Medicine

Coolidge's General Electric tube, patents from 1913, used hot tungsten cathodes for steady, controllable X-ray output. Earlier gas...

Toronto's team isolated insulin in 1921 and patented it in 1923 for one dollar each, licensing royalty-free to universities and El...

Rutgers graduate student Schatz discovered streptomycin in soil bacteria screening run by Waksman, who patented it and licensed ro...

Djerassi's Mexico City Syntex team synthesized norethisterone from yams in 1951, patents following through 1956 as Searle and Pinc...

Greatbatch grabbed the wrong resistor in 1956 and watched his oscillator tick at heartbeat pace. His mercury-powered implant, pate...

EMI's Hounsfield, funded partly by Beatles record profits, patented computed tomography from 1968 and scanned a patient's head in ...

Damadian's 1971 tumor-detection finding and 1974 patent on scanning apparatus, field-focused by his Fonar company, launched magnet...

Cambridge's Kohler and Milstein fused myeloma cells with B-cells, making immortal antibody factories of single specificity. The 19...

Palmaz, an Argentine radiologist, hand-etched his wire-mesh tube and partnered with cardiologist Richard Schatz; Johnson and Johns...

Kariko and Weissman's 2005 discovery that pseudouridine-substituted mRNA dodges immune attack, patented through UPenn as 8,278,036...

Doudna and Charpentier's 2012 Science paper on Cas9 programming met Zhang's Broad Institute eukaryotic-editing filings, granted sp...

Jonas Salk's inactivated polio vaccine was tested on well over a million American children in 1954, one of the largest medical tri...

Kary Mullis conceived the polymerase chain reaction in 1983 while driving through the California hills at night. Repeated cycles o...

Harvard geneticists Philip Leder and Timothy Stewart created a mouse carrying an activated cancer gene, making it highly susceptib...

After the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes linked to hereditary breast and ovarian cancer were identified in the mid-1990s, Myriad Genetics o...