The idea of a “breakthrough” implies a significant departure from earlier ways of thinking or doing things. Important developments in society and science occurred throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

Some of them pertain specifically to a particular country, such as the civil rights movement in the United States. Significant events included the US Supreme Court’s ending of segregation in public schools through the landmark 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education.

Others may have been achieved by one nation but have global, even universal, applications: the launching of Sputnik is an example. In 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik I. This not only transformed global communication but also launched the space race. In 1961, the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space.

Within science, possibly the most crucial breakthrough relates to the human ability to understand all life, which has been advanced by the identification of the structure of DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid. This was accomplished in 1953 by James Watson and Francis Crick based on the groundbreaking research of Rosalind Franklin; the men received the 1962 Nobel Prize, but not Franklin, who had died in 1958.