Edward Jenner, the father of vaccinations

Before vaccines, there was 'variolation': what was it?

Before the technology behind vaccinations was discovered, some keen observers of medicine around the globe noticed how previous infections could impact future ones. Learn about the techniques early physicians used before they had vaccines.

Jonas Salk developed the first successful polio vaccine—and tested it on himself

The American medical researcher developed the inactivated virus vaccine from 1952 to 1955 and proved that it could prevent disease. He tested the virus on himself and his family in 1954 and then carried out formal clinical trials on more than 1.3 million children.

A 1954 outbreak at a Boston boarding school allowed scientists to isolate the measles virus

While measles was described as early as the 9th century, humanity lacked the medical technology to fight the disease until the mid-20th century. Vaccine development from the Boston outbreak in the 1960s and 1970s led to one of the most effective inoculation campaigns in history.

'Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.'

- Polio vaccine developer Jonas Salk (1914–1995)

Leonard Thompson was the first human to receive an insulin injection for diabetes

In January 1922, the 14-year-old was the first person to receive an insulin injection to treat diabetes, just months after insulin was isolated in dogs and used to treat their induced diabetes. Thompson had an allergic response to an apparent impurity in the injection, but his second dose, 12 days later, was a success.

The virus was officially described for the first time in 1789

Michael Underwood, an English physician and surgeon, was the first to describe the disorder, noting it caused disability in the lower extremities in children. Large-scale outbreaks of the disease were not observed until the late 19th century.

John Snow—not the one from 'Game of Thrones'—determined that contaminated water sickened London

His pioneering epidemiology work during an 1854 cholera outbreak mapped out the commonalities between people in London who were getting sick. He discovered that ill people were getting water from the same Broad Street pump. Before Snow's work, the prevailing theory was that bad air sickened individuals instead of cholera-causing bacteria in the water.

The first successful IVF pregnancy was in the United Kingdom in 1978

Gynecologist Patrick Steptoe and his collaborator Robert Edwards, a biologist, attempted to fertilize a human egg cell in a petri dish 101 times before finally succeeding. This resulted in the birth of Louise Brown—at the time referred to as a "test tube" baby—in 1978, who was born into the spotlight.

Penicillin’s pioneers were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1945

Alexander Fleming, Howard Florey, and Ernst Chain received the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering and developing penicillin.

Poison ivy was sent to Europe in the 1600s as an exotic, ornamental oddity, where it was purposefully grown in the English royal gardens at Kew, the Faculty of Medicine in Paris, and a few other locations.

The birth of the multivitamin

In 1912, biochemist Kazimierz Funk, often anglicized as Casimir Funk, proposed that there existed an essential nutrient in food that could prevent deficiency diseases, such as scurvy or rickets. This article explores the origin of the multivitamin, an invention that has garnished...

A New York farmer established the first cheese factory and revolutionized the industry

Jesse Williams, a farmer in New York state, had a passion for cheese but didn’t have the resources to produce it at the scale he desired. So, in 1851, Jesse and his son opened the first cheese factory, sourcing milk from multiple local farms and producing 100,000 pounds of cheddar—in their first season. Soon, Williams had hundreds of factories and created the prototype for cheesemaking as we know it today.

Poison ivy was sent to Europe in the 1600s as an exotic, ornamental oddity

The plants were grown in the English royal gardens at Kew, the Faculty of Medicine in Paris, and a few other locations.

Samuel O’Reilly patented the tattoo gun in 1891

Before the tattoo gun's invention, recipients sweated while artists slowly tapped or sliced designs into their flesh. The tattoo gun changed the field, helping artists ink clients’ skin at incredible speeds. Inventor Samuel O’Reilly applied the basic idea of an electric pen invented by Thomas Edison to his tattoo gun.

The mosquito's role in the transmission of malaria was confirmed in 1897

The British army doctor Ronald Ross, who later won the Nobel Prize for his work, was the first to describe the transmission of malarial parasites by mosquitoes. He had lab mosquitoes suck blood from malaria-infected people and separately found the malaria parasite inside a mosquito's gut, confirming the bug's role in malaria transmission.

With no textbooks or antibiotics, this WWI surgeon pioneered facial reconstruction

New Zealand surgeon Dr. Harold Gillies made extraordinary advances in the field of reconstructive surgery during World War I and after. This 36-minute NPR podcast interviews historian Lindsey Fitzharris, author of Gillie's biography, The Facemaker, charting how the good doctor reconstructed the faces of numerous soldiers in an age before antibiotics and plastic surgery as we know it today.

Thomas Edison publicly executed animals with AC to convince the public of its dangers

J.P. Morgan first backed Thomas Edison's direct current system, seeing electricity's potential to usurp John D. Rockefeller's kerosene empire. Despite the investments and smear campaign against alternating current, alternating current ultimately won public support after lighting the 1893 World's Fair, after which Morgan would fund Tesla's wireless transmission tower.

Wilbur published key papers, gave speeches in the burgeoning aviation community

Much of the theoretical work is credited to Wilbur, whose scientific mind observed birds and early pioneers to discover the key problem to solve was control. This 1901 speech surveys the recent work in the field and showcases what the brothers worked on two years before their breakthrough flight.

Washington systematically introduced and popularized mule breeding in the United States

Known as "the father of the American Mule," Washington imported a prized Spanish donkey and bred it with a female horse at Mount Vernon. He promoted mules as stronger, more efficient farm animals, helping spread their use across the South and transforming American agriculture.

Charles Darwin studied goose bumps by scaring zoo animals in London with a stuffed snake

Read the famous naturalist’s work from the late 1800s, detailing how he sought to draw comparisons between how animals and humans respond to fear. As part of that work, he exposed monkeys and a peccary to a stuffed snake and noted the animals’ hair-raising fear response.

Food allergies were first documented more than 4,000 years ago

Although food allergies are on the rise in modern times, they have been documented in written records for thousands of years. More than 3,000 years ago, Chinese emperors advised patients to avoid certain foods, and Hippocrates noted in his work that food could cause serious harm to certain individuals, and even lead to death.

Before Dawkins, other biologists proposed the power of mutating ideas

Nobel Prize winner Jacques Monod proposed, “Ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms. Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role.”

Wilhelm Wundt, the forgotten father of modern psychology

He was the first psychologist to call himself one, and he influenced a whole generation of early psychologists. Learn about the life and works of Wilhelm Wundt with this thorough entry from a philosophy encyclopedia.

'Johnny Appleseed' was the itinerant horticulturalist John Chapman

Born in 1774 in Massachusetts, Chapman planted apple orchards for pioneers across Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, to be sold to locals to produce hard cider. He became famous through a 'Harper's Weekly' profile in the late 1800s, cultivating the modern legend.

John Riddell’s first helmet was adopted by college football teams in 1939

The early days of football were violent and there was little protection for players, especially their heads. When deaths became commonplace, John Riddell set out to invent a better way to protect football players. Eventually, the technology from Riddell’s helmets ended up on WWII battlefields.

Before launching his cereal company, John Harvey Kellogg promoted natural food at a sanitarium

Kellogg was the director of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, a health resort in Michigan, where he served patients vegetarian dishes, including early experiments with meat substitutes. Kellogg espoused a philosophy of "Biologic Living," which suggested consuming natural food would lead to "racial hygiene" for white Americans, a tenet of the eugenics movement.

At the beginning of the 20th century, a group of young men ate standard American food—replete with food additives like borax and formaldehyde—as part of government research to better understand food safety.

The 2026 Ebola outbreak in the DRC is spurring new Ebola vaccine development for the Bundibugyo species.

The first line of 'immortal' human cells, which can divide indefinitely and are used in scientific research, was nonconsensually taken from a Black woman.

Elk Cloner, the first computer virus to spread in public, was written as a practical joke by Richard Skrenta, a Pittsburgh high school student.

Double world record holder Hunter Ewen helped conquer his fear of balloons, called globophobia, by training to win Guinness World Record titles for balloon inflation.

Warren Buffett's former professor Benjamin Graham is known as the 'father of value investing,' a strategy in which investors seek to buy stocks trading below their intrinsic worth.

Larger animals like giraffes, elephants, and blue whales have developed a unique defense against cancer, a phenomenon known as Peto's Paradox

Against his wishes, Albert Einstein's brain was removed before his cremation, and the pathologist responsible stored it for decades in mason jars within a beer cooler.

Learn more about the history of fireworks, which dates back to an accidental invention during an alchemist's quest for information about immortality.

Abraham Lincoln was almost assassinated weeks before his inauguration as he traveled from Illinois to DC through Baltimore in 1861; it took two independent claims for Lincoln to be convinced the threat was real

Hookworm infection, though risky, may help fight certain autoimmune conditions by tamping down the immune system's inflammatory response.

The concept of phantom limbs, the perception that amputated limbs are still present, dates back to a French military surgeon in the 16th century.

Trace how the Bill of Rights, inspired by centuries of political theory, took shape between 1774 and 1789.

Many legends about George Washington, including his supposed wooden teeth and the story of cutting down the cherry tree, lack evidence.

Before writing 'Walden,' transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau nearly burned down his hometown with a campfire that grew out of control.

Walt Disney's early film 'Alice's Wonderland' was a groundbreaking innovation in the silent film era

Before humans, the Soviet Union and the United States sent animals—including apes, dogs, and cats—to space during the Space Race.

See 33 images that became central to huge scandals, including a young Charles and Camilla, Michael Jackson's baby on a hotel balcony, and Hugh Grant's mugshot.

Visualize how CRISPR-Cas9—a type of immune system used by single-celled organisms to attack invasive viruses—targets and makes precise changes to a gene's DNA.

Clever Hans was a 1900s horse that was believed to be able to solve math equations, tell time, and read and comprehend German, until a psychology student discovered how he got his answers.

The term 'algorithm' originated from the Latinized name of al-Khwārizmī, a 9th-century mathematician whose works introduced Arabic numerals and the decimal-based numeral system to Europe and whose treatise 'Al-Jabr' gave algebra its name.

In 2018, 26-year-old missionary John Allen Chau was killed by tribesmen after attempting to reach and evangelize on India's isolated North Sentinel Island

Hear about the 250-year history of the United States Postal Service, complete with some of its strangest deliveries, important innovations, and the figures that made it an American institution.

'Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone,' a work by American painter Thomas Moran, inspired Congress to establish Yellowstone National Park.