Browse the index

The uncertainty principle.

Discovered jumping genes decades before the field caught up.

Predicted the meson and the nuclear strong force.

Silent Spring launched the environmental movement and got DDT banned.

Discovered nerve growth factor in a bedroom lab under fascist persecution.

Worked out at nineteen why some stars must collapse into black holes.

Solved the structures of penicillin, vitamin B12 and insulin by X-ray.

Defined what a computer is, then was destroyed by the country he saved.

Explained the nerve impulse in mathematical terms.

Co-described the double helix and the central dogma of molecular biology.

Shared the DNA structure Nobel.

QED, nanotechnology's founding lecture, and the Challenger diagnosis.

Chemist whose Auschwitz testimony is the standard of moral witness.

Photographed the shape of the molecule that makes us.

Mapped the ocean floor and proved continental drift.

Unified the electromagnetic and weak forces; first Muslim science laureate.

Monoclonal antibodies — now a $200bn class of medicines.

Conductive polymers — flexible screens and printed electronics.

Predicted the boson that gives particles mass, found 48 years later.

Extracted artemisinin from ancient texts; millions of malaria deaths averted.

Mapped the ribosome, the cell's protein factory and antibiotic target.

Green Belt Movement founder; 51 million trees and a democracy campaign.

Hawking radiation and A Brief History of Time.

Proved CFCs destroy ozone; his work produced the Montreal Protocol.

Founded femtochemistry, filming chemical bonds as they break.

Coined and codified functional medicine; founded the Institute for Functional Medicine in 1991.

Discovered the opiate receptor and argued the body is a single emotional-molecular network.

Discovered telomerase, central to ageing and cancer research.

Neurologist who put diet, glycemia and the microbiome at the centre of brain health.

Demoted, defunded, and right: her mRNA work produced the COVID vaccines.

Biologist-novelist who reinvented Portuguese in Mozambican terms.

Reprogrammed adult cells into stem cells, remaking regenerative medicine.

CRISPR gene editing, now in approved sickle-cell therapy.