a 22-mile light path between Mount Wilson and Mount San Antonio, Albert Michelson measured the speed of light in 1926 as 299,796 kilometres per second, plus or minus 4.
Read the full story →In June and July 1879, Albert Michelson, a 26-year-old instructor at the U.S. Naval Academy, measured the speed of light as 299,910 kilometres per second, far more accurately than anyone before.
Read the full story →In 1905, while working as a patent clerk in Bern, Albert Einstein published four papers that transformed physics. Historians call it his miracle year.
Read the full story →Einstein's 1915 theory of general relativity predicted that the sun bends starlight. Eclipse measurements in May 1919 matched his calculations and made him world famous.
Read the full story →In 1905 Albert Einstein explained the photoelectric effect by proposing that light comes in packets of energy, work that won him the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Read the full story →Building on work by Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose, Albert Einstein predicted in 1924 that atoms cooled near absolute zero would merge into one quantum state. It was created in 1995.
Read the full story →In 1916 Albert Einstein predicted ripples in spacetime called gravitational waves. LIGO detected them directly on 14 September 2015, nearly one hundred years later.
Read the full story →In 1917 Albert Einstein introduced the concept of stimulated emission of light. Decades later it became the working principle of the maser and the laser.
Read the full story →Albert Sabin's Cincinnati laboratory trained Robert Chanock, his favourite “scientific son”, who later showed that RSV causes severe respiratory disease in young children.
Read the full story →Albert Sabin developed the oral polio vaccine, cheap and easy to give on a sugar cube, and gave it free of charge without profiting from its sale.
Read the full story →By studying the bodies of polio victims, Albert Sabin showed that the virus multiplies first in the intestine, an insight that shaped the oral vaccine he later created.
Read the full story →Albert Sabin's live oral polio vaccine was cheap, could be given as drops on a sugar cube, and protected the gut as well as the blood, so it stopped the virus spreading.
Read the full story →Before asking anyone else to take his live oral polio vaccine, Albert Sabin swallowed it himself, and his family and colleagues were among the very first recipients.
Read the full story →In the Second World War Albert Sabin served on the Army's Neurotropic Virus Commission, studying dengue and sandfly fever and developing early vaccines and preventive measures.
Read the full story →In 1957 Alexei Abrikosov showed that in type-II superconductors magnetic field enters through a lattice of tiny quantum whirlpools, explaining the materials now used in MRI and accelerator magnets.
Read the full story →Alfred Adler argued that a child's place among siblings, first, middle or youngest, influences personality, extending psychology beyond the parent-child bond.
Read the full story →Alfred Adler introduced the idea of the inferiority complex, describing how feelings of inadequacy can shape personality and how people strive to compensate.
Read the full story →After leaving Freud's circle in 1911, Alfred Adler founded the Society for Individual Psychology in 1912, the first major independent school of psychotherapy.
Read the full story →In 1898 Alfred Adler published a health book for tailors arguing that their illnesses must be treated in light of their social and economic conditions.
Read the full story →Alfred Adler's ideas shaped later giants of psychotherapy, including Abraham Maslow, Viktor Frankl, Albert Ellis and Rollo May.
Read the full story →Alfred Adler made social interest, or Gemeinschaftsgefühl, the core of mental health: a sense of belonging and a desire to contribute to the welfare of others.
Read the full story →Alfred Adler was one of the first psychotherapists to discard the analytic couch in favour of two chairs, so therapist and patient could sit as equals.
Read the full story →As an army doctor in World War I, Alfred Adler treated traumatised soldiers and lectured on war neurosis, a forerunner of what is now called PTSD.
Read the full story →In 1980 Alfred Gilman’s laboratory purified the first G protein, the molecular switch that relays signals from receptors on a cell’s surface to its interior, through which about half of all medications act.
Read the full story →A 1982 study by Amos Tversky and three physicians showed that patients and doctors chose lung cancer surgery far more often when results were described as chances of living rather than chances of dying.
Read the full story →By watching single bacteria divide, André Lwoff proved in 1949–1950 that a virus can lie dormant inside its host’s genetic material, be inherited silently and later be switched on, the key to understanding latent infections such as HIV and herpes and virus-driven cancers.
Read the full story →By tracking stars near the centre of the Milky Way for more than two decades with sharpened telescope images, Andrea Ghez showed that they orbit an invisible object of about four million solar masses, the clearest evidence that supermassive black holes exist.
Read the full story →RNA interference, discovered by Andrew Fire and Craig Mello in 1998, became the basis of approved medicines such as patisiran for a rare nerve disease and inclisiran for high cholesterol.
Read the full story →In 1967 Andrew Viterbi, a refugee from Fascist Italy, published an algorithm for cleaning errors out of digital signals; he did not patent it, and it became a standard part of mobile phones, satellite receivers and space communications.
Read the full story →Anna Freud's first book, Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis (1927), laid the foundation for direct therapeutic work with children.
Read the full story →In 1936 Anna Freud published The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, a founding work of ego psychology and one of the most influential books in psychoanalysis.
Read the full story →Anna Freud founded the Hampstead Child Therapy Course in 1947 and its clinic in 1952, training the first generation of child psychotherapists for Britain's NHS.
Read the full story →Anna Freud's 1965 book Normality and Pathology in Childhood introduced developmental lines and helped establish the field of developmental psychopathology.
Read the full story →Arieh Warshel co-created computer models that combine quantum and classical physics to simulate chemical reactions inside proteins, a method now used to design drugs, catalysts and solar materials.
Read the full story →In 1964 and 1965 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered the cosmic microwave background, the faint radiation left over from the birth of the universe.
Read the full story →Arthur Ashkin discovered that a focused laser beam can trap and move tiny objects, and turned the effect into optical tweezers, now a standard tool for holding single cells, viruses and molecules of DNA in biology and medical research.
Read the full story →In 1956 Arthur Kornberg isolated DNA polymerase, the enzyme that builds new DNA, and the class of enzymes he discovered now drives PCR testing and genetic engineering.
Read the full story →In 1975 Arthur Schawlow and Theodor Hänsch proposed that laser light could slow atoms and cool a gas, an idea that became laser cooling, now used in the most precise atomic clocks and in some quantum computers.
Read the full story →“A friend is devoted at all times; a brother is born to share adversity.”