The Eureka! Moment: 100 Key Scientific

Genius, Einstein said, is 99% perspiration. The other 1%--the moment of inspiration and insight--provides some of the best stories of our time. From superconductors to the Big Bang, the best tales of scientific revelation are collected inThe Eureka! Moment, an addictive tour through the modern world's key scientific discoveries. Rupert Lee's accounts transport readers to the moment of realization: the inventor's laboratory, his or her doubts, initial setbacks, feuds with other scientists, and finally the shock and excitement of triumph. Together, these "biographies of inspiration" paint an astonishing picture of human ingenuity. In physics we learn how scientists for Bell Labs inadvertently supplied proof for the Big Bang theory while trying to eliminate the background hiss in their microwave antenna. In astronomy we see Hubble's recognition that the universe is expanding, not static, as well as the fortuitous discovery of Pluto by a farm boy from Kansas. We join Watson and Crick as they decodethe double helix of DNA, and Karl von Frisch as he deciphers the honeybee's waggle dance. Skillfully written to clarify concepts from quarks to relativity to antibodies for the lay reader,The Eureka Momentis a must-read for anyone interested in popular science and the history of invention.

List of Plates

xv

Introduction

1

(13)

MEDICINE

14

(36)

The Yellow Fever Virus (Reed, 1900)

18

(2)

Blood Groups (Landsteiner, 1901)

20

(2)

Vitamins (Hopkins, 1912)

22

(2)

Insulin (Banting and Best, 1922)

24

(2)

Brain Waves (Berger, 1929)

26

(2)

Penicillin (Fleming, 1929)

28

(2)

Sulphonamides (Domagk, 1935)

30

(2)

Rejection of Transplants (Gibson and Medawar, 1943)

32

(2)

Sickle Cell Anaemia (Pauling et al, 1949)

34

(2)

Smoking Causes Lung Cancer (Doll and Hill, 1950; Wynder and Graham, 1950)

36

(2)

The Polio Vaccine (Salk, 1953)

38

(2)

Interferons (Isaacs and Lindemann, 1957; Isaacs et al, 1957)

40

(2)

Prions (Prusiner et al, 1983)

42

(2)

HIV (Barre-Sinoussi et al, 1983)

44

(2)

Helicobacter pylori (Marshall et al, 1985)

46

(2)

Embryonic Stem Cells Grown Artificially (Gearhart, 1997)

48

(2)

HISTORY OF LIFE

50

(16)

First Clues About How Life Began (Miller, 1953)

54

(2)

The Early Presence of Life on Earth (Mojzsis et al, 1996)

56

(2)

The Origin of Higher Organisms (Sagan, 1967)

58

(2)

Nemesis of the Dinosaurs (Alvarez et al, 1980)

60

(2)

`Lucy' (Johanson and Taieb, 1976)

62

(2)

The `Taung Child' (Dart, 1925)

64

(2)

BIOLOGY

66

(32)

Conditioned Reflexes (Pavlov, 1906)

70

(2)

Bacteriophages (d'Herelle, 1917)

72

(2)

The Vertebrate Organiser (Spemann and Mangold, 1924)

74

(2)

Urease (Sumner, 1926)

76

(2)

Progesterone (Corner and Allen, 1929)

78

(2)

The Krebs Cycle (Krebs and Johnson, 1937)

80

(2)

ATP (Lipmann, 1941)

82

(2)

Bee Dances (von Frisch, 1946)

84

(2)

Evolution Driven by Competition (Lack, 1947)

86

(2)

How Nerves Work (Hodgkin et al, 1952; Hodgkin and Huxley, 1952)

88

(2)

The Chemical Composition of Insulin (Sanger and Thompson, 1953)

90

(2)

The Structure of Vitamin B12 (Hodgkin et al, 1956)

92

(2)

The Calvin Cycle in Photosynthesis (Calvin, 1962)

94

(2)

Monoclonal Antibodies (Kohler and Milstein, 1975)

96

(2)

GENETICS

98

(36)

One Gene---One Enzyme (Garrod, 1909)

102

(2)

Genes on Chromosomes (Morgan, 1910)

104

(2)

Genes are Made of DNA (Avery et al, 1944)

106

(2)

Gene Recombination in Bacteria (Lederberg and Tatum, 1946)

108

(2)

Transposons (McClintock, 1951)

110

(2)

The DNA Double Helix (Watson and Crick, 1953)

112

(2)

The Central Dogma (Crick, 1958)

114

(2)

The Nature of the DNA Code (Crick et al, 1961)

116

(2)

The Operon (Jacob and Monod, 1961)

118

(2)

Reverse Transcriptase (Baltimore, 1970; Temin and Mitsuzani, 1970)

120

(2)

Oncogenes (Martin, 1970)

122

(2)

Sequencing a Genome (Sanger et al, 1977)

124

(2)

The Antibody Problem (Tonegawa, 1983)

126

(2)

Homeobox Genes (McGinnis et al, 1984)

128

(2)

DNA Fingerprints (Jeffreys et al, 1985)

130

(2)

`Dolly', the Cloned Sheep (Wilmut et al, 1997)

132

(2)

ASTRONOMY AND COSMOLOGY

134

(30)

Galaxies (Hubble, 1925)

138

(2)

The Expanding Universe (Hubble, 1929)

140

(2)

Pluto (Tombaugh, 1930)

142

(2)

What Makes Stars Shine (Bethe and Critchfield, 1938; Bethe, 1939)

144

(2)

The Age of the Solar System (Patterson, 1955)

146

(2)

The Origin of the Chemical Elements (Burbidge et al, 1957)

148

(2)

Quasars (Hazard et al, 1963; Schmidt, 1963; Oke, 1963; Greenstein and Matthews, 1963)

150

(2)

Proof of the Big Bang (Penzias and Wilson, 1965)

152

(2)

Pulsars (Hewish et al, 1968)

154

(2)

Organic Molecules in Interstellar Space (Snyder et al, 1969)

156

(2)

Gamma-Ray Bursters (Djorgovski et al, 1997; Metzger et al, 1997)

158

(2)

Planets Orbiting Other Stars (Mayor and Queroz, 1997)

160

(2)

The Age of the Universe (Freedman et al, 2000)

162

(2)

EARTH SCIENCES

164

(18)

The Earth's Core (Oldham, 1906)

168

(2)

The Moho (Mohorovicic, 1909)

170

(2)

The Ionosphere (Appleton and Barnett, 1925)

172

(2)

Plate Tectonics (Morgan, 1968)

174

(2)

Methane Clathrate in the Ocean Depths (Hollister et al, 1972)

176

(2)

Black Smokers (Spiess et al, 1980)

178

(2)

The Ozone Hole (Farman et al, 1985)

180

(2)

CHEMISTRY

182

(18)

The Haber Process (Haber, 1909)

186

(2)

Chemical Bonds (Lewis, 1916)

188

(2)

Polymers (Staudinger and Fritschi, 1922)

190

(2)

Plutonium (McMillan and Abelson, 1940)

192

(2)

Ziegler-Natta Catalysts (Ziegler et al, 1955)

194

(2)

Buckminsterfullerene (Kroto et al, 1985)

196

(2)

High-Temperature Superconductors (Muller and Bednorz, 1986)

198

(2)

PHYSICS

200

(46)

The Quantum Theory (Planck, 1900)

204

(2)

Radioactive Decay (Rutherford and Soddy, 1903)

206

(2)

Proof That Atoms Exist (Einstein, 1905)

208

(2)

Photons (Einstein, 1905)

210

(2)

Special Relativity (Einstein, 1905)

212

(2)

Superconductivity (Kammelingh Onnes, 1911)

214

(2)

The Atomic Nucleus (Rutherford, 1911)

216

(2)

Cosmic Rays (Hess, 1912)

218

(2)

General Relativity (Einstein, 1915)

220

(2)

The Proton (Rutherford, 1919)

222

(2)

The Quantum Atom (Bohr, 1923)

224

(2)

The Uncertainty Principle (Heisenberg, 1927)

226

(2)

The Position (Anderson, 1932)

228

(2)

The Neutron (Chadwick, 1932)

230

(2)

Nuclear Fusion (Rutherford et al, 1933)

232

(2)

Nuclear Fission (Hahn and Strassmann, 1939)

234

(2)

The Transistor (Bardeen and Brittain, 1948)

236

(2)

The Neutrino (Reines and Cowan, 1953)

238

(2)

The Hunting of the Quarks (Friedman, 1972)

240

(2)

The W and Z Particles (Arnison et al, 1983)

242

(2)

Bose-Einstein Condensate (Anderson et al, 1995)

244

(2)

Science in the Year 2000

246

(13)

Index

259

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The Eureka! Moment: 100 Key Scientific Discoveries of the 20th Century

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