Nobel Prize

Born 9 October 1950. ProfessionMs. Jody Williams is the founding coordinator of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), which was formally launched by six nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in October of 1992. Ms. Williams has overseen the growth of the ICBL to more than 1,000 NGOs in more than sixty countries. She has served as…

I was born in Brooklyn in 1922. Both my mother and father were Russian Jewish emigrants who came to America in the early 1900’s. My father was a tailor and my mother, a housewife. Though of limited education themselves, they instilled in me the values of intellectual achievement and the use of whatever talents I…

I was born on October 2nd 1917, in Thames-Ditton, near London. My parents, of Belgian-German extraction, were Belgian nationals who had taken refuge in England during the war. They returned to Belgium in 1920, and I grew up in the cosmopolitan harbour city of Antwerp, at a time when education in the Flemish part of…

My parents went from the north of Scotland to South Africa shortly before World War I. My mother had been a teacher and my father was an engineer with the Post Office. I was born in Johannesburg in 1924, the youngest of three children. My family moved around the country quite a lot, as did…

I was born and brought up near a village in Nottinghamshire and in my childhood enjoyed the freedom of the rather isolated country life. After the first world war, my father had bought a small farm, which became a marvellous playground for his five children. My two brothers and two sisters were all older than…

I was born in Caracas, Venezuela, on October 29, 1920 of Spanish-Jewish ancestry. My father, a self-made business man, was a textile merchant and importer. He was born in Spanish Morocco, whereas my mother was born and raised in French Algeria and brought up in the French culture. When I was five years old, my…

My parents were both New Englanders, though my father was born in Minnesota where his father had moved from Massachusetts to join a frontier community. My father moved east as a young man, and for a number of years was YMCA secretary in Haverhill, Massachusetts. Subsequently he invented and worked in the application of a…

In the fall of 1921 I attended the only course in genetics open to undergraduate students at Cornell University. It was conducted by C. B. Hutchison, then a professor in the Department of Plant Breeding, College of Agriculture, who soon left Cornell to become Chancellor of the University of California at Davis, California. Relatively few…

My twin sister Paola and I were born in Turin on April 22, 1909, the youngest of four children. Our parents were Adamo Levi, an electrical engineer and gifted mathematician, and Adele Montalcini, a talented painter and an exquisite human being. Our older brother Gino, who died twelve years ago of a heart attack, was…

My forebears all came from the United Kingdom. On my father’s side, they migrated from London and County Derry in Northern Ireland to Londonderry, New Hampshire. When the American Revolution came, they, as loyalists, moved on to Canada. My father, grandfather and great-grandfather were born in St. Andrews, New Brunswick. In 1865, my grandfather, Andrew…