Hubbard, Edward A.; National Institutes of Health · Public domain

Christian Anfinsen showed that a protein's three-dimensional shape is dictated entirely by its amino acid sequence — that a chain of amino acids, once assembled, folds itself into a functional form without outside instruction. Known as Anfinsen's dogma, the finding came from his work on the enzyme ribonuclease and won him a share of the 1972 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, alongside Stanford Moore and William Howard Stein.