Nobel Prize

My parents came to the United States in the early years of this century as part of a wave of Russian Jewish immigrants seeking freedom and opportunity in the New World. My mother, Sarah Levitan, came to America when she was 18. My father, Samuel, rebelling against an orthodox family, left home in his midteens…

I was born in the shadow of World War II, on December 18, 1939, on the south shore of Long Island, a product of the early twentieth century emigration of Eastern European Jewry to New York City and its environs. My father’s father, Jacob Varmus, left a village of uncertain name near Warsaw just after…

I grew up in an academic middle-class family. In 1926, when I was 3 years old, my father was appointed professor of history at the University of Lund, Sweden, and moved there with his family from Uppsala, Sweden. My mother had passed a master-of-arts examination and my father a Ph.D. degree at the University of…

My paternal great, great grandfather emigrated from Koenigsberg, currently Kaliningrad, to St. Louis during the 1850s, a time of large-scale movement of Germans, including German Jews, to the Mid-Western United States. My paternal grandfather moved to Binghamton, New York, where my father was born. My father had success in vaudeville as a singer/dancer/comedian. He eventually…

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was born on September 14, 1849 at Ryazan, where his father, Peter Dmitrievich Pavlov, was a village priest. He was educated first at the church school in Ryazan and then at the theological seminary there. Inspired by the progressive ideas which D. I. Pisarev, the most eminent of the Russian literary critics…

Theodor Kocher was born on August 25, 1841, at Berne. His father, a Chief-Engineer, was a very keen worker and kept him constantly at work. The influence of a devoted mother and later the loving care of a selfsacrificing wife enabled him to pass without interruption through the continuous strait of secondary school and University,…

Ludwig Karl Martin Leonhard Albrecht Kossel was born in Rostock on September 16, 1853. He was the eldest son of the merchant and Prussian consul Albrecht Kossel and his wife Clara, née Jeppe. He attended the secondary school in Rostock and went, in the autumn of 1872, to the newly founded University of Strassburg in…

Paul Hermann Müller was born at Olten, Solothurn, Switzerland, on January 12th, 1899, and his early childhood was spent at Lenzburg, Aargau, the birthplace of his father who was an employee of the Swiss Federal Railway. The family moved to Basle where Paul attended primary school and, later, Free Evangelical elementary and secondary schools. He…

John Franklin Enders was born on February 10th, 1897, at West Hartford, Connecticut, U.S.A. He is the son of John Ostrom Enders, a banker in Hartford, and Harriet Goulden Enders (née Whitmore). Enders was educated at the Noah Webster School at Hartford and St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire. Finishing school in 1915, he…

Thomas Huckle Weller was born at Ann Arbor, Michigan, on June 15th, 1915. He was educated at the public schools there, and later at the University of Michigan, where his father, Carl Vernon Weller had an appointment in the Pathology Department of the Medical School. Entering this University in 1932, T. H. Weller graduated in…