Carbon dating

Carbon dating is based on the fact that living organisms—like trees, plants, people and animals—absorb carbon-14 into their tissue. When they die, the carbon-14 starts to change into other atoms over time. Scientists can estimate how long the organism has been dead by counting the remaining carbon-14 atoms. The technique was developed by a team led by University of Chicago chemist Willard Libby, who would later receive the Nobel Prize for innovative work.

The breakthrough introduced a new scientific rigor to archaeology, allowing scholars to piece together a history of humans across the world and prove that civilizations originated simultaneously around the globe. We could reconstruct how different cities and cultures rose, flourished and fell.

Carbon dating has helped us reveal how our bodies work, understand the climate of the Earth and reconstruct its history, and to track meteorites, the sun’s activity, and the Earth’s magnetic fields. Radiocarbon dating was also instrumental in the discovery of human-caused climate change, as scientists used it to track the sources of carbon in the atmosphere over time.

As Kenneth Pitzer wrote in his nomination for the Nobel Prize: “Seldom has a single discovery in chemistry had such an impact on the thinking in so many fields of human endeavor.”

Cancer Research

In 1972, Janet Rowley was a young scientist and physician at the University of Chicago interested in studying cancer and inherited diseases. Poring over photographs of chromosomes taken from the malignant cells of leukemia patients, she noticed something odd: Two chromosomes had consistently swapped genetic material in each of the patients. In patient after patient, she found the identical genetic swap, known as a translocation.

This was the moment that established cancer as a genetic disease—the result of changes in a cell's genetic material. At the time, cancer was not thought to be a genetic disease. But by 1990, more than 70 translocations had been identified and linked to different cancers.

Rowley’s discoveries fundamentally changed the way cancer was understood and treated. Her work opened the door to the development of targeted drugs and created a model that still drives cancer research.

Today, scientists at the University of Chicago continue to build upon Rowley’s work. From advancing immunotherapy—a treatment that uses the body’s own immune system to detect and destroy cancer—to planning the city’s first freestanding clinical cancer center, UChicago continues to deepen our knowledge and develop innovative new treatments in the fight against these complex diseases. 

Explore UChicago Library’s archival collections on cancer researchers:

• Prof. Janet Rowley's papers
• Assoc. Prof. Maud Slye's papers

Social Work

Social workers engage in a range of professional activities. Some work directly with individuals, families or groups to address a wide range of social issues. Others lead social service or community organizations, conduct research to inform social policies and practice, or lead government policymaking efforts.

As a profession, “social work” didn’t exist until the late 19th century. As people crowded into cities seeking opportunities, poverty and poor labor conditions were rampant. These dire conditions inspired social reformers to take action.

Among those reformers were Sophonisba Breckinridge and sisters Edith and Grace Abbott. They joined settlement houses—institutions that provided child care and basic health services to the communities around them. They also conducted social science research, a radical approach at the time, to uncover the root causes of social problems.

These settlements inspired the creation of schools designed to train a professional corps of social workers. In 1920, when Breckinridge and Abbott guided the merger of the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy with the University of Chicago, they fulfilled their vision that social work education should be conducted “in close connection with a good university (and because) the modern university also needs such a school.”

Today, that school—now known as the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice—is widely recognized as one of the top social work schools in the United States. Its faculty and students build on a tradition of integrating research, education, and direct intervention to address the most pressing social challenges and to advance a more just and humane world.

Explore UChicago Library’s archival collections on social work

• Papers of Edith and Grace Abbott

• Papers of Sophonisba Breckinridge