Dr. Linda Buck shared the Nobel Prize in medicine for helping discover odorant receptors and the organization of the olfactory system, learning more about how we smell the world around us.

Currently the Director of the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Dr. Nüsslein-Volhard is a Nobel Prize laureate for discoveries on genetic control of early embryonic development.

Gertrude Elion was a pharmacology researcher that changed the way drug research is undertaken and make it much more rigorous and less trial-and-error. Not only did she help develop numerous medications but she was award a Nobel Prize for her work.

Losing her job as an assistant in the anatomy department at the University of Turin after Mussolini passed a law in 1938 barring people of Jewish heritage from working at universities or in medicine Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini wasn’t going to let that get in the way of her research.

Often considered an outsider and rebel, Dr. Barbara McClintock was really more a visionary and very ahead of her time.

Dr. Rosalyn Sussman Yalow was able to use the radioimmunoassay methods she and a colleague developed to prove that type 2 diabetes is caused by the body’s inefficient use of insulin not a lack of insulin like had been previously thought.

Recipient of the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics, Dr. Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin was a leader in the field of molecular biology and a pioneer in the field of protein crystallography.

Dr. Maria Goeppert Mayer started off studying mathematics but switched to physics to end up doing groundbreaking work in the realm of nuclear chemistry.

Working side by side in an equal partnership for their entire careers Dr. Gerty Cori and her husband shared their work and the 1947 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

December 1 is World AIDS Day, a perfect time to examine the work and contributions of Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, a French virologist who helped discover HIV and its links to the disease today known as AIDS.