Nobel Prize

My fraternal twin, Roger, and I were born prematurely on June 23rd, 1925, in Halifax, England, an industrial town in the West Riding of Yorkshire, although we lived outside Halifax at 2, Woodhall Crescent on Wakefield Road, a row house rented from the town. My father, William Smithies, was at that time working for his…

Translation from the Russian text (pdf) I was born on 21 May 1921. My father was a well-known teacher of physics and the author of textbooks, exercise books and works of popular science. I grew up in a large communal apartment where most of the rooms were occupied by my family and relations and only…

I was born on 27 January 1936 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the first of three children of Kuan Hai Ting, a professor of engineering, and Tsun-Ying Wang, a professor of psychology. My parents had hoped that I would be born in China, but as I was born prematurely while they were visiting the United States,…

I was born April 14, 1921, in Oakland California, spent most of my boyhood in California, with three years in the east and two in the Panama Canal Zone, my father being a naval officer. I attended the University of California, Berkeley (with two years out in Chile), graduating in economics in 1944. After a…

Ancestry “On 11 March 1890, a five-hour banquet for hundreds of invited guests was held in the festive chamber of the Berlin City Hall. A festival of a magnificence perhaps unparalleled in the history of science … The vast chandeliered room was decorated with palm trees and laurel leaves, and one end was dominated by…

Erik Axel Karlfeldt (1864-1931) was born in Karlbo in the province of Dalekarlia. The name Karlfeldt, which he assumed in 1889, was derived from the name of his father’s farm; his parents were Erik Janson and Anna Stina Jansdotter, both of whom came from old mining families. Karlfeldt attended schools at his birthplace and at…

Frederick Grant Banting was born on November 14, 1891, at Alliston, Ont., Canada. He was the youngest of five children of William Thompson Banting and Margaret Grant. Educated at the Public and High Schools at Alliston, he later went to the University of Toronto to study divinity, but soon transferred to the study of medicine.…

John James Rickard Macleod was born on September 6, 1876 at Cluny, near Dunkeld, Perthshire, Scotland. He was the son of the Rev. Robert Macleod. When later the family moved to Aberdeen, Macleod went to the Grammar School there and later entered the Marischal College of the University of Aberdeen to study medicine. In 1898…

Scotland I was born in Edinburgh, in Scotland, a few days after the end of the Second World War. Both my parents had left school at a very young age, unwillingly in my father’s case. Yet both had deep effects on my education, my father influencing me toward measurement and mathematics, and my mother toward…

My Childhood I was born on December 30, 1930 in Ningbo, a city on the east coast of China with a rich culture and over seven thousand years of history. Although it was a tumultuous age in China when I was a child, I was lucky enough to have completed a good education from primary…