In recent days the world learned the names of those men and women honored with the three science Nobel Prizes. The breakthroughs for which these prizes were awarded—the development of blue light-emitting diodes (LEDs), game-changing advances in light microscopes, and the discovery of an “inner GPS” in the brain—have revolutionized light sources, imaging for biomedicine, and our understanding of how our brains create spatial sense of the world around us.

One might think the process of scientific discovery is straightforward, swift and inexorable. In truth, these three words rarely apply to any research, and even less so to fundamental, curiosity-driven research that pushes the boundaries of human knowledge. The 2014 Nobel Prizes provide striking examples.

British-American scientist John O’Keefe’s 1971 discovery of “place cells,” neurons that track particular places in the environment, required a decade of dedicated research. Even then, a second major component of the brain’s navigation system, “grid cells,” were not uncovered until 2005 by the Norwegian couple May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser, who share this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

The Physics prize was awarded to Japan’s Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano and Japanese-American scientist Shuji Nakamura for two decades of work, beginning with the quest to grow high-quality crystals of gallium nitride, a key ingredient in blue LEDs. Their achievement wouldn’t have been possible without work done in the 1960s on semiconductor heterostructures, invented to improve transistors and recognized much later by the 2000 Nobel Prize.

The path to dramatic improvements in fluorescence microscopy took an equally circuitous path. American William E. Moerner, recipient of this year’s chemistry prize, began his work on single molecule detection as a memory storage device in the late 1980s. American scientist Eric Betzig and German scientist Stefan W. Hell, who share in the prize, investigated several different approaches to improve the resolution of optical microscopy and their own decade-and-a-half journey was interwoven with the contributions of many others.