History books

Tucked behind the circulation desk inside Rockefeller’s Rita and Frits Markus Library, readers can find Rockefeller student dissertations dating back to 1959, the year of the university’s first convocation. On this storied bookcase sits early work that developed into biomedical breakthroughs, from revealing the chemical structure of antibodies to demystifying the circadian clock to explicating how humans regulate body weight. Among the authors are now two Nobel laureates, 27 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 36 members of the National Academy of Sciences, along with researchers who have achieved countless other noteworthy distinctions.