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The parents of Hildegard (pronounced "HIHL-duh-gahrt") of Bingen, Hildebert and Mechtild von Bermersheim, were members of the gentry; with connections to other landed families in the Rhineland-Palatinate (now Germany). Hildegard, the last of ten children, was evidently bright and precocious. In twelfth century Germany; however, only two courses were open to women: marriage and the Catholic Church. Therefore, her father arranged for Hildegard, at age eight, to enter the nunnery of Jutta, the daughter of a neighboring family who had established a hermitage on the grounds of the monastery at Disibodenberg. There, Hildegard learned Christian liturgy, biblical doctrine, music, and domestic handwork. She was apparently a quick student, for she was soon teaching others. When she was fourteen or fifteen, she was ready to become a nun and received the veil from Otto, bishop of Bamberg and lord bishop of Mainz. For two decades, Hildegard's life was that of the nunnery. Biographical sources usually employ phrases such as "She grew in the grace of God" for this period. Two specifics, however, can be known or inferred. The first is the occurrence of her visions, which she describes as great suffusions of light during which understanding of the Bible, the universe, and the physical world was revealed to her by God. She stresses that she was fully conscious during these visions--that is, they were not mystic or out-of-body experiences. The second inference is that she grew in authority, for when Jutta died in 1136, Hildegard was named head of the nunnery. Shortly afterward, she became abbess, and plans were made to build a cloister on the grounds. By 1143, the new church structure was consecrated and the cloister occupied. INSET: Hildegard of Bingen.

John Cowdery Kendrew was the only child of a climatologist and an art historian at Oxford University; his childhood was spent in an academic atmosphere. He attended English public (that is, preparatory) schools, and he chose Cambridge University for the study of chemistry, with time out for service in World War II, before he did his final graduate work. His thesis work compared the structures of fetal and adult hemoglobin, which gave him experience with X-ray crystallography but no major structural conclusions. Kendrew chose myoglobin for a serious study of structure because it is about one-quarter the size of hemoglobin, which Max Ferdinand Perutz had already begun to study, and because it was relatively plentiful, being an oxygen-retention molecule found in the blood and muscles of whales. Little was known about the detailed structure of proteins when Kendrew and Perutz began their separate work. It was clear that the protein molecule, of whatever type or source, was made up of small molecules called amino acids, twenty different ones, and that these were hooked together head-to-tail in a single unbranched chain, containing from eight or ten to many thousands of amino acids. (Myoglobin contains about four hundred.) It was also known that the chains assumed secondary structures, possibly helices (pleated sheets) and what appeared to be amorphous masses. Kendrew and his coworkers tackled the structure problem using X-ray diffraction. This technique can be compared to beaming a strong light through a lattice of regularly spaced, shiny Christmas-tree balls (representing atoms); photographing the spots of light reflected off balls in the lattice; and calculating where the bails had to be, based on the pictures thus obtained. INSET: John Cowdery Kendrew.

Edward Calvin Kendall's family was professional: His father was a dentist, and his uncles were a physician and a clergyman. He was directed away from his first interest, physics, and into chemistry by his high school chemistry teacher in Stamford, Connecticut. At Columbia University, Kendall demonstrated the wisdom of this choice. After the statutory year of commercial research at Parke, Davis, and Co. in Detroit, Kendall moved to a clinical position at St. Luke's Hospital in New York City. After three years, however, he decided that he preferred the laboratory setting of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. His choice proved out quickly. Within his first year at the Mayo Clinic, working with abundant thyroid tissue from midwestern slaughterhouses, he isolated crystalline thyroxine, the iodine-rich hormone necessary for oxidation of the energy-producing small molecules produced by digestion in the mammalian body. For a decade or more, he tried to determine the chemical structure of thyroxine, but he was "scooped" in 1926 by C. R. Harington in England. After a few years spent isolating and determining the structure of the tripeptide yeast enzyme glutathione, Kendall turned to extracts of the adrenal cortex, a gland associated with the kidneys whose secretions were known to be related to animal metabolism. During the 1930's and 1940's, Kendall (as well as Tadeus Reichstein in Switzerland) isolated and demonstrated the structures of six hormones that Kendall called "Compound A" through "Compound F." These were of little clinical interest until Philip Showalter Hench tried Compound E in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. The effects were dramatic, and Compound E, renamed cortisone, quickly found applications in the treatment of rheumatic fever, allergies, skin and eye inflammations, various blood diseases, ulcerative colitis, Addison's disease, and hypopituitarism. INSET: Edward Calvin Kendall.

Donald James Cram's family moved to Brattleboro, Vermont, in 1921; two years later, his father died of pneumonia. There were five children to be fed and housed, leading Cram to an early ethic of work for money or services. It also led him to a conviction that he wanted no part of futureless, repetitive employment. At Winwood, a small private school on Long Island, Cram read all the classics, but he also played varsity sports. His undergraduate studies in chemistry at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, gave him the first hint that here might be the nonrepetitive, ever-fresh work for which he was looking. His M.S. and Ph.D. research confirmed this, and thereafter he never looked back. Teaching and research, both with their continuous surprises, would be his life. Cram began research work at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), right away, while he was still getting his feet under him in the classroom. His investigation of natural products from Merck & Co.'s penicillin studies during World War II quickly led to the observation of the retention or exact inversion of configuration (the three-dimensional structure around carbon atoms with four different groups attached to them). Cram attributed this to the bridging of two adjacent carbons by a phenonium ion (essentially a benzene ring) during the course of the reaction, so that the atoms could not rotate about their bond and thereby change their configuration. The phenonium and other bridging ions occupied the attention of Cram and his graduate students for two decades, allowed the synthesis of many biological and pharmaceutical compounds in which configuration is all-important for medicinal effectiveness, and gave birth to a broad generalization about product structure called Cram's rule. INSET: Donald J. Cram.

Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann was the son of an Austrian state civil servant in the tax (internal revenue) department who died when Ludwig was fifteen years old. Ludwig studied at the Gymnasium in Linz, then moved to the University of Vienna, where he worked under Josef Stefan and Josef Loschmidt, receiving his doctorate when he was twenty-two years old. He moved into a position at the university and remained in academia for his entire career, rising as one did in the German university of the time from fee-supported lecturer to full professor. He became world-renowned as both teacher and researcher. Early in his career, Boltzmann produced experimental work in physics. In 1872, stimulated by James Clerk Maxwell's writings on electromagnetic theory; he studied dielectrics (insulators) with the intention of confirming Maxwell's technical prediction about the index of refraction of substances. He confirmed this prediction for both solids and gases. Boltzmann also confirmed that the speed of light varies in different directions in an anisotropic crystal (one with different symmetries on the x, y, and z axes). Boltzmann also published work on diamagnetism (the property of some substances, placed in a magnetic field, to become polarized in a direction that causes them to be repelled by the field) and on electromagnetic radiation. Later, he would renew his interest in electromagnetic theory, but not in laboratory experimentation. Boltzmann's reputation rests not on his publications in experimental physics but on his deep and penetrating mathematical analyses of physical phenomena, particularly those of molecules in a gas. INSET: Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann.

The forebears of Jöns Jacob Berzelius (pronounced "bur-ZEE-lee-us") on both sides of his family were clergymen for three generations. His father died when he was four years old, and Jöns lived with various relatives thereafter. Although he was expected to study for the ministry, Berzelius was an indifferent student, preferring to collect and classify birds, flowers, and insects. His choice of medicine was almost the only one available to a science-minded student of the day; the sciences as they are now known were not offered as degree studies in the universities. Fortunately, Berzelius was introduced to chemistry by a cousin, and he worked for a time in a pharmacy where he learned glassblowing, a necessary art for chemists of the time. erzelius' work in mineral water analysis and voltaic current caused the physician Sven Hedin to recommend him in 1802 as an unpaid assistant to the professor of medicine and pharmacy at the Medical College in Stockholm. At this time, he also met Wilhelm Hisinger, a mine owner who had the money and was himself enough of a scientist to support investigations in electrochemistry and mineralogy for many years, laying the groundwork for Berzelius' later discoveries. The appointments in the Medical College finally gave Berzelius a secure position in the world of chemistry, although he spent many years repaying debts contracted through no fault of his own. The secretaryship of the Swedish Academy of Science, which in addition to a salary provided excellent laboratory facilities, consolidated his position both academically and financially. By about 1820, he began to take his place as an authority among the chemists of England and the Continent. INSET: Jöns Jacob Berzelius.

Claude Louis Berthollet (pronounced "behr-toh-LAY") was born to a family from the minor aristocracy that had fallen on hard times. His connections opened doors, however, and he became the physician to Mme de Montesson in Paris, which gave him access to a private laboratory. His work brought him to the attention of the new chemists surrounding Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and to the Académie des Sciences, where he presented seventeen memoirs between 1778 and 1780. In the latter year, he became a member of the academy. Berthollet began his career as an adherent to the "phlogiston" theory of chemistry, which held that combustible materials contained an element of fire, called phlogiston, that was released when burning took place. The "calx" that remains (for example, a metal oxide) was seen as having lost its phlogiston, but the metal could be reclaimed by transferring phlogiston from soot, oils, resins, sulfur, and the like, through heating. This doctrine was radically opposed by Lavoisier, who showed that the calx was actually heavier than the metal, contrary to what the phlogiston theory would predict. Lavoisier correctly attributed this result to reaction with atmospheric oxygen and the recovery of the metal to the removal of oxygen. Berthollet became associated with Lavoisier's school, because he thought that both sides of the argument could be modified to produce a unified chemistry. Later, he abandoned the phlogiston theory altogether. The point on which all the new chemists agreed was nomenclature, which in the 1780's was a hodgepodge of uninformative terms such as "oil of vitriol" (sulfuric acid) and "liver of sulfur" (potassium sulfide). This was replaced with a system that foreshadowed that of today, clearly identifying the elements or groups of atoms making up the compound named. The first textbook on nomenclature appeared in 1797. INSET: Claude Louis Berthollet.

Bernardo Alberto Houssay (pronounced "ew-SI") was born into an educated family of French extraction. He was bilingual in Spanish and French and showed an early interest in history, literature, and natural science. He plunged into the professional academic world by the age of seventeen and spent his entire life there. DoHoussay's M.D. thesis was typical of his research throughout his lifetime--he elected to study the pituitary because no one else was, and he constructed his own research equipment and protocols because no such things existed in Argentina at the time. Houssay was extraordinarily self-motivated, and he almost single-handedly built a research tradition in physiology in his country. His thesis was published in book form as Estudios sobre la acción de los extractos hipofisarios (1911; studies of the action of pituitary extracts), but by the time that he was appointed to the University of Buenos Aires, he had published two other studies, of snake and spider venoms and of venous blood circulation, and had investigated a number of other matters that appeared in shorter papers. INSET: Bernardo Alberto Houssay.

Robert Hutchings Goddard was born into a family of comfortable means, supported by his inventor-manufacturer father. Robert was sickly as a child and did not graduate from high school until the age of twenty-one. He was later found to have tuberculosis, which would persist throughout his life. On October 19, 1899, when Goddard was seventeen, he had a dream of almost mystical quality about space travel: It was the motivation for his lifework, and he remembered it every year on its "Anniversary Day." He began to work out the mathematical possibilities of rocket engines when he was an undergraduate and took out his first patents shortly after finishing his graduate work. During this time, Goddard also demonstrated that a rocket can function in a vacuum. A popular misunderstanding stated that the rocket could not move in space, with nothing to push "against." In fact, a rocket does not push against anything external. It is like a can with a continuous explosion inside. As long as the can is intact, internal pressure is equal in all directions, and the can does not move. If one end is removed, the pressure falls to zero at that end; the pressure at the other end is unbalanced, and that pressure drives the rocket forward. In fact, Goddard found, the rocket is more efficient in a vacuum, because its own exhaust does not get in the way of the rearward blast. Smithsonian and Guggenheim grants enabled Goddard to work as he liked: alone as a scientist, assisted by only a few technicians. His wife, Esther, a woman of considerable mental ability although untrained in science, acted as his collaborator, scribe, and sounding-board through nearly the whole of his research career. Over three decades, Goddard established almost all the engineering advances of modern rocketry. INSET: Robert Goddard.