science
Discoverers who found light in urine and hydrogen in the air.
The Man Who Saw With His Ears
What does geometry sound like when you can only hear it described?
The Butterflies of the Soul
He won the 1906 Nobel Prize for proving the brain is built from separate cells. He found out by drawing them, on an ink-stained tablecloth, for fifty years.
The Birthday Cake
A deaf arithmetic teacher in a Kaluga log cabin derived the rocket equation between marking schoolboys' sums, and kept a trapdoor in his ceiling his family called the door to outer space.
The Milk Came Out the Neck
A Soviet surgeon coined the word transplantology, taught the man who did the first human heart transplant, and spent his afternoons sewing puppy heads onto German shepherds.
The Drum Generally Heals Up
What kind of man asks his colleagues to poke him awake if he stops breathing, and considers a perforated eardrum a social asset?
The Off-Center Wheel
Why would the man who invented the bit build a unicycle that bobbed up and down on purpose?
The Boy in the Garden
A country doctor famous for birds made two small cuts in his gardener's eight-year-old son — and then did it again, and again, for years.
The Man Without a Face
How do you lose the face of the man who coined the word cell, wrote a law of physics, and rebuilt half of London?
The Giggling Mycologist
What kind of person gets laughed out of the British scientific establishment and leaves giggling?
The Man Who Laughed at Everything
He correctly described the structure of all matter in the universe. Plato tried to have his books burned. Plato won.
The Surgeon Who Tried the Experiment
He inoculated himself with a patient's discharge to settle a scientific question, and his reputation was so enormous that nobody checked his work for fifty-one years.
The Man Who Drank the Plague
He built a small closet, filled it with the vomit of the dying, and sat inside breathing deeply — all to prove yellow fever wasn't contagious.