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Classic Lasker

Oct 9, 2023

“The idea of spending your time digging into mysteries…I thought that would be a wonderful way to spend your life.”

Evelyn Witkin did spend her life digging into mysteries, and she was recognized with the 2015 Lasker Award for her work that solved one—how some bacteria survived 100x the radiation that killed...


May 15, 2023

The venom of the Brazilian pit viper Bothrops jararaca causes a sudden and catastrophic drop in blood pressure. Armed with this knowledge, David Cushman and Miguel Ondetti set out to isolate the active component. In this 1999 interview with Princeton University professor Leon Rosenberg, Cushman tells the story of their...


Apr 14, 2023

Oliver Smithies freely admits that he did not find a solution to the problem he set out to solve, but he was able to turn his initial failure into a success that forever changed biomedical research. The gene targeting method that Smithies developed made it possible to generate knockout mice as models for human disease....


Mar 10, 2023

After meeting a young man dying of renal failure, Willem Kolff could not shake the thought that there was a simple solution: remove urea from the blood. Using sausage skin and an enamel tub, Kolff made the rotating drum artificial kidney. This was the beginning of renal hemodialysis, now a widely used intervention...