The first Muslim Nobel laureate in science, disowned by the country he never stopped serving
A boy from a small Punjabi town who set exam records at 14 went on to unify two of nature's forces. Declared a non-Muslim by Pakistan's parliament,…
Called a dreamer for trying to map the ribosome, she spent twenty years proving it could be done
Raised in a poor Jerusalem household and fatherless from the age of eleven, she took on a problem her peers thought impossible and became the first…
Helped confirm the crater where an asteroid ended the age of dinosaurs
A Colombian-born planetary geologist at NASA who helped confirm that a buried crater in Mexico was the impact site of the asteroid that ended the age…
Barred from university, she founded surface chemistry with a tin trough and a button in her kitchen
Kept at home to nurse her parents, she studied the films that form on washing-up water with equipment she built herself, and wrote to a famous…
Built a camera fast enough to film atoms moving inside a chemical reaction
Growing up in provincial Egypt with no laboratory to speak of, he went on to invent techniques fast enough to capture chemical bonds breaking and…
Measured the size of the Earth from a mountain in the Punjab, and studied India by learning its languages
Carried off as a court scholar by a conquering sultan, he used his captivity to write a study of Indian science and religion that was fair, curious…
Lost four years of specimens in a fire at sea, went back out, and found natural selection in a fever
Left school at 14 and paid for his science by selling beetles and birds. The letter he sent from a remote island forced Darwin to publish, and he…
Said the continents move, was laughed at for it, and died on the Greenland ice
A meteorologist and balloonist who noticed that the coastlines of Africa and South America fit together. Geologists mocked his theory for forty…
At 23 she found the first effective treatment for leprosy; at 24 she was dead and her boss took the credit
The first Black woman to graduate from the University of Hawaii solved a problem doctors had struggled with for centuries. Her method was used for…
Almost deaf, she classified a third of a million stars by eye and gave astronomy its alphabet
She lost most of her hearing as a young woman, spent a decade at home after college, and then found at Harvard the work she was made for. The…
The greatest mathematician of antiquity, killed by a soldier while working on a problem
He calculated pi, explained the lever and buoyancy and defended his city with machines. Much of his work survived only because a monk scraped it off…
Spent her life extracting medicines from Indian plants in a chemistry department that barely had funding
The first woman to receive a doctorate of science from an Indian university, she worked on the chemistry of native plants for six decades and…
Discovered that genes can move, and waited thirty years for anyone to believe her
Working alone in a maize field, she found that genes could jump around the chromosome. Colleagues thought she had lost her way. She kept going, and…
Drank a flask of bacteria to prove that ulcers were an infection, not stress
A junior doctor from a mining town who could not get anyone to listen. When his paper was rejected and no animal would catch the disease, he infected…
Sacked for demanding democracy, he won Latin America's first science Nobel from a borrowed laboratory
A pharmacist at 17 and a doctor at 23, he built Argentine physiology from nothing, was thrown out of his own institute twice for his politics, and…
Noticed the sea was too blue to be explained by reflected sky, and won a Nobel Prize finding out why
A civil servant who did physics in his spare time before a simple observation about the colour of the sea led him to discover how light scatters when…
Working from a railway carriage, he found a parasite, its insect carrier and a new disease, all by himself
Sent to a remote town in Minas Gerais to control malaria, a young Brazilian doctor described an entirely new disease from start to finish, a feat…
Said mosquitoes carried yellow fever in 1881, and was laughed at for twenty years
A Havana doctor with a stammer who presented a correct theory to an international conference, was ignored, and kept publishing until an American…
Raised as a household drudge, she became the first woman paid to do science
Childhood typhus stunted her growth and her mother trained her as a servant. Brought to England by her brother, she discovered eight comets and…
Worked out what stars are made of, then was told to say she was probably wrong
Cambridge would not give her a degree, so she left for America and wrote a thesis showing the universe is mostly hydrogen. A senior astronomer…
Refused to patent the discovery that underpins a whole industry of modern medicines
The son of a Jewish immigrant who went back to Argentina to build science there, was forced out by a coup, and in a Cambridge lab worked out how to…
A seasick medical school dropout who sat on the most important idea in biology for twenty years
Chronically ill and terrified of the reaction, he delayed publishing natural selection for two decades and might have delayed longer had a letter…
Taught high school for fourteen years and, in his spare time, proved that insects can learn
With no laboratory, no assistants and no research funding, a Black science teacher in St Louis published dozens of papers showing that bees see…
Built a carbon-dating laboratory in Dakar to test his own theories about African history
A Senegalese physicist and historian who trained in nuclear physics in Paris, then built West Africa's first radiocarbon dating laboratory to bring…
