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 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 ...

A slender thread of memory connects a Texas Hill Country man to a discovery that transformed modern technology. In 1916, Fred Schmidt’s grandfather, Jan Czochralski (1885-1953), a largely self-taught ...