---
title: "List of multiple discoveries"
chunk: 7/7
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:44:22.470419+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

== 21st century ==

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. As a result, the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics was shared by Takaaki Kajita of Japan and Arthur B. McDonald of Canada.
1996: James Allison of MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas at Houston discovered a mechanism enabling cancer immunotherapy. In 2002 Tasuku Honjo of Kyoto University discovered another such mechanism. 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."
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.
2020: Half of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez, who each have led a group of astronomers focused since the early 1990s on a region at the center of the Milky Way galaxy called Sagittarius A*, finding an extremely heavy, invisible object (black hole) that pulls on a jumble of stars, causing them to rush around at dizzying speeds. Some 4 million solar masses are packed together in a region no larger than the Solar System.
2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was shared by Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, and Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Max Planck Institute, in Berlin. Passed over in the prize was Virginijus Šikšnys of Vilnius University, in Lithuania, though all three had shared the 2018 Kavli Prize for the same discovery of CRISPR gene editing.
2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was shared by David Julius, of the University of California, San Francisco, and Ardem Patapoutian, of Scripps Research, in La Jolla, California, a UCSF postdoctoral alumnus, for their independent discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch.
15 May 2025: The independent discovery of orange cats' genetic mutation appeared in Current Biology reports by a Stanford University team led by Christopher Kaelin, and by a Kyushu University team led by Hiroyuki Sasaki.

== Quotations ==
"When the time is ripe for certain things, these things appear in different places in the manner of violets coming to light in early spring."
"[Y]ou do not [make a discovery] until a background knowledge is built up to a place where it's almost impossible not to see the new thing, and it often happens that the new step is done contemporaneously in two different places in the world, independently."
"[A] man can no more be completely original ... than a tree can grow out of air."
I never had an idea in my life. My so-called inventions already existed in the environment – I took them out. I've created nothing. Nobody does. There's no such thing as an idea being brain-born; everything comes from the outside.

== See also ==

== Notes ==

== References ==

== Sources ==

== External links ==
Annals of Innovation: In the Air: Who says big ideas are rare?, Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker, 12 May 2008
The Technium: Simultaneous Invention, Kevin Kelly, 9 May 2008
Apperceptual: The Heroic Theory of Scientific Development at the Wayback Machine (archived 12 May 2008), Peter Turney, 15 January 2007
A Survey of Russian Approaches to Perebor (Brute-Force Searches) Algorithms, by B.A. Trakhtenbrot, in the Annals of the History of Computing, 6(4):384–400, 1984.
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