Henrietta Lacks was the unwitting donor of cells from her cancerous tumor, which were cultured by George Otto Gey to create an immortal cell line for medical research. This is now known as the HeLa cell line....

Theodore Harold "Ted" Maiman was an American engineer and physicist credited with the invention of the first working laser. Maiman’s laser led to the subsequent development of many other types of lasers. The laser was successfully fired on...

John Stewart Bell FRS was a British physicist from Northern Ireland (Ulster), and the originator of Bell's theorem, a significant theorem in quantum physics regarding hidden variable theories. In 1964, after a year's leave from CERN that he...

Gordon Earle Moore is the co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of Intel Corporation and the author of Moore's Law (published in an article 19 April 1965 in Electronics Magazine). Moore's law describes a long-term trend in the history of computi...

Emmett Louis Till was a 14-year-old African-American who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after a white woman said she was offended by him in her family's grocery store. The brutality of his murder and the fact that his killers were acqu...

John Craig Venter is an American biologist and entrepreneur, most famous for his role in being one of the first to sequence the human genome and for his role in creating the first synthetic cell in 2010. Venter founded Celera Genomics, Th...

Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, also known as "TimBL", is an English computer scientist, best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He made a proposal for an information management system in March 1989, and he implemented the fir...

George Perry Floyd Jr. was an African American man who died during a police arrest in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020. Protests in response to both Floyd's death, and more broadly to police violence against other black Americans, quickly spread...

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is an American computer programmer and Internet entrepreneur. He is best known for co-creating the social networking site Facebook, of which he is chief executive and president. It was co-founded as a private company...

Aaron Hillel Swartz was an American computer programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet hacktivist who committed suicide in the context of a prosecution that was widely believed to be overly zealous and inappropriate. Swartz was i...