The following cases are opportunities for development:
Chemistry | Physics | Earth Science | Biology

Biology

• dissection and modern anatomy

Katherine Parks, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection

• Richard Lower on the "life-force" (air, heat) of the blood (1669)

Robert Frank, Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists

• interpreting animal motion mechanically

D.D.Chene, 2005, "Mechanisms of Life in the Seventeenth Century: Borelli, Perrault, Regis"

• interpreting the chemistry of living things:

Franciscus Sylvius & iatrochemistry

• Walter Charleton and nutrition (1659)

• Louis Pasteur & the anthrax vaccine

• origin of standardized lab white mice

Katherine Rader, Making Mice

• fruit flies -- and their role in multiple research projects

Robert Kohler, Lords of the Fly

• evolution before Darwin (Chambers' Vestiges of Creation)

James Secord, Victorian Sensation (2000)

• Darwin & evolution of sexuality in barnacles (1854)

• Darwin & experiments on hybridization (1876)

• Darwin & the expression of emotions (1872)

• craniology

• Eugene DuBois & "Java man"

• Archibold Garrod & heritable protein deficiencies

• William Rose & the essential amino acids

• Huxley & the sliding filament theory of muscle contraction

• Paul and Anne Ehrlich & The Population Bomb

• Hamilton Smith & "endonuclease R"

• Robert Trivers & "reciprocal altruism"

• Walter Stoeckenius & bacteriorhodopsin

• Tycho Brahe's system and community

Christianson, On Tycho's Island (2000)

• Galileo, Kepler and mariners on the tides

• Fredrich Mohs & the hardness scale

• Louis Agassiz, glaciers and ice ages

• Kelvin and the age of the Earth

• discovery of Uranus or Neptune

• paleomagnetic time-scale (& continental drift)

William Glen, The Road to Jaramillo

• the rise and fall of Pluto as a planet

• Keith Runcorn, polar wandering & continental drift

• Maria Tharp & mapping the ocean floor

• James Hansen & global warming

• Robert Hooke, the watchspring and "Hooke's law" -- including a priority dispute

Lisa Jardine, The Curious Life of Robert Hooke: The Man Who Measured London (2004)

• origin of Snel's law of refraction -- also theories of light, motion and 'laws" themselves

• Benjamin Franklin and electricity

• electricity as a fluid (or 2 fluids!)

• discovery of the electron

Buckwald & Warwick, Histories of the Electron

• Eddington & testing the gravitational bending of light

• Fizzeau & the speed of light

• semiconductors and transistors

• masers and lasers

• early glass making (and ceramic glazes)

• early adhesives, including mortars & sealing materials

• early metallurgy of iron, bronze or brass

• women & "household chemistry," 1500-1600s

• Robert Boyle and the politics of the vacuum

Steve Shapin and Simon Shaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump

• Wilhelm Homberg and acid & alkali strengths

• alchemy in early America

Principe & Neumann, John Starkey

• discovery of chlorine

Hasok Chang and Catherine Johnson, An Element of Controversy: The Life of Chlorine in Science, Medicine, Technology and War

• solutions and "affinities"

Mi Gyung Kim, Affinity, That Elusive Dream (2003)

• Joseph Black & latent heat & heat capacity

• Joseph Priestley & the isolation and identification of gases

• Antoine Lavoisier, inside and outside science

• Lavoisier's concept of acidity

• Lavoisier & the origins of calorimetry

• concept of heat

Stephen Brush, What is This Thing Called Heat?

• Berzelius and the electrical atom

• Humphrey Davy, electrochemistry and the discovery of sodium and potassium

• Kelvin and the origin of absolute zero temperature

• concept of temperature and its measurement

Chang, Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress

• concept of energy

• Justus Liebig & the elemental composition of organic compounds

• Kekule & isomers

• Edward Frankland & valences

• Louis Pasteur & optical activity

• Jacobus Van' t Hoff & stereochemistry

• Gilbert Lewis & the octet rule

• William Ramsay, John Rayleigh & inert gases