A schoolteacher who started her doctorate at 39 and discovered how sex is determined, in a mealworm
It took her nearly twenty years of teaching to save enough to study. In the nine years of research she was given, she found the X and Y chromosomes…
Built the world's largest seed bank to end famine and was starved to death in a Soviet prison
He travelled five continents collecting the seeds of every crop humans had bred. Denounced by a charlatan with Stalin's backing, he died of hunger in…
An Iowa farm boy who bred wheat in Mexico and is credited with saving more lives than anyone alive
He failed his university entrance exam, spent years in the fields of Mexico crossing wheat by hand, and then argued India and Pakistan into planting…
Operated on a fetus still inside the womb, and its tiny hand gripped her finger
A Nigerian-born pediatric and fetal surgeon who pioneered operating on babies before birth, including a widely seen 1999 photograph of an unborn…
Denied a professorship for his race, he made cortisone affordable and was firebombed for buying a house
The grandson of an enslaved man, he started college at high-school level, earned a doctorate in Vienna and synthesised drugs from soybeans that…
Proved that women could protect themselves from HIV, after twenty years of trials that did not work
An epidemiologist from a small sugar town who documented, in the early 1990s, that young South African women were being infected with HIV far faster…
Wrote Silent Spring while dying of cancer and launched the modern environmental movement
A marine biologist from a struggling farm family who supported her relatives on a government salary, then took on the chemical industry over…
Barred from her university by fascist race laws, she built a lab in her bedroom
Sharpened sewing needles, a home-made incubator and fertilised eggs from local farms: the research that won her a Nobel Prize began in hiding during…
Her X-ray photograph revealed the shape of DNA, and others took the credit
A meticulous experimentalist whose X-ray images of DNA were shown to rivals without her knowledge. She died at 37, four years before the Nobel Prize…
Built a typhus vaccine using lice he fed on his own skin, then used the lab to shelter people from the Nazis
A biologist who invented the first effective vaccine against epidemic typhus by breeding infected lice, then used his laboratory in occupied Poland…
An orphan who shot a sparrow, asked what it was, and became the birdman of India
He never finished a degree and spent years failing at business. Then he walked the subcontinent counting birds, wrote the book that taught a nation…
A rebellious boy jailed at eleven who drew the brain cell by cell and founded neuroscience
His father apprenticed him to a barber and a cobbler to cure his wildness. He survived malaria in Cuba and near-fatal tuberculosis, then used a…
Carried a plastic bag for soil samples everywhere, and one of them held a drug that has treated billions
A farmer's son who taught at night school to fund his studies, and spent his career patiently sorting through soil bacteria. A sample from near a…
The first woman from her Ethiopian district to go to university now runs a major African research centre
A plant pathologist who grew up on a farm where girls were expected to marry young, spent years in labs abroad, and then went back to Africa to work…
A surgeon so slow his colleagues called him "the obstacle" found a way to turn back the clock on cells
He gave up surgery after failing at it, fell into depression when his research stalled, and nearly quit science. Then he showed that adult cells…
Studied by candlelight when her parents took away her fire and clothes, and won over Gauss under a false name
Shut out of the École Polytechnique for being a woman, she submitted work as "Monsieur LeBlanc". Her death certificate described her as a property…
A clerk with no degree who filled notebooks with theorems mathematicians are still working through
Thrown out of college twice for neglecting every subject but mathematics, he wrote to Cambridge from a shipping office in Madras. He died at 32,…
Did some of his most important mathematics at a café table, and never finished a formal degree
A largely self-taught mathematician discovered doing advanced work in a Kraków park, who went on to found the field of functional analysis and lead a…
Given two years to live at 21, he spent the next 55 explaining the universe
Diagnosed with motor neurone disease as a student, he went on to transform our understanding of black holes and wrote the best-selling science book…
Ridiculed at 24 by the most famous astronomer alive, he was proved right and won the Nobel Prize at 73
On the voyage from India to Cambridge he calculated that heavy stars must collapse without limit. Eddington ridiculed the idea to his face. Fifty…
Spent alternate years herding sheep in Lesotho, and became one of Africa's most cited chemists
She went to school one year and looked after the family flock the next. Decades later she was leading research into dyes that can be switched on by…
Built a world-class insect research institute in Nairobi when Africa was told to buy science from abroad
An entomologist who argued that the continent losing most crops to insects should be the one studying them, and spent thirty years proving it could…
Found the malaria drug that has saved millions in a 1,600-year-old Chinese text
With no doctorate, no foreign training and a lab that was little more than pots and ether, she tested a plant extract on herself and gave the world…
Spent a career tracing how tuberculosis survives, in the country it kills the most
A South African microbiologist who has spent decades studying the biology of tuberculosis, one of the leading causes of death in her country, and…
