Science
Astronauts refused to fly until she checked the maths
When NASA switched to electronic computers, John Glenn asked for Katherine Johnson to verify the machine's orbital numbers by hand. She did, and only then did he agree to launch.
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Marie Curie is the only person to win Nobels in two sciences
She won Physics in 1903 for radioactivity and Chemistry in 1911 for isolating radium and polonium. Her notebooks are still so radioactive that reading them requires protective clothing and a signed waiver.
One photograph revealed the shape of DNA
Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, known as Photo 51, showed the unmistakable X pattern of a double helix. It took a hundred hours of exposure and settled the structure of life itself.
The first computer programmer wrote code before computers existed
In 1843 Ada Lovelace published an algorithm for a machine that was never built, and noted it could one day compose music as well as crunch numbers. She saw software a century early.
She proved chimpanzees make tools
Jane Goodall watched a chimp strip a twig to fish termites out of a mound in 1960. Until then toolmaking was the line that supposedly separated humans from animals.
A 1,600-year-old recipe cured malaria
Tu Youyou found the key to artemisinin in a fourth-century Chinese text that said to soak sweet wormwood in cold water. Heat destroyed the compound; the ancient method saved it, and millions of lives.
She discovered that genes can move
Barbara McClintock's jumping genes in maize were dismissed for decades as impossible. She was proved right and won the Nobel alone, thirty years later, at the age of 81.