Nobel Prize

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I was born in Halifax, Yorkshire on January 7th, 1941 to Thomas Ernest Walker and Elsie Walker (née Lawton). My father was a stone mason, and a talented amateur pianist and vocalist. I was brought up with my two younger sisters, Judith and Jennifer, in a rural environment overlooking the Calder valley near Elland, and…

Jacobus Henricus van ‘t Hoff was born in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, on August 30, 1852. He was the third child in a family of seven children of Jacobus Henricus van ‘t Hoff, a physician, and Alida Jacoba Kolff. In 1869 he entered the Polytechnic School at Delft and obtained his technology diploma in 1871. His decision…

Henri Moissan was born in Paris on September 28, 1852. His advanced education began in the Collège de Meaux and later in Edmond Frémy’s laboratory at the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle, where he attended lectures by E.H. Sainte-Claire Deville and Henri Debray. A year later, he removed to Dehérain’s laboratory in the École Pratique des Haute…

Heinrich Otto Wieland was born as the son of Württemberger parents, Dr. Theodor Wieland and Elise Blum, on June 4, 1877, in Pforzheim where his father was a pharmaceutical chemist. He studied at the Universities of Munich, Berlin and Stuttgart, and then returned to the Baeyer Laboratory in Munich where, in 1901, he received his…

Adolf Frederick Johann Butenandt was born on March 24, 1903 at Bremerhaven-Wesermünde. The son of a business man Otto Butenandt of Hamburg, he went to school at Bremerhaven and studied chemistry at the Universities of Marburg and Göttingen. In 1927 he graduated at the University of Göttingen, where he had studied under From 1927 until…

Leopold Stephen Ruzicka was born on September 13, 1887, in Vukovar, a small Croatian town on the Danube, somewhat east of its confluence with the Drava. His father, Stjepan Ruzicka, was a cooper; his mother’s maiden name was Ljubica Sever. His great-grandparents included a Czech, from whom the name Ruzicka stems, an Upper Austrian and…