Nobel Prize

Bernardo Alberto Houssay was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on April 10, 1887, one of the eight children of Dr. Albert and Clara (née Laffont) Houssay, who had come to Argentina from France. His father was a barrister. His early education was at a private school, the Colegio Británico. He then entered the School of…

Max Theiler was born on January 30, 1899, in Pretoria, South Africa, one of the four children of Sir Arnold and Emma (née Jegge) Theiler. His father was a well-known veterinary scientist. He attended local schools except for one year in Basle, Switzerland (his father was of Swiss origin), then went on to Rhodes University…

André Frédéric Cournand was born in Paris on 24th September, 1895, the second of the four children of Jules Cournand, a stomatologist, and his wife Marguérite Weber. He received his early education to secondary school level at the Lycée Condorcet, and obtained his bachelor’s degree at the Faculté des Lettres of the Sorbonne in 1913,…

Werner Theodor Otto Forssmann was born in Berlin on August 29, 1904, the son of Julius Forssmann and Emmy Hindenberg. He was educated at the Askanische Gymnasium (secondary grammar school) in Berlin. Leaving school in 1922, he went to the University of Berlin to study medicine, passing his State Examination in 1929. For his clinical…

Dickinson Woodruff Richards Jr. was born on October 30, 1895, in Orange, New Jersey, U.S.A. He is the son of Dickinson W. Richards, a New York lawyer and Sally Lambert, whose father and three of her brothers practised medicine in New York. He was educated at the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut, and, in 1913, went…

Severo Ochoa was born at Luarca, Spain, on September 24th, 1905. He is the son of Severo Ochoa, a lawyer and business man, and Carmen de Albornoz. Ochoa was educated at Málaga College, where he took his B.A. degree in 1921. His interest in biology was greatly stimulated by the publications of the great Spanish…

Arthur Kornberg was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1918 and educated in its public schools. He received his undergraduate degree in science from the City College of New York in 1937 and the M.D. degree from the University of Rochester in 1941. After a year’s internship in internal medicine, he served as a commissioned…

His mother originated from Lorraine, his father from the Pyrénées, two French provinces very distant from one another and with vast cultural differences. His parents met in Paris. During the First World War, his father, a doctor and captain in the army, sent Jean Dausset’s mother and the first three children to Toulouse. It was…

Michael S. Brown was born on April 13, 1941, in Brooklyn, New York, the eldest child of Harvey Brown, a textile salesman, and Evelyn Brown, a housewife. His sister Susan was born three years later. When Brown was 11 years old the family moved to Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, where Brown attended…

Joseph L. Goldstein was born on April 18, 1940, in Sumter, South Carolina, the only son of Isadore E. and Fannie Alpert Goldstein. The family owned and operated a clothing store in Kingstree, South Carolina, a town of 5000 people. After his education in the primary and secondary public schools of Kingstree, Goldstein attended Washington…