Donald Glaser

The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Glaser invented the bubble chamber in 1952 while a young physicist at the University of Michigan, reportedly inspired by watching bubbles form in a glass of beer. The device let physicists photograph the tracks of subatomic particles and became the workhorse of particle physics, earning him the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physics at age 34. He later switched fields entirely, moving into molecular biology and then neurobiology at Berkeley.