At 100 she looked back. Each decade a new discovery. Ten Nobel prizes, she built a house around them, as reporters snaked across the lawn. First physics, then biology, and in each lab someone proposed marriage. She turned them all down then turned back to her bench, her fume cupboard, her centrifuge. At forty she became an inorganic chemist; at fifty she took to aeronautical design. At sixty she sighed, but at sixty-one, pressed on. Retirement came and went. Asked at 89, did she have regrets, she laughed and laughed, then took up molecular gastronomy.
Photography: Robert Aichinger