The Person Who Would Not Drop It

A doctor locked away for handwashing, a photograph that showed the shape of DNA, phosphorus boiled out of urine, and a frog in a magnetic field.

The discovery has a name. It also has a person who stayed with it after the room had moved on. A doctor who could show that handwashing saved women, and was locked away for saying so. A geneticist who watched genes jump and waited decades to be believed. An alchemist who boiled urine looking for gold and found the element that glows. The work is the story. The stubbornness is why there is a story.

Handwashing was demonstrated, and the man who demonstrated it was put away. The hundred-hour photograph held the shape of DNA. Phosphorus came out of a pot that was supposed to produce gold. Jumping genes were seen in corn, and the seeing was not believed for 32 years. The levitated frog hung in a magnetic field, and the man who put it there later collected a Nobel Prize for something else.

This page is the shelf those people share. Start here for the handwashing, the photograph, and the frog, and for the longer record of the person who would not put the experiment down.

• The Archaeologist Who Measured the Great Pyramid in Pink Underwear — and Buried His Father's Favorite Theory
• The Backyard Dish the Neighbors Thought Could Control the Weather — and the Man Who Used It to Hear the Milky Way
• The Chemist Who Caught His Landlady Recycling Dinner With a Pinch of Radioactivity
• The Chemist Who Got Parliament to Make Gold-Making Legal Again
• The Computer Pioneer Who Declared War on London's Organ Grinders
• The Naturalist Who Rode a Caiman — Then Went Home and Built the World's First Nature Reserve
• The Newspaper That Took 49 Years to Admit Rockets Work in Space
• The Physicist Who Cleaned His 40-Foot Spectrograph by Sending the Family Cat Through It
• The Scientists Who Sat in a Room Hot Enough to Cook a Steak — and Walked Out Fine
• The Priest Who Put Tiny Taffeta Pants on Frogs to Find Out Where Babies Come From
• The Trumpeters Who Rode a Steam Train Back and Forth to Test a Theory About Stars
• The Engineer Who Built a Flip Table to Shake a Gold Coin Out of His Own Windpipe
• The King Found Six Hours Into the Dig, Under a Parking Space Marked 'R'
• The Three Safes of Atomic Secrets That All Opened With the Same Number
• The Abbé Who Shocked 200 Monks in a Line a Mile Long to Time the Speed of Electricity
• The Moon Rocket Struck by Lightning Twice — and the Switch Nobody in Mission Control Had Heard Of
• The Obituary That Supposedly Created the Nobel Prize — and That Nobody Has Ever Found
• The Physicist Who Levitated a Frog — and Then Won a Real Nobel Prize
• The Man Who Found Troy — and Dug Straight Through It
• The Geologist Who Tried to Eat His Way Through the Entire Animal Kingdom
• The Scientist Who Weighed the Earth but Couldn't Speak to His Housekeeper
• The 100-Hour X-Ray Photograph That Revealed the Shape of DNA
• The Alchemist Who Boiled Urine Looking for Gold and Found Phosphorus
• The Chemist Who Fed the World and Gassed the Trenches
• The Circus Strongman Who Found Egypt's Greatest Tomb
• The Corn Geneticist Who Saw Genes Jump — And Waited 32 Years to Be Believed
• The Doctor Who Discovered Handwashing — and Was Locked Away for It
• The Farm Boy Who Discovered Pluto — and Now Sails Past It Forever
• The Graduate Student, the 'Little Green Men,' and the Nobel That Got Away
• The Movie Star Who Patented a Secret Weapon the Navy Rejected

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