page_title: List of multiple discoveries
section_title: 21st century
hierarchical_section_title: List of multiple discoveries / 21st century
caption_attribution_description: Nobel Laureates in Medicin 2018, Stockholm, Sweden, December 2018 Press conference.
context_page_description: Historians and sociologists have remarked the occurrence, in science, of "multiple independent discovery". Robert K. Merton defined such "multiples" as instances in which similar discoveries are made by scientists working independently of each other. "Sometimes," writes Merton, "the discoveries are simultaneous or almost so; sometimes a scientist will make a new discovery which, unknown to him, somebody else has made years before."
  Commonly cited examples of multiple independent discovery are the 17th-century independent formulation of calculus by Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and others, described by A. Rupert Hall; the 18th-century discovery of oxygen by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Joseph Priestley, Antoine Lavoisier and others; and the theory of the evolution of species, independently advanced in the 19th century by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace.
  Multiple independent discovery, however, is not limited to such famous historic instances. Merton believed that it is multiple discoveries, rather than unique ones, that represent the common pattern in science.
context_section_description: In 2001 four different authors published different implementations of a distributed hash table.
  The Super Kamiokande and SNOLAB collaborations, whose findings were published in 1998 and 2001 respectively, both proved that neutrinos have mass. The 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics was shared by Takaaki Kajita of Japan and Arthur B. McDonald of Canada as a result.
  James Allison of MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas at Houston discovered a mechanism enabling cancer immunotherapy in 1996. Tasuku Honjo of Kyoto University discovered another such mechanism in 2002. This outcome, which led to them sharing the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been described as follows. "Each independently discovered that our immune system is restrained from attacking tumors by molecules that function as 'brakes.'  Releasing these brakes (or 'brake receptors') allows our body to powerfully combat cancer."
  In 2014, Paul Erdős' conjecture about prime gaps was proved by Kevin Ford, Ben Green, Sergei Konyagin, and Terence Tao, working together, and independently by James Maynard.
caption: Allison
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