Physiology or Medicine

Award ceremony speech

English Presentation Speech by Professor Hans Forssberg, Member of the , Member of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, 10 December 2015 Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Esteemed Nobel Laureates, Ladies and Gentlemen, All around us – in nature, on our skin and in our bodies – a constant power struggle is under way between…

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Biographical

Max Delbrück was born on September 4th, 1906, in Berlin, Germany, the youngest of seven children. His father, Hans Delbrück, Professor of History at the University of Berlin, was for many years editor and political columnist of the Preussische Jahrbücher. His mother was a granddaughter of the chemist, Justus von Liebig. Max Delbrück grew up…

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Biographical

I was born and raised in Fosnavåg, a small town on an island on the west coast of Norway, in one of the most beautiful parts of the country (Fig. 1). My parents owned a small farm, although my father worked as a carpenter. My mother took most of the responsibility for the farm and…

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Biographical

I was born in 1962 on the west coast of Norway, about 200 kilometres north of Bergen. I spent the first 9 months of my life on Haramsøy (Fig. 1), an island with fewer than 500 inhabitants and, at that time, only a single daily ferry connection to the mainland. In 1963 my parents and…

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Press release

KAROLINSKA INSTITUTET has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 1969 jointly to Max Delbrück, Alfred D. Hershey and Salvador E. Luria for their discoveries concerning “the replication mechanism and the genetic structure of viruses”. Summary Around 1940 Delbrück, Hershey and Luria became interested in bacteriophage, a type of virus that…

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Biographical

“He can’t even throw a baseball!” was the way my cousin Harvey greeted me soon after my birth on May 8, 1947. Looking forward to a fellow athlete, Harvey, age three, found me ill prepared for sports. I suspect the disappointment continued, as Harvey progressed to become one of the star little league players in…

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