Let's start with medicine. In 1928 the young Scottish researcher Alexander Fleming sloppily left a lab dish growing bacteria on a bench when he went on vacation. It got contaminated with a Penicillium mold spore, and when he returned, he noticed that the mold seemed to stop the growth of the germs. His serendipitous discovery would eventually save more lives than were lost in all the century's wars combined.

Fleming serves well as a symbol of all the great medical researchers, such as Jonas Salk and David Ho, who fought disease. But he personally did little, after his initial eureka! moment, to develop penicillin. Nor has the fight against infectious diseases been so successful that it will stand as a defining achievement of the century.

The century's greater biological breakthrough was more basic. It was unceremoniously announced on Feb. 28, 1953, when Francis Crick winged into the Eagle Pub in Cambridge, England, and declared that he and his partner James Watson had "found the secret of life."

Watson had sketched out how four chemical bases paired to create a self-copying code at the core of the double-helix-shaped DNA molecule. In the more formal announcement of their discovery, a one-page paper in the journal Nature, they noted the significance in a famously understated sentence: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material." But they were less restrained when persuading Watson's sister to type up the paper for them. "We told her," Watson wrote in The Double Helix, "that she was participating in perhaps the most famous event in biology since Darwin's book."

DNA is likely to be the discovery made in the 20th century that will be the most important to the 21st. The world is just a few years away from deciphering the entire sequence of more than 100,000 human genes encoded by the 3 billion chemical pairs of our DNA. That will open the way to new drugs, genetic engineering and designer babies.

So should Watson and Crick be Persons of the Century? Perhaps. But two factors count against them. Their role, unlike that of Einstein or Churchill, would have been performed by others if they hadn't been around; indeed, competitor Linus Pauling was just months away from shouting the same eureka!. In addition, although the next century may be, this did not turn out to be a century of genetic engineering.

What about the technologists?

There's Henry Ford, who perfected ways to mass-produce the horseless carriages developed in Germany by Gottlieb Daimler and others. The car became the most influential consumer product of the century, bringing with it a host of effects good and bad: more personal freedom, residential sprawl, social mobility, highways and shopping malls, air pollution (though the end of the noxious pollution produced by horses) and mass markets for mass-produced goods.

Wilbur and Orville Wright also used the internal-combustion engine to free people from earthly bounds. Their 12-second flight in 1903 transformed both war and peace. As Bill Gates said in these pages, "Their invention effectively became the World Wide Web of that era, bringing people, languages, ideas and values together." The result was a new era of globalization.

Even more central to this globalization were the electronic technologies that revolutionized the distribution of information, ideas and entertainment. Five centuries ago, Gutenberg's advances in printing helped lead to the Reformation (by permitting people to own their own Bibles and religious tracts), the Renaissance (by permitting ideas to travel from village to village) and the rise of individual liberty (by allowing ordinary folks direct access to information). Likewise, the 20th century was transformed by a string of inventions that, building on the telegraph and telephone of the 19th century, led to a new information age.

In 1927 Philo Farnsworth was able to electronically deconstruct a moving image and transmit it to another room. "There you are," he said, "electronic television." (In the heated historical debate, both TIME and the U.S. Patent Office ended up giving him credit for the invention over his rival Vladimir Zworykin of RCA.)

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