The experiment that overturned a law of physics was hers; the Nobel Prize went to the theorists
She left China in 1936 for a doctorate and never saw her parents again. Twenty years later her painstaking experiment proved that nature can tell…
Sequenced West Africa's deadliest outbreaks and got the results out before the world caught up
A Cameroonian-born molecular biologist who built a genomics laboratory in Nigeria capable of sequencing Lassa fever, Ebola and, within days of the…
Never bothered to apply for a full professorship, and won the Nobel Prize for her first research paper
A laser physicist who spent her career happily in the lab rather than chasing titles, and was the third woman ever to win the physics Nobel, for work…
Mapped penicillin, vitamin B12 and insulin with hands crippled by arthritis
Told at 24 that rheumatoid arthritis would twist her hands for life, she spent the next sixty years teasing the structures of vital molecules out of…
Taught for years without pay or title and proved a theorem at the heart of modern physics
Universities would not hire her, so she lectured under a man's name for nothing. Her theorem linking symmetry to conservation laws is now a…
A brilliant biologist no American university would hire, so he did his best work in Europe
Born in Charleston to a widowed mother who taught in a school for Black children, he graduated top of his class at Dartmouth and spent his life…
Showed in 1856 that carbon dioxide traps the heat of the sun, and was forgotten for 150 years
An amateur scientist and women's rights campaigner who put gases in glass jars in the sun and drew the right conclusion about the atmosphere. A man…
Arrived at Harvard Medical School to find the dormitory had never expected a woman
The first woman admitted to Harvard Medical School, who returned to the Philippines to found its first pediatric hospital and invent a bamboo…
A shopkeeper's son from the Gold Coast who gave his name to a formalism in X-ray physics
He taught himself from the science books in his father's shop, earned a doctorate at Princeton, and then went home to build mathematics and physics…
Helped bring an affordable rotavirus vaccine to the children who needed it most
A virologist who spent decades studying the diarrheal diseases that kill children across India, work that helped produce a low-cost rotavirus vaccine…
Blind from the age of three, he reads the history of life in the shapes of seashells by touch
A Dutch immigrant child who was handed a shell in a fourth-grade classroom and never put it down. His fingers noticed things sighted biologists had…
Born into slavery, kidnapped as a baby, he taught the American South how to feed itself
Turned away from one college on arrival because he was Black, he became the first Black student at another and spent 47 years teaching poor farmers…
Failed his teaching exams twice, counted 28,000 pea plants and founded genetics without anyone noticing
A farmer's son who joined a monastery to afford an education, he worked out the laws of inheritance in an abbey garden. His paper was ignored for 34…
Solved a hundred-year-old problem, then turned down every prize offered for it
A reclusive Russian mathematician who proved the Poincaré conjecture, one of mathematics' hardest unsolved problems, then declined the Fields Medal…
From a village with one literate family to the man who helped crack the genetic code
He learned to read under a tree because his village had no school building, and forty years later showed how three letters of DNA spell out one amino…
A deaf, underpaid "computer" who gave astronomers a ruler for the universe
Hired to measure star brightnesses on glass plates for thirty cents an hour, she noticed a pattern in pulsing stars that let others measure the size…
A farm boy with a burned hand who chased the causes of disease from Japan to West Africa, and died there
A childhood accident left his left hand nearly useless. He became a bacteriologist anyway, was right about syphilis and wrong about yellow fever, and…
Built India's nuclear research programme from scratch, then died in a plane crash at its height
A cosmic ray physicist who abandoned a promising career in Europe to build India's atomic energy programme almost from nothing after independence,…
Feigned madness to escape a caliph, then spent ten years under house arrest working out how we see
A thousand years ago he insisted that ideas be tested by experiment, showed that light enters the eye rather than leaving it, and wrote a book on…
Told doctors to wash their hands and was driven out of the profession for it
He cut deaths in his maternity ward by ninety per cent with a bowl of chlorinated water. His colleagues were insulted, he lost his job, and he died…
Found the solid core at the centre of the Earth from paper records, and worked until she was over 100
A seismologist who ran Denmark's earthquake stations single-handed for decades, kept her readings on cards in oatmeal boxes, and in 1936 explained…
Bred sweeter sugarcane for India, mapped the chromosomes of garden plants, and fought to save a rainforest
A woman from Kerala who chose botany over marriage at a time when neither her caste nor her sex made that easy, worked in England through the war,…
A secretary with no degree who changed what we know about chimpanzees, and about ourselves
She saved waitressing tips for a boat to Africa and was sent into the forest with her mother as chaperone. Within months she had seen a chimpanzee…
Helped identify Ebola in 1976 and spent the next five decades fighting its outbreaks
A microbiologist who travelled into the forest in 1976 to investigate a mysterious fever and helped identify Ebola. He kept returning to outbreaks…
