Elizabeth Svoboda

When Lisbeth Ceriani was diagnosed with breast cancer, she wanted a blood test to find out if she carried one of the two dreaded BRCA genes, which could increase her risk of ovarian cancer by up to 50 percent. She decided that if she were a carrier, she would have doctors remove her ovaries. But the sole purveyor of the BRCA tests, Utah-based Myriad Genetics, refused her insurance. Myriad holds the patent on the BRCA genes, and thus exclusive R&D rights, so there were no alternative tests, and Ceriani found herself unable to make a decision about her future health.

Surgical solutions for restoring lush locks have always involved a painful trade-off — transplanting hairs from the rear of your head to the top could leave you thin in the back. But Bessam Farjo, a hair-loss specialist at the British company Intercytex, has devised a less barbaric fix: cloning patients' hair cells. "The concept is to create a limitless supply of donor hair," Farjo says.

Trapped on a high floor? Reach for today's featured Invention Award winner.

As the 9/11 inferno unfolded on television, one question kept dogging Kevin Stone: Why weren't the people trapped in the World Trade Center able to make their way to safety? "I said to myself, This is crazy," recalls Stone, an orthopedic surgeon and seasoned inventor in San Francisco. "There should be a better way to exit a skyscraper when something like this happens."

What if you knew that a ten-minute podium presentation could alter your life's course for decades? Seasoned entrepreneurs sweat out this kind of tension when they make elevator pitches to venture capitalists. But at the Pete Conrad Spirit of Innovation Awards Summit, the presenters on the hot seat are all between 14 and 18 years old.

"Here's what happens when we turn on the light," Karl Deisseroth says. He points to a mouse, ordinary save for the thin optical fiber protruding through its skull. When a lab tech presses a lever, blue light shoots through the fiber, and the mouse -- which had been sauntering straight ahead -- starts to run in circles. "He's doing that because the blue light turns the neural circuit on," Deisseroth explains. "As soon as we stop the stimulation, he'll walk straight again."

In late 2005, cardiac researcher Doris Taylor revived the dead. She rinsed rat hearts with detergent until the cells washed away and all that remained was a skeleton of tissue translucent as wax paper—a ghost heart, as Taylor calls it. She injected the scaffold with fresh heart cells from newborn rats. Then she waited.