🧬The Greats

In June 1858, while mourning his infant son's death from scarlet fever, Darwin received a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace, then collecting specimens in the Malay Archipelago, outlining a theory of natural selection nearly identical to Darwin's own unpublished work of two decades. Friends arranged for extracts of both men's writings to be read jointly at the Linnean Society on 1 July 1858, with neither author present, before Darwin rushed Origin of Species into print the next year.

In August 1852, returning from four years collecting in the Amazon, Wallace's ship Helen caught fire in the mid-Atlantic; he watched almost his entire collection of specimens, drawings and notes burn and sink. He and the crew spent ten days adrift in an open lifeboat before a passing ship rescued them. Rather than quit, Wallace set out again within two years for the Malay Archipelago, where eight more years of collecting eventually led him to natural selection.

Between 1856 and 1863, Mendel grew and hand-pollinated roughly 28,000 pea plants in the garden of St. Thomas's Abbey in Brno, tracking seven distinct traits across generations. He presented the results to Brno's Natural History Society in 1865 and published them the next year in the society's own proceedings, a journal so obscure it was barely cited for 35 years. Only in 1900, after three botanists independently found the same ratios, was his paper recognized as having solved the problem decades earlier.

In July 1885, a mother brought her nine-year-old son Joseph Meister to Pasteur's Paris laboratory after a rabid dog had bitten the boy fourteen times. Rabies was then a certain, agonizing death, and Pasteur's vaccine had only ever been tested on dogs. With two licensed physicians actually administering the injections, since Pasteur held no medical degree himself, the boy received thirteen doses of increasingly potent vaccine over ten days — and survived, becoming the first person ever saved from rabies.

In May 1952, Franklin's student Raymond Gosling, working under her direction at King's College London, produced Photograph 51, the sharpest X-ray image yet of DNA fiber, requiring roughly 100 hours of exposure. In January 1953, colleague Maurice Wilkins showed it to James Watson without asking Franklin first; Watson and Francis Crick used it, along with her unpublished data, to build their double-helix model within weeks. All three papers appeared together in Nature that April, but only Watson, Crick and Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize.

At the 1951 Cold Spring Harbor Symposium, McClintock presented years of evidence that genes could move between chromosome positions and switch other genes on or off, an idea so far outside contemporary genetics that her mostly baffled audience largely dismissed it. She stopped publishing the work in detail soon after and kept studying maize quietly for decades, confident in her data even as almost no one else worked on it. DNA sequencing eventually confirmed transposable elements across many species, and in 1983 she received the Nobel Prize, unshared.

In 2011, at a scientific conference in Puerto Rico, Charpentier approached Doudna to propose a collaboration on a puzzling bacterial defense system called CRISPR. Working between Berkeley and Charpentier's lab in Sweden, the two labs showed by June 2012 that CRISPR's Cas9 enzyme could be reprogrammed with a single guide RNA to cut any chosen DNA sequence, turning a bacterial immune mechanism into a programmable editing tool almost overnight. In October 2020 they shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the first Nobel science prize awarded to a team of only women.