History of Science coverage from Scientific American, featuring news and articles about advances in the field.

From starting out as a night-drive idea to becoming a global diagnostic gold standard, PCR has irreversibly transformed life sciences in its 40 years of existence. By 1991, scientists had begun ...

In her groundbreaking trilogy, “Women Scientists in America,” she told the stories of numerous accomplished but largely invisible women. By Penelope Green Margaret W. Rossiter, a historian whose ...

The Hubble Space Telescope as seen from the Space Shuttle Discovery in December 1999. Credit: NASA In the summer of 1995, Robert Williams, then director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, which ...

In an amazing twist of fate, the aggressive cervical cancer tumor that killed Henrietta Lacks, a 31-year old African American mother, became an essential tool that helped the biomedical field flourish ...

There are some scientists whose contributions to the stores of human knowledge are so well-known that they have become household names. I don’t think it’s going too far out on a limb to say that ...