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Wrote the refugee not as a statistic but as a person with a prior life.

Rewrote space, time, gravity and light in a single year of work.

Found the atomic nucleus and split the atom.

Made the impossible ordinary and gave Latin America its own way of telling time.

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

The only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.

Lent $27 of his own money and started a global industry for the poor.

Twenty-seven years in prison, then negotiated the end of apartheid without civil war.

First non-European Nobel laureate; wrote two nations' anthems.

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

Wrote Black American interior life without explaining it to anyone.

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

Negotiated the Eritrea peace accord; later a contested wartime leader.

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

Founded femtochemistry, filming chemical bonds as they break.

Explained the nerve impulse in mathematical terms.

Conductive polymers — flexible screens and printed electronics.

The Plague and The Myth of Sisyphus; absurdism as an ethic.

The Gulag Archipelago broke the Soviet system's moral standing.

Penicillin; antibiotics have saved an estimated 200 million lives.

Made the short story carry the weight of novels.

Recast famine as a failure of entitlement, not food supply.

Fifteen years under house arrest; later a contested civilian leader.

Discovered jumping genes decades before the field caught up.

Drank the bacterium to prove ulcers are infectious, not stress.

First Latin American science laureate; pituitary role in glucose metabolism.

First songwriter awarded the literature Nobel.

Raman scattering, now the basis of a ubiquitous laboratory spectroscopy.

The silver stain that made neurons visible.

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

The Captive Mind dissected intellectual submission to totalitarianism.

Prospect theory founded behavioural economics and modern policy 'nudging'.

Surgeon who has treated tens of thousands of survivors of wartime sexual violence.

Omeros transplanted Homer to the Caribbean.

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

Crowds and Power analysed mass psychology and dictatorship.

Showed communities can govern shared resources without markets or states.

Discovered telomerase, central to ageing and cancer research.

Africa's first elected woman head of state; rebuilt post-war Liberia.

Stripped English prose to the bone.

Wave mechanics and What Is Life?, which inspired the DNA hunters.

Randomised trials made development aid an experimental science.

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

Co-discovered insulin and sold the patent for one dollar.

Prices as information; the intellectual engine of late-century market liberalism.

Ammonia synthesis feeds around half of humanity; also weaponised chlorine gas.

First Latin American to win the literature Nobel; teacher and diplomat.

Made radio a transatlantic reality.

Cumulative causation and the economics of racial inequality in America.

Independent People gave a small nation a world literature.

Confronts historical trauma and bodily fragility; The Vegetarian, Human Acts.

Predicted the meson and the nuclear strong force.

Turned penicillin from curiosity into mass-manufactured medicine.

Austere novelist of power and complicity; Disgrace and Waiting for the Barbarians.

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

Blindness and the parable of institutional collapse.

Ended a 52-year civil war by negotiated accord.

Freed tens of thousands of children from bonded labour.

Co-discovered nucleoside-modified mRNA.

Wrote disability, Hiroshima and postwar conscience.