Field
Mechanisms of disease and the body, diagnostics, and the laboratory methods underpinning modern biomedicine.
Biology & Genetics
This paper turned a bacterial immune system into a programmable gene-editing tool. Doudna, Charpentier and colleagues showed that the Cas9 enzyme, guided by a single engineered RNA, can be directed to cut any chosen DNA sequence.
Biology & Genetics
Takahashi and Yamanaka showed that ordinary adult cells can be reprogrammed back into an embryonic-like, pluripotent state using just four genes. These induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells can become any cell type, without the ethical concerns of embryonic stem cells.
Biology & Genetics
The public Human Genome Project's first analysis of the human genome sequence. It presented a draft covering most of the genome and drew early conclusions about the surprisingly small number of human genes.
This paper made the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) practical by using a heat-stable DNA polymerase (Taq) from a hot-spring bacterium. The change let DNA be copied through repeated heating and cooling without adding fresh enzyme each cycle.
Neuroscience
Hodgkin and Huxley built the first quantitative, predictive model of the nerve impulse. Measuring ionic currents in the squid giant axon, they derived equations that reproduce the action potential from the dynamics of sodium and potassium channels.