Growing up in the interwar period in London, Rosalind Franklin was determined to become a scientist, defying her father's wishes. After World War II, Franklin worked at the French government's central chemical research laboratory, where she learned X-ray crystallography. This technique relies on a beam of X-rays that passes through a crystal and strikes photographic film, letting a trained reader to see a three-dimensional arrangement of atoms. Her training in this field led to opportunities to photograph DNA, which allowed researchers to study in depth this complex molecule and to come to...

While studying retroviruses and cancers cells in the 1980s, researcher Luc Montagnier published a paper about the isolation of a virus from the immune system cells of a patient showing symptoms of what would soon be known as AIDS. That virus, HIV, was later proved to be related to AIDS, a disease that mystified doctors. Montagnier's work went unnoticed until Robert Gallo, an American scientist, published the same conclusions and sought to profit from kits to detect the virus. Montagnier sued, and the case, which went on for two decades, included the intervention of U.S. President Ronald...

In the race to map the human genome, Craig Venter is credited with speeding up the discovery of the whole human genome by about five yearsuan incredible step forward for this type of research. Venter's whole-genome shotgun sequencing approach was cheaper, more accurate, and much faster than other mapping methods. Though his firm, Celera Genomics, shared credit with the rival Human Genome Project, Venter's method was undoubtedly the superior one and the catalyst for the record-breaking efforts. Personally, Venter has proved to be a passionate personality in the staid world of science, funding...