Anniversary Award cast your vote - United Kingdom

Harald zur Hausen’s discovery led to the development of vaccines that provide approximately 95 % protection from infection by HPV16 and HPV18. Since 2006 tens of millions of girls including more than 28m in the United States, have been vaccinated worldwide.

In 1991 J. Craig Venter developed expressed sequence tags, a revolutionary new strategy to rapidly discover genes. Venter is recognized for his contribution to genomic research. Many scientists predict that these discoveries may revolutionise personal medicine, pharmaceuticals, and biofuels in the coming years.

Sir Martin Evans performed pioneering research into stem cells, and used them to create mice with a specific genetic disorder. This led to the creation of “knockout” mice, which are used to model human diseases by deactivating a specific gene.

It is estimated that one-third of people tested for HIV do not return for the results. Hermes Chan and Abdullah Kirumira developed a test that produces a result in three minutes, rather than days or weeks. Both men are now developing tests for other diseases.

Marvin Caruthers' methods were licensed to Applied Biosystems, which subsequently became one of the largest life-science instrument companies in the world. Automated DNA synthesis has been essential in such fields as chromosome mapping, genomic sequencing and the study of interactions between DNA, RNA and proteins.

This is the fundamental innovation that allows genetic material from two sources to be combined, making possible the use of bacteria as drug factories and the genetic engineering of plants and animals. Herbert W. Boyer and Stanley N. Cohen had the idea while eating pastrami and corned-beef sandwiches when attending a conference in Hawaii.

In 1978, David Goeddel went to work at Genentech as its staff scientist—making him the first employee of the first biotech firm. His pioneering work in the field of gene cloning and expression research made it possible to produce insulin in the laboratory for the first time, and led to the first drug produced using recombinant DNA technology.

In 1970, Raymond Damadian found that cancerous tissues could be distinguished from healthy tissues using NMR. He went on to build the first prototype for a whole-body magnetic-resonance scanner and produced the first image of a human chest on July 3rd 1977. Now in widespread use, magnetic-resonance imaging (MRI) technology has saved hundreds of thousands of lives. The question of who most deserves the credit for its invention, however, remains controversial.

Without the automated DNA fluorescence sequencer developed in his laboratory, completing the Human Genome Project could have taken the best part of a century. Leroy Hood also had a hand in turning the project into a race. He was a co-author, in 1996, of a paper called “A New Strategy for Genome Sequencing”. This described a new way of assembling short DNA sequences into long ones and led ultimately to the creation of Celera Genomics, a company that produced a rival sequence to that of the “official” project.

PayPal was born from the merger in 1998 between X.com and Cofinity, at which Peter Thiel and Max Levchin served as chief executive and chief technology officer respectively, Paypal did not create the market for online payments but its fraud prevention and risk-management features greatly increased consumers’ confidence in making payments over the internet.

In 1991, Ratan Tata assumed the reigns of his family-run company. He is recognised as the architect of a series of bold foreign acquisitions, for increasing Tata Group’s revenue to $67 billion (by 2010) and as the man behind the birth of the world’s cheapest car, the Tata Nano.

Jimmy Wales co-founded Wikipedia, a free, online encyclopedia, in 2001. Every entry is a wiki—a special kind of web page that anyone can edit. Today versions of Wikipedia exist in more than 250 languages, containing over 10m articles (2.6m in English), making Wikipedia the largest encyclopedia ever created.

Under N.R. Narayana Murthy's leadership, Infosys developed the idea of providing computing services from India to clients around the world, often at much lower cost, paving the way for a $40 billion industry.

In 1987 Sam Pitroda was asked by Rajiv Gandhi, the Indian prime minister, to help democratise access to telecommunications. His response was to deploy instantly recognisable yellow telephone kiosks in every town and village. This helped to release India's telecoms industry from state control and opened it up to private firms, paving the way for a technology boom. He now promotes similar policies in other countries.

Innocentive is an online forum that brings “solution seekers”, who post descriptions of technical problems they need to solve, together with “problem solvers” who try to solve them in order to win an associated bounty. Around $1.6m in potential rewards are currently listed on the innocentive.com website, which is used by over 80,000 researchers

John Cioffi was a 22-year old engineer when he first calculated that high-speed data transmission, at speeds of up to 1.5 megabits per second, was possible over copper telephone lines. He was laughed at. Dr Cioffi’s research at Stanford University in the late 1980’s laid the foundations for today’s digital subscriber line (DSL) technology, now the most widespread form of broadband in the world.

In 1974 Ray Kurzweil launched Kurzweil Computer Products and led development of the first omni-font OCR system, a computer program capable of recognizing text written in any normal font. In 2009 the global market for advanced speech recognition in mobile handsets was predicted to increase from US$32.7 in 2009 to US$99.6 million in 2014.

Matti Makkonen is a Finnish engineer who is credited with inventing SMS, which allows short messages to be sent between mobile phones. He proposed the idea in the 1980s while working at Finland’s telecoms authority. Billions of text messages are now sent every day.

Mr Lazaridis had the original idea for the BlackBerry in his basement, and the first device, with its distinctive miniature keyboard, launched in 1999. There are now over 11m BlackBerry devices in use around the world.

Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström’s innovation led to the development of internet file-sharing and telephony using peer-to-peer technology, which allows millions of computers to link up over the internet without central co-ordination. In 2000 they launched KaZaA, which became the dominant means of sharing music and video files, despite attempts by the entertainment industry to shut it down. Skype, launched in 2003, lets users make free phone calls over the internet, forcing traditional telecoms operators to slash their prices.

Few companies become so integrated into everyday life that their names become verbs, and none has done so as quickly as Google, which combined a superior method of ranking search results with an advertising-based business model to pay the bills. The firm is widely seen as the new Microsoft—which is both an accolade and a warning.

Considered the father of Wi-Fi Vic Hayes chaired the IEEE 802.11 committee, which was set up in 1990 to establish a wireless networking standard. Wi-Fi now enables wireless connectivity in millions of homes, schools and offices, and an increasing number of hotels and airports.

Linus Torvalds released the first version of the Linux kernel in 1991, when he was a 21-year-old computer-science student at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He made the source code behind Linux freely available so that others could modify it to suit their needs, or contribute their own improvements. Linux now runs on millions of devices from handhelds to mainframes, and has attracted wide industry support.

In 1959, Paul Baran began to think about ways to make America's communications infrastructure resistant to a nuclear attack. He proposed using a system called “distributed adaptive message block switching”, known today as packet switching. This involves breaking digital information into small chunks, or packets, and sending them separately over the network, thus doing away with centralised switching centres and enabling the network to work even when partly destroyed. His idea was initially ignored and was only given its first proper test in 1969, when it was used as the basis for ARPANET, an experimental computer network that later grew into the internet.

Tim Berners-Lee proposed a scheme to enable electronic documents to link to other documents stored on other computers. This idea, which later grew into the world wide web, started out as a program called Enquire, which he wrote for his own use while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. Tim went on to write the first web browser and web server, both of which he gave away on the internet, along with details of the protocols to describe and transmit web pages. Today the web consists of billions of pages and is used by hundreds of millions of people.

James Gosling started Sun's “Green Project”, with the aim of producing an operating system for the consumer-electronics industry. Out of this came the Java programming language. With the emergence of the World Wide Web, Java became popular because of the ability of any application written in the language to be delivered over the Internet irrespective of the kind of computer or operating system it was to run on. James Gosling is recognised the world over as the father of the Java programming language.

James Gosling started Sun's “Green Project”, with the aim of producing an operating system for the consumer-electronics industry. Out of this came the Java programming language. With the emergence of the World Wide Web, Java became popular because of the ability of any application written in the language to be delivered over the Internet irrespective of the kind of computer or operating system it was to run on. James Gosling is recognised the world over as the father of the Java programming language.

Steve Jobs directly oversees all product design and development at Apple and led the team that created the iPhone, which was launched in 2007. The iPhone is not just a phone but a platform. Its operating system is derived from the OS X Software found in Apple’s Macintosh computers, which makes it capable of heavy-duty computing tasks. The iPhone’s app store lets users download new software easily.

In 1975 Steve Sasson built the world’s first digital camera but it wasn’t taken to market. In 2009 digital cameras generated $6.6 billion worth of sales worldwide.

YouTube, founded in 2005, lets users upload video files via broadband connections. They can then be viewed on YouTube’s own site, or embedded in pages on other sites. Viewers can add comments and ratings. YouTube quickly became a cultural phenomenon and is now the most popular video site on the internet.

From the creation of “Donkey Kong” in 1981 to the establishment of the “Mario” and “Zelda” franchises in the 1980s and the current success of DS hand-held and Wii motion-sensing games consoles, Mr Miyamoto helped to bring into being, and then redefined, a new industry.

During the 1980s Switzerland's legendary watch industry fell into decline, with exports falling by half within a decade as a result of Japanese competition. Mr Hayek's response was to consolidate the industry to create the Swatch Group. It went on to beat the Japanese at their own game, creating the bestselling watch brand in history and becoming the largest watchmaker in the world, with a quarter of the market.

When Apple launched the iPod in October 2001, it was widely derided. Who would buy such an expensive device, and why did Apple think it could take on Sony? But Apple had the last laugh. The iPod became an iconic product, and Apple is staying ahead of its rivals with further innovations.

Michael Biddle founded Micheal Biddle & Associates in his garage to demonstrate that it was possible to recycle plastics that were mixed with other materials. MBA Polymers (renamed in 1994) recovers materials from a variety of highly comingled sources such as scrapped office equipment. Some 50mn tons of plastic are used annually in the United States, but less than 5% of plastics from complex streams are recycled. Between 2007 and 2010, MBA recovered more than 50,000 tons of plastic.

In 1985 Richard Swanson founded SoftPower Corporation to commercialise the solar-cell technology he developed while a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford engineering at Stanford University. Solar power has grown by an average of 40% a year since the beginning of the decade with global solar installations expanding from 600 megawatts in 2003 to nearly 3,000 megawatts in 2008.

Arthur Rosenfeld is considered a founding father of the energy-efficiency movement. He established the Center for Building Science at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and helped to develop more efficient lighting, low-emissivity windows and software to analyse the energy use of buildings.

George Craford and Roland Haitz helped to move LEDs, which are far more energy efficient than conventional bulbs, into new markets such as traffic lights and domestic illumination.

In 1987 Johannes Poulsen took the helm at Vestas, then a small Danish firm with 60 employees. By the time he retired in 2002, Vestas had 5,000 employees and a quarter of the world market for wind turbines. Under Mr Poulsen, Vestas greatly improved the efficiency of wind turbines, reducing costs and making wind power more competitive.

This is the battery technology found in hybrid cars, laptop computers and many other devices, and is just one of the many innovations devised by Stanford Ovshinsky, a self-taught inventor who pioneered the field of amorphous materials in the 1950s. He is now focusing on solar panels and hydrogen-powered cars.

In 1994, Takeshi Uchiyamada joined Toyota's project to develop an eco-friendly car for the 21st century. He became chief engineer for the Prius, the world's first mass-produced petrol-electric hybrid car, in 1996. Given a free hand in the design, his team developed a continuously variable transmission system that allows the petrol engine and electric motor to work separately or in tandem. The hybrid design improves fuel efficiency and dramatically cuts emissions. By 2003, Prius sales had topped 150,000 units worldwide.

Geoffrey Ballard began research into fuel cells as a means of addressing the problem of smog in large cities. Fuel cells combine stored hydrogen with oxygen from the air to generate electricity, water vapour and no harmful emissions. Modern fuel cells are expected to power a new breed of electric vehicles, by overcoming the cost, size and weight limitations of batteries. In 1979 Dr Ballard co-founded Ballard Power Systems to develop, commercialise and market fuel cells. The firm now has partnerships with companies including DaimlerChrysler and Ford, and has supplied fuel cells to Honda, Mitsubishi, Nissan and Volkswagen.

Diesel engines have always been more fuel-efficient than petrol engines. But what prevented them from being used more widely was the noise and pollution they produced—caused mainly by the way the fuel in diesel car engines could not be burned at a steady rate. In 1990, Rinaldo Rinolfi's team at Fiat solved the problem with a common rail injection system. This used a high-pressure pump to feed fuel into a manifold (or rail), allowing the injection pressure to remain steady no matter how fast or slowly the car was moving. As a result, the temperature within the cylinders remains hot enough to burn the fuel thoroughly, reducing both engine noise (ie, detonation) and noxious emissions. Fiat sold the common rail technology (called Unijet) to Bosch in 1994.

In 1996 Peter Diamandis offered a $10mn dollar prize to the first privately finance team that could build and fly a reuseable spacecraft. The prize was collected by Mojave Aerospace Ventures in 2004. Mr Diamandis founded the X-Prize Foundation to revive the practice of offering prizes to spark innovation. Its aim is to bring about radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity by creating and managing prizes that encourage innovators to solve some of the world’s greatest challenges.

In 2004 Mark Zuckerberg started the social networking site Facebook from his dorm room at Harvard University. At that time it was only available to Harvard students. Today Facebook has more than More than 500 million active users, 50% of its active users log on to Facebook in any given day and people spend over 700 billion minutes per month on the site.

Dr Iijima discovered carbon nanotubes in 1991 while working as a researcher at NEC. They are the strongest and stiffest materials known, with many unique properties. They are being applied in catalysts, batteries, fuel cells, solar cells and drug delivery.

Discovered independently by Peter Grünberg and Albert Fert in 1988, the GMR effect was subsequently developed for commercial use by Stuart Parkin of IBM. By increasing the sensitivity of the sensors used to read data for magnetic disks, the GMR effect boosted hard-disk capacity, cutting the cost of storage and eventually making possible the first iPod.

Peter Omidyar set up eBay in 1995 with the aim of creating a marketplace accessible to any internet user. The business was profitable by 1996. People all over the world buy and sell items in 45,000 categories; some even make a living trading on eBay.

In 1984, Fujio Masuoka invented the low-cost, low-power, non-volatile storage technology that can today be found inside mobile phones, music players and many other devices. He sued Toshiba, his employer at the time, for $9m, which he believed was his fair share of the $180m the firm had earned from his work.

In 1981 Gerd Binnig, Heinrich Rohrer, and Christoph Gerber developed the STM, a device that made it possible to image and study structures and processes on the atomic scale and in three dimensions (see article). The STM, which now exists in dozens of variants, is a vital research tool in such fields as materials science, nanotechnology and microbiology. In 1986, Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer shared half of the Nobel prize in physics for their work in developing the STM.

Harald zur Hausen’s discovery led to the development of vaccines that provide approximately 95 % protection from infection by HPV16 and HPV18. Since 2006 tens of millions of girls including more than 28m in the United States, have been vaccinated worldwide.

Shuji Nakamura, working for a tiny company, Nichia Chemical Industries, on an island off western Japan, single-handedly developed the first commercial blue and violet semiconductor lasers, using gallium-nitride technology. The achievement was one of the most important leaps in the design of solid-state lasers. The wavelength of blue light is about half that of typical infra-red semiconductor lasers found in CD players and laser printers. The use of blue lasers therefore allows manufacturers to triple or even quadruple the amount of data that can be stored on a CD. Blue lasers also endow laser printers with resolutions even better than they have today. When Dr Nakamura left Nichia Chemical for a chair at University of California, Santa Barbara, sales of blue LEDs (light-emitting diodes) and lasers were bringing the firm more than $200m a year.

Stephen Fodor, while head of research at Affymax Technologies, a pharmaceuticals company based in the Netherlands, led a team that discovered ways of using photolithographic techniques from the semiconductor industry to direct the synthesis of biochemical compounds on chips primed with light-sensitive molecules. The technology was spun out and commercialised by Affymetrix of Santa Clara, California, which Dr Fodor now runs. The company's GeneChip can synthesise huge numbers of small DNA molecules rapidly and cheaply on a sliver of quartz measuring no more than one centimetre square. GeneChips are used widely today for performing tests such as detecting drug-resistance mutations in infectious organisms and monitoring human genes for cancer-associated mutations. The GeneChip has already led to the discovery of a new leukaemia.

IN 2007 Nick Hughes, a former employee of Vodafone, and Susie Lonie, a mobile-commerce expert, developed a scheme to allow people without a bank account to transfer money electronically. The scheme, M-PESA, (M is for mobile ; pesa is Swahili for money) allows people to transfer money using a mobile phone, even if they don’t have a bank account, using software installed on a special SIM card that works on even the most basic handsets. Cash transfers are handled by a network of retail agents, rather than bank branches. In 2010 the scheme had over 12m customers, over 18,000 agents in Kenya and had transferred more than 432 billion Kenyan shillings ($5.4 billion) since its launch.

The Vestergaard Frandsen, profit-for-a-purpose company, used to create hotel and supermarket uniforms. Born from Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen’s desire to solve some of the underdeveloped world’s greatest health problems, its products are now in use in refugee camps and disaster areas all over the world. They include Permanet, a mosquito bed net impregnated with insecticide; Zerofly, a tent tarp that kills flies; and a Lifestraw, a filter worn around the neck that makes dirty water safe to drink.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was created in 2000 with a mission to improve lives around the world. As well as applying a rigorous, businesslike approach to philanthropy, it provides an enabling platform for other non-profit organisations. It focuses on improving health, reducing poverty and increasing access to technology in public libraries.

Founded in 1998, CelTel grew to become Africa's second-largest mobile operator and was sold in 2005 to MTC of Kuwait for $3.4 billion. As well as boosting economic activity via mobile phones, CelTel showed that it is possible to build a multi-billion dollar African company in an industry other than oil or mining.

Hernando de Soto argues that bureaucracy and the lack of formal property rights are major causes of poverty in developing countries. Red tape and the lack of legal title to property, preventing its use as collateral, make it hard for the poor to establish or expand businesses. While serving as economic adviser to the Peruvian government, Mr de Soto initiated a property-titling scheme which helped 1.2m families. Similar reforms have been implemented in El Salvador, Haiti, Tanzania and Egypt. Mr de Soto has also championed the use of league tables to shame governments into cutting red tape.

In 2000, Victoria Hale founded the non-profit pharmaceutical company to develop treatments for “orphan” diseases neglected by traditional drugmakers. OneWorld develops drugs based on donated or royalty-free intellectual property, and is in final-stage testing of a promising new therapy to cure visceral leishmaniasis in India.

Muhammed Yunus is the managing director of Grameen Bank, whose 1,300 branches serve more than 3.5m people in 46,000 villages in Bangladesh. He devised the concept of rural microcredit, the practice of making small loans to individuals without collateral. Typical customers are women who borrow $30 to start a small business by, for example, buying a sewing machine. Grameen's repayment rate is 98%. The microcredit model has been emulated in 50 countries around the world, including America.