Laboratories and Institutes: Places Built for Research, 1759 to 1962

Founded in 1759 by Princess Augusta as a nine-acre garden at Kew Palace. In the 1770s Joseph Banks used his position to send plant collectors around the world, which turned a royal garden into a centre of scientific work.

Founded by decree on 4 June 1887 after Louis Pasteur appealed for funds following the public success of his rabies vaccine, and inaugurated on 14 November 1888. Pasteur directed it until his death in 1895, and it remains a private non-profit research foundation.

Began in 1890 as a summer biology school on Long Island. The Carnegie Institution later added a station for experimental evolution on the site, where Hershey and Martha Chase ran their 1952 blender experiment, and the two merged in 1962.

Founded in 1904 by George Ellery Hale with Carnegie Institution funding. Its 100-inch Hooker telescope, finished in 1917, was where Edwin Hubble showed in 1923 that Andromeda lies beyond the Milky Way.

Grew from the Institut du Radium, created in 1909 under Marie Curie, with a physics and chemistry laboratory beside a biological and medical one led by Claudius Regaud. Its building on rue d'Ulm was completed in 1914, and it merged with the Curie Foundation in 1970.

Founded on 20 March 1917 in Tokyo as a private foundation, after Jokichi Takamine proposed a national institute and Eiichi Shibusawa organised the funding. Its accelerator facility is where nihonium, element 113, was confirmed in 2004.

Formed on 1 January 1925 by combining the research of AT&T and Western Electric. This corporate laboratory produced the transistor in 1947, information theory in 1948 and the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation in 1964.

Founded in 1930 after a 1927 National Academy of Sciences committee recommended a permanent East Coast marine laboratory, with early Rockefeller Foundation support. It operates the submersible Alvin and led the 1985 identification of the Titanic wreck.

Established in 1943 as Project Y, a top-secret Manhattan Project site for designing and assembling nuclear weapons, with J. Robert Oppenheimer as scientific director.

Established by a convention ratified on 29 September 1954 by twelve Western European states, because fundamental physics needed a scale no single nation could fund. Tim Berners-Lee first proposed the World Wide Web here in 1989.

Created on 29 July 1958 by the National Aeronautics and Space Act, after Sputnik, and it absorbed the older National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. It has run the Apollo programme and the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes.

Founded in 1962 as the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Its two-mile accelerator, completed in 1966, was used in 1968 scattering experiments that gave the first direct evidence for quarks.