Nobel Prize

A Journey Guided by Questions Every serious endeavor should start with a proper question. What is worthy of being shared with the rest of the world in a biographical sketch of someone largely unknown before October 3, 2023? To be honest, even after serious deliberations, I didn’t find a convincing answer. What follows is an…

Iwas born in 1940 in Lillebonne, a small working-class town twenty-five kilometres from Le Havre. I was an only child and my parents, Alphonse and Blanche Duchesne, ran a small café-grocery in the spinning mill dis­trict. They had lost a little girl of six before I was born. My earliest memo­ries are inseparable from the…

Svante Pääbo did not submit a biography.

Carolyn Bertozzi did not submit a biography.

Anton Zeilinger did not submit a biography.

John Clauser did not submit a biography.

Alain Aspect did not submit a biography.

I was born in Tunisia in July 1941, during World War II. The war did not leave me many memories, as I was a bit young even at the 1945 armistice. In Tunis I was educated at the College Alaoui and Lycée Carnot until 1957 when I was transferred to the Prytanée Militaire à La…

This biography is intended to talk about how my early life contributed to my development as a scholar. This is necessarily speculative, since I have no evidence of what would have happened if my early life had been different. However, my impression is that my development as a scholar built on using my brain on…

I was born in Paris in 1958 and lived the first twenty years of my life in the 13th and 14th arrondissements. My late mother, Yvonne, was first a schoolteacher and then stayed at home to take care of her three children: myself, my sister Françoise, and my brother Jean-Marie. My mother suffered from diabetes…