Рустем Кадыров · CC BY 4.0

A structural biologist at Stanford who spent decades working out how the enzyme RNA polymerase reads DNA and transcribes it into messenger RNA — the first fundamental step by which genetic information gets put to use inside a cell. Detailed images of that transcription machinery in action won him the 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, for what the citation called the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription.