Category Archives: biography

Françoise Barré-Sinoussi: Virus Hunter

Posted on by

It was early 1983 and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi of the prestigious Pasteur Institute in Paris was busy at the centrifuge trying to detect the presence of a retrovirus. The sample in the centrifuge came from an AIDS patient, though the disease wasn’t called AIDS yet.

Just two years earlier in the US, a cluster of young men had been reported as suffering from unusual infections and forms of cancer normally experienced by the very old or by people using drugs designed to suppress the immune system. More cases were reported and US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) formed a …read more

Continue reading Françoise Barré-Sinoussi: Virus Hunter→

Profiles in Science: Jack Kilby and the Integrated Circuit

Posted on by

Sixty years ago this month, an unassuming but gifted engineer sitting in a lonely lab at Texas Instruments penned a few lines in his notebook about his ideas for building complete circuits on a single slab of semiconductor. He had no way of knowing if his idea would even work; the idea that it would become one of the key technologies of the 20th century that would rapidly change everything about the world would have seemed like a fantasy to him.

We’ve covered the story of how the integrated circuit came to be, and the ensuing patent battle that would …read more

Continue reading Profiles in Science: Jack Kilby and the Integrated Circuit→

Philo Farnsworth, RCA, and the Battle for Television

Posted on by

The parenthood of any invention of consequence is almost never cut and dried. The natural tendency to want a simple story that’s easy to tell — Edison invented the light bulb, Bell invented the telephone — often belies the more complex tale: that most inventions have uncertain origins, and their back stories are often far more interesting as a result.

Inventing is a rough business. It is said that a patent is just a license to get sued, and it’s true that the determination of priority of invention often falls to the courts. Such battles often pit the little guy …read more

Continue reading Philo Farnsworth, RCA, and the Battle for Television→

LEGO: The Kristiansen Legocy

Posted on by

Whether you are young, old, or a time traveling Vulcan, something unites all of us globally: the innocent LEGO blocks that encourage creativity over spoon-fed entertainment. Have you noticed the excess of zombified children and adults alike drooling over their collective screens lately? Back in the ancient times, all a child needed to create hours of joy were plastic interlocking bricks and a place for their parents to trip over them. The LEGO Group harbored the inspiration of our childhood inventiveness, and none of it would have been possible without the founder, Ole Kirk Kristiansen (or Christiansen). The humble carpenter …read more

Continue reading LEGO: The Kristiansen Legocy→

The Flight of the Seagull: Valentina Tereshkova, Cosmonaut

Posted on by

That the Cold War was a tense and perilous time in history cannot be denied, and is perhaps a bit of an understatement. The world stood on the edge of Armageddon for most of it, occasionally stepping slightly over the line, and thankfully stepping back before any damage was done.

As nerve-wracking as the Cold War was, it had one redeeming quality: it turned us into a spacefaring species. Propelled by national pride and the need to appear to be the biggest kid on the block, the United States and the Soviet Union consistently ratcheted up their programs, trying to …read more

Continue reading The Flight of the Seagull: Valentina Tereshkova, Cosmonaut→

Ted Dabney, Atari, and the Video Game Revolution

Posted on by

It may be hard for those raised on cinematic video games to conceive of the wonder of watching a plain white dot tracing across a black screen, reflecting off walls and a bounced by a little paddle that responded instantly to the twist of a wrist. But there was a time when Pong was all we had, and it was fascinating. People lined up for hours for the privilege of exchanging a quarter for a few minutes of monochrome distraction. In an arcade stuffed with noisy pinball machines with garish artwork and flashing lights, Pong seemed like a calm oasis, …read more

Continue reading Ted Dabney, Atari, and the Video Game Revolution→

Spanning The Tree : Dr Radia Perlman & Untangling Networks

Posted on by

As computer networks get bigger, it becomes increasingly hard to keep track of the flow of data over this network. How do you route data, making sure that the data is spread to all parts of the network? You use an algorithm called the spanning tree protocol — just one of the contributions to computer science of a remarkable engineer, Dr. Radia Perlman. But before she created this fundamental Internet protocol, she also worked on LOGO, the first programming language for children, creating a dialect for toddlers.

Born in 1952, Perlman was a prodigy who excelled in math and science, …read more

Continue reading Spanning The Tree : Dr Radia Perlman & Untangling Networks→

Robert Hall and the Solid-State Laser

Posted on by

The debt we all owe must be paid someday, and for inventor Robert N. Hall, that debt came due in 2016 at the ripe age of 96. Robert Hall’s passing went all but unnoticed by everyone but his family and a few close colleagues at General Electric’s Schenectady, New York research lab, where Hall spent his remarkable career.

That someone who lives for 96% of a century would outlive most of the people he had ever known is not surprising, but what’s more surprising is that more notice of his life and legacy wasn’t taken. Without his efforts, so many …read more

Continue reading Robert Hall and the Solid-State Laser→

Richard Feynman: A Life Of Curiosity And Science

Posted on by

It was World War II and scientists belonging to the Manhattan Project worked on calculations for the atomic bomb. Meanwhile, in one of the buildings, future Nobel Prize winning theoretical physicist Richard Feynman was cracking the combination lock on a safe because doing so intrigued him. That’s as good a broad summary of Feynman as any: scientific integrity with curiosity driving both his work and his fun.

If you’ve heard of him in passing it may be because of his involvement on the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster commission or maybe you’ve learned something from one of his many lectures preserved …read more

Continue reading Richard Feynman: A Life Of Curiosity And Science→

Sophie Wilson: ARM and How Making Things Simpler Made Them Faster & More Efficient

Posted on by

Sophie Wilson is one of the leading lights of modern CPU design. In the 1980s, she and colleague Steve Furber designed the ARM architecture, a new approach to CPU design that made mobile computing possible. They did this by realizing that you could do more, and quicker, with less. If you’ve use a Raspberry Pi, or any of the myriad of embedded devices that run on ARM chips, you’ve enjoyed the fruits of their labor.

It all began for Sophie Wilson with an electric lighter and a slot machine (or fruit machine, as they are called in the UK) in …read more

Continue reading Sophie Wilson: ARM and How Making Things Simpler Made Them Faster & More Efficient→