Polska

Some discoveries are far ahead of their time. This is certainly true of one of the achievements by Jan Czochralski, one of the best-known Polish scientists abroad. Today one of his discoveries is used in the production of semi-conductors in the world's largest electronics companies, such as the Intel and Motorola (US), Samsung (Korea) or NEC (Japan). Almost all of the world's silicon, from which diodes, transistors and chips are made, is processed using a method developed by Czochralski. In 1916, he happened by accident to discover an ingenious way of growing large crystals of metal and semi-conductors. Although an application for this method was found only in the 1950s, today's electronics would be impossible without it:  none of the equipment we have all come to rely on in our daily lives - such as televisions, computers, telephones, robots, microwave ovens and quartz watches - which all require silicon chips would have been possible. In 1924 Czochralski patented the composition of a new alloy which did not contain tin, ideally suited for casting railway carriage bearings. The German railways obtained the patent for this alloy (which is why in Germany this metal is known as the "railway metal", Bahnmetal). A few years later, the USSR, USA and Czechoslovakia also bought it. Czochralski discovered big  and small things - the liquid used for  hot perms at the hairdresser's is based on his recipe. Professor Andrzej K. Tarkowski's discoveries were also far ahead of their time. During the 1960s, he collaborated with Dr. Anne McLaren of the UK. Tarkowski and McLaren studied embryos during the earliest stage of development, using mice. They were the first to grow embryos in vitro (outside the mothers' bodies), conducted various kinds of experiments on them, and then implanted them in surrogate mothers. Tarkowski was also the first to show that it is possible to direct the development of mouse embryos. He showed, for example, that it is possible to grow a healthy mouse from only half an embryo. Thanks to these studies, today pre-natal, pre-implantation diagnostics are used, making it possible to take single cells from embryos grown in vitro and determine whether or not their DNA contains dangerous mutations. Another of Tarkowski's most important achievements was to demonstrate that parthenogenesis (virgin birth) is possible in mammals - i.e. that it is possible for a living creature to develop which has been created without the participation of sperm. Tarkowski's work on parthenogenic mice was published in the authoritative journal Nature, which even featured a photograph of one such mouse on its cover. In 1983, Tarkowski developed a method of joining the cells of mice embryos by using "cell fusion", using electricity. Thirteen years later, it was that same method that was used by Ian Wilmut to implant a nucleus into a sheep's egg cell, which was how Dolly, the famous cloned sheep, was created. In 2002, Professor Tarkowski received the Japan Prize from that country's Foundation for Science and Technology, considered to be the equivalent of a Nobel Prize.