In this ongoing quest, they have helped write the history of science. Ernest Lawrence, the Lab's founder and the first of its nine Nobel prize winners, invented the cyclotron, which led to a Golden Age of particle physics and revolutionary discoveries about the nature of the universe. To this day, the Lab remains a world center for accelerator and detector innovation and design. The Lab is the birthplace of nuclear medicine and the cradle of invention for medical imaging. In the field of heart disease, Lab researchers were the first to isolate lipoproteins and the first to determine that the ratio of high density to low density lipoproteins is a strong indicator of heart disease risk.
Research here ranges across the panorama of science.
Lab scientists are among the pioneers who are helping build the Internet, at one point preventing its collapse by developing protocols to regulate traffic flow on the net. Life scientists have developed a mouse model that will allow testing of experimental treatments for human sickle cell disease. Astrophysicists are on the verge of resolving age-old questions about how our universe was created and whether it will one day end. Material scientists are working at the frontier of atomic scale engineering. Fuel cells are being developed and better lighting is moving from our labs into the marketplace.