Chomolungma, known in the West as Mount Everest, is the world's highest peak. It stands on the Nepal-Tibet border and has two summits. One is 29,028 feet (8,848 meters) high, and the other is 28,700 feet (8,748 meters) high. The taller peak was named in 1865 for Sir George Everest, British surveyor-general of India. The exact height of the mountain was not definitely established until 1952-55 by the Survey of India.

The first two individuals to reach the top of Everest were Tensing Norkay of Nepal and Sir Edmund Hillary of New Zealand. Attempts to climb to the top had begun in the early 1920s, but none were successful until Hillary and Norkay reached the summit on May 29, 1953. The expedition was sponsored by the Royal Geographical Society and the Joint Himalayan Committee of the Alpine Club in Great Britain. The first woman to reach the summit was Junko Tabei of Japan, accompanied by Ang Tsering of Nepal in 1975.

The full name of DNA is deoxyribonucleic acid. It carries the codes of genetic information that transmit inherited characteristics to successive generations of living things. DNA was discovered in 1869 by Friedrich Miescher. In 1943 its role in inheritance was demonstrated. In 1953 its structure was determined by an American biochemist, James D. Watson, and an English physicist, Francis H.C. Crick. Watson and Crick showed the structure to be two strands of a phosphoryl-deoxyribose polymer arranged as a double helix. Watson and Crick were awarded the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine in 1962.