Foundations

Janet Mertz’s work with simian virus 40 DNA during her graduate years was pivotal for developing DNA recombination as we now know it.

Political activist and Nobel winner Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin pioneered X-ray crystallography to discover the molecular structures of penicillin and insulin.

Public bathing, ubiquitous around the world and through the ages, plays an often-unappreciated role in public health.

The father-and-son duo Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka crafted thousands of scientifically accurate models of plants and sea creatures as teaching aids. 

The father-and-son duo, the last generations of a long line of renowned glassworkers, crafted thousands of realistic models of plants and sea creatures.

For more than 50 years, the program has served as a pipeline to get more scholars of color into academic institutions.

Percy Lavon Julian, a young, Black scientist working in Jim Crow America, gained international recognition after beating chemists at the University of Oxford in the race to synthesize the alkaloid physostigmine, used for decades as a treatment for glaucoma.

Before its association with a pining for the toys or TV shows of yesteryear, nostalgia was deemed a dangerous psychiatric disorder.

Elaborate annotations hidden in a copy of Sir James Edward Smith’s The English Flora hinted at the life of a mysterious woman botanist.

Researchers continue to debate whether US President Abraham Lincoln was coming down with smallpox as he delivered his famous Gettysburg Address, and if he had been immunized.

How the pungent odor that occurs after a light rain became a well-studied phenomenon

Intrigued by an optical illusion he experienced while traveling in Scotland, Robert Addams wrote what is now considered one of the definitive observational accounts of so-called motion aftereffects.

Centuries of folklore backed by scientists in the early 1900s have perpetuated the idea that menstruating women can exert dangerous forces.

Soranus of Ephesus’s manual shaped the way midwifery was practiced for more than a millennium.

A contaminated ham put bacteriologist Émile Pierre-Marie van Ermengem on the path to discovering the microbe that produces botulinum toxin.

Trofim Lysenko’s attacks on geneticists had long-term effects on Russian science and scientists, despite a lack of evidence to support his beliefs about biological inheritance.

One hundred years after its invention, BCG has stood the test of time as a vaccine against tuberculosis.

A famous account of multiple personality disorder in the early 20th century foreshadowed a century of controversial diagnoses and debate among psychiatrists.

The “mother of plant virology and serology,” Helen Purdy Beale, developed techniques to understand the nature of viruses that went unappreciated for decades.