Nobel Prize

I was born on January 15, 1947 in Chicago, Illinois, the oldest of three sons of Vivian and Eli Chalfie (Figure 1). In trying to reconstruct the events that led me to this opportunity to write an autobiographical essay, I realize how much chance, luck, the influence of others, and, in some cases, my own…

Childhood I was born in the small city of Hobart in Tasmania, Australia, in 1948. My parents were family physicians. My grandfather and great grandfather on my mother’s side were geologists. My great-grandfather on my father’s side, before coming to Australia as a minister of the Church of England, had lived for some time in…

I was born in San Diego, California in 1961. My brother Mark was born in January of the previous year. My father Kenneth Greider was a physicist who had recently graduated with a Ph.D. from University of California at Berkeley. My mother Jean Foley Greider also had received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in Botany.…

“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass “Everything’s got a moral …”Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland I was born in 1974…

Günter Grass was born in 1927 in Danzig-Langfuhr of Polish-German parents. After military service and captivity by American forces 1944-46, he worked as a farm labourer and miner and studied art in Düsseldorf and Berlin. 1956-59 he made his living as a sculptor, graphic artist and writer in Paris, and subsequently Berlin. In 1955 Grass…

Swedish Tomas Tranströmer föddes 15 april 1931 som son till Gösta och Helmy, född Westerberg. Eftersom föräldrarna skildes när Tomas var tre år, växte han upp i Stockholm med sin mor, som var lärarinna. Somrarna tillbringade de i morfaderns lotshus på Runmarö i den stockholmska skärgården, en miljö som alltid varit en viktig utgångspunkt för…

English Tomas Tranströmer was born on April 15, 1931, the son of Gösta and Helmy, née Westerberg. His parents divorced when Thomas was three years old, so he grew up in Stockholm with his mother, who was a schoolteacher. They spent their summers at his maternal grandfather’s pilot station on the island of Runmarö in…

Rene Francois Armand Prudhomme (1839-1907) was the son of a French shopkeeper. He wanted to become an engineer, but an eye disease terminated his training at a polytechnic institute. He studied literature, and after a brief and unsuccessful interlude in industry, he took up law, though without much conviction, and worked in a solicitor’s office.…

English Mario Vargas Llosa was born in 1936 in Arequipa, Peru’s second largest city. During his childhood in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and Piura, a city in the north of Peru, he believed that his father had died. However, this was a lie told by his mother to conceal their tortuous separation. The truth emerged when, in…

Spanish Mario Vargas Llosa, nacido en 1936 en Arequipa, la segunda ciudad más grande del Peru, pasó su niñez en Cochabamba, Bolivia, y en Piura, una ciudad al norte del país, creyendo que su padre había muerto. En realidad, se trataba de una mentira urdida por su madre para encubrir una tormentosa separación, que estalló…