In 1921, two researchers from Canada, Frederick Grant Banting (1891 - 1941) and Charles Herbert Best (1899 - 1978), made an incredible discovery - insulin. This hormone is very important because it regulates blood sugar levels in the human body. Persons suffering from diabetes are unable to maintain safe levels and are at risk of comas and death. After the discovery of insulin, however, it was found that injections of the hormone and a well-controlled diet could help people to lead a regular lifestyle.

Banting was later knighted in 1934 and became Sir Frederick Grant Banting. Sadly, on his way to England in 1941, he was killed in a plane crash.

Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955) was born on March 14, 1879, in Germany. In 1905, Einstein published his theory of relativity in "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies." Among his other publications included The Meaning of Relativity. His research eventually earned him worldwide fame and a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921.

Despite the fact that he was born in Germany, he woulSd not stay in his mother country forever. Einstein, who was a patent clerk and Jewish, immigrated to the U.S. in 1933 after Adolf Hitler seized control of Germany. In the U.S. he taught at Princeton University in New Jersey. In 1939, Einstein helped to inform Franklin Roosevelt, then President of the U.S., that Germany was possibly creating atomic weapons. The Advisory Committee on Uranium was created and the Manhattan Project, as the plan to develop atomic bombs was code-named, went into effect.

Clarence Birdseye (1886 - 1956), a naturalist, developed a way of freezing food while maintaining its flavor and nutritional benefits. The frozen foods, packaged in rectangular-shaped containers, became quite handy.

He came upon his discovery while working near the Arctic for the American government. Birdseye found that immediately frozen meat kept its flavor. Creating a business in 1922, Birdseye Seafoods, Inc., he further improved his discovery. His new findings were used to create another company, the General Seafood Corporation. Despite Birdseye's death on October 8, 1956, Birds Eye remained in business and is still functioning today.

During the 1920's, a courtroom case in the United States changed the public's view of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution forever. This particular trial would also be the first-ever to be broadcast live on radio.

In 1925, a Tennessee biology teacher named John Thomas Scopes was put on trial for teaching evolution. In the previous two years, Tennessee had been among several states in the U.S. to have fundamentalists propose laws to make teaching evolution illegal. The American Civil Liberties Union, with Clarence Seward Darrow (1857 - 1938) as its lawyer decided to defend Scopes. On the opposing side, William Jennings Bryan fought for Tennessee and against evolution in the classroom. Despite the fact that Scopes eventually lost a trial that he never testified at and was charged $100.00, Darrow was seen as the superior lawyer. Bryan, a three-time presidential candidate was humiliated and outsmarted. Only five days after the trial had ended, Bryan passed away. The outcome of the "Monkey Trial" was later changed; a technicality was found.

John Logie Baird (1888 – 1946), a Scottish engineer, held several jobs throughout his lifetime: shoe shiner, salesman, and electrical engineer. His most appreciated accomplishment, however, is not a clean shoe. It is the Baird Televisor: the first working system of television. While developing his invention, the founder of the Television Development Company became a pioneer when he transmitted the image of a boy in action. In 1926, Baird displayed his breakthrough creation in London at the Royal Institution. Within two years, he would also become the first person to transmit images to and from London and New York. These were not the Scot’s only contributions, however. He also created the stereoscopic television, electrical recordings (of images), and the color television.

The first American to transmit pictures of a moving object was Charles Francis Jenkins. He accomplished this feat in 1927.

In the summer of 1928, Alexander Fleming (1881 - 1955), a British scientist, discovered green and yellow mold on a culture plate of Staphylococcus bacterium. This discovery would eventually earn Fleming and two other scientists, chemist Ernst Boris Chain and pathologist Howard Walter Florey, a Nobel prize in 1945. In 1944, King George VI had knighted Fleming.

What was all the commotion behind green and yellow mold? The mold that Fleming discovered growing on a left-out culture plate had eliminated some of the Staphylococcus. Afterwards, he isolated Penicillin notatum and cultivated it, finding that the mold was deadly to other bacteria as well. Alexander Fleming had discovered the world's first antibiotic.

In 1929, Fleming published a report on penicillin and its antibacterial characteristics. Aside from the discovery, Fleming did not continue work on the antibiotic. Two other scientists, Ernst Chain and Howard Florey, however, went on to purify penicillin for medical purposes. Their advances would rescue the lives of servicemen fighting in World War II.

Sir Alexander Fleming was born on August 6, 1881, in Ayrshire, Scotland. He studied at Saint Mary's Hospital Medical School and graduated in 1908. Previous to Fleming's discovery, his research had included attempts at slowing and stopping infections. At the time of his find, the scientist had been working with Staphylococcus bacterium, trying to reproduce the works of another researcher. Fleming died of a heart attack on March 11, 1955, in London.