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The Jewish Hall of Fame

One person in 500.

There are fewer than sixteen million Jews alive — about one person in every five hundred on Earth.

Draw the world as five hundred people and the entire Jewish population of the planet is one of them.

The world drawn as five hundred people, one of them JewishA grid of five hundred small human figures, each standing for about sixteen million people alive. Four hundred and ninety-nine are drawn in grey; the last one, in the bottom right corner, is gold, and it is the world's Jews.this one is Jewish ↑
Five hundred figures, one for every sixteen million people alive. One of them is Jewish. Not a rounding artifact, just the size of the population. Figures from Pew Research Center, 2020.

Contributions to medicine.

The same one in five hundred that all but vanishes in a crowd still keeps showing up in the lab coat.

Polio, tuberculosis, mRNA — a small sample of what's in this room.

Polio vaccineBlood typesmRNA vaccinesKrebs cycleStreptomycinChemotherapyOncogenesMonoclonal antibodiesPsychoanalysisPrionsCognitive therapyDendritic cellsNerve growth factorRadioimmunoassayHepatitis B vaccineLeukemia drugs

Every word traces to someone already in the collection — Salk, Weissman, Ehrlich, Waksman, Landsteiner, Levi-Montalcini, Beck, Blumberg, Krebs, Milstein, Prusiner, Steinman, Varmus, Yalow, Elion and Freud.

Contributions to science and technology.

Keep going, and the pattern holds in physics, mathematics and computing too.

Relativity, the transformer, the double helix — the room keeps getting bigger.

RelativityFrequency hoppingFeynman diagramsAtomic structureNoether's theoremAmmonia synthesisNuclear fissionGame theoryThe transformerThe double helixFree softwareArtificial intelligenceReading machinesThree Laws of RoboticsBehavioral economicsNuclear winter

Every word traces to someone already in the collection — Einstein, Lamarr, Feynman, Bohr, Noether, Haber, Meitner, von Neumann, Shazeer, Franklin, Stallman, Minsky, Kurzweil, Asimov, Kahneman and Sagan.