Rapid eye movement sleep
Kleitman and Aserinsky's 1953 discovery gave dream research a measurable brain state, rapid eye movement sleep, but seven decades on, what REM sleep actually evolved to do remains a genuinely open question.
Consciousness
The one thing everybody has and nobody can explain.
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Split-brain
Sperry and Gazzaniga's split-brain experiments showed real hemisphere specialisation and a left-brain 'interpreter' that invents confident reasons for actions it didn't cause, but not the tidy left-brain, right-brain myth it spawned.
Turing test
Alan Turing
The Turing test is a precise, behaviour-first redefinition of intelligence—not proof of thought, but a standard for functional equivalence in dialogue. It endures because it is simple, testable, and ruthlessly limited.
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Henry Gee
Henry Gee is a British palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist, a senior editor at Nature, and the author of books on deep time, the origin of vertebrates and human evolution.
Horizontal gene transfer
Zinder and Lederberg · 1951
Bacteria can pick up genes from other cells by transformation, transduction or conjugation, not only by inheriting them. Lederberg and Zinder showed in 1951 that a virus could carry genes from one strain of Salmonella to another, and Lederberg's earlier work with Edward Tatum showed that E. coli can exchange genes by conjugation. The material treats the process as the main route by which antibiotic resistance spreads among bacteria.
Jennifer Doudna
Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier
Doudna and Charpentier’s 2012 work established CRISPR-Cas9 as the first programmable, RNA-guided DNA cleavage system. It relies on Cas9 protein and a synthetic guide RNA chimera. It works in vitro. It does not demonstrate editing in living organisms or repair outcomes. It is the origin of all subsequent CRISPR applications — not a refinement, but the first functional design.
3D printing
Chuck Hull
3D printing is a layer-by-layer fabrication method rooted in Chuck Hull’s 1984 stereolithography patent. It evolved from rapid prototyping in the 1980s into an industrial production option by 2019. Its real advantage is enabling previously impossible geometries—like hollow or truss-structured parts—that cut weight and waste. Fused deposition modeling (FDM) was the most common process as of 2020. It does not replace conventional manufacturing at scale. It does not solve material consistency, certification, or throughput problems. Its impact is precise, not pervasive.