Nobel Prize

I was born in 1943, the only child of John and Edna Roberts (née Allsop) in Derby, England. My father was a motor mechanic and my mother a homemaker. We moved to Bath when I was four and so I consider myself a Bathonian. My elementary education was at Christ Church infant school and St.…

A sense of place was and remains an important part of my life. I was born in a rural community in the northern hill country of Kentucky. My earliest memories are those of a child playing around the house on our family farm, located in a bend of the Licking River near McKinneysburg. My mother,…

I was born on December 1, 1925 in Baltimore, Maryland where I attended public schools and graduated from the accelerated course at Baltimore City College, a public high school of special note because it took selected students from around the city. An all boys school, it resembled a private college preparatory school in both its…

My childhood was spent on the outskirts of the sub-tropical city of Brisbane. I have a younger brother, Ian, and we grew up as part of a traditional, extended family that was very much influenced by the values of our two grandmothers. The one was a devout Methodist, the other a lapsed Quaker who was…

I was born in 1944 in Riehen, a village near Basel, and spent almost all of my first twenty-five years with my family in the same house. My grandfather on my father’s side had bought this house in 1918 after moving with his family from Tübingen to Basel to become Professor of German Literature at…

I was born in the lovely coastal city of Charleston, S.C. in 1916 and lived there until I was thirteen. In Charleston I first became enamored of “natural history” when I attended nature study classes and field trips to nearby beaches, marshes and woods, sponsored by the Charleston Museum. I became an avid shell collector…

The first two decades of my life were spent in the New York City area, where the families of both my parents had settled in the 1920s after immigrating from Italy. My father had been a ship builder in Naples but my mother was still a young child when she came from Sicily. They met…

My father, Jabir Murat Ejupi, was born in Albania in 1892 and was the oldest of four children. His mother died when he was 13 years old. He and his family were shepherds and he subsequently ran away from home to sell candy in the Balkan countries as a teenager for several years. Although he…

Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran was born in Paris on June 18, 1845 in the house which was formerly No. 19 rue de l’Est but later became, when this district was rebuilt, an hotel at No. 125, Boulevard St. Michel. Both his father and paternal grandfather were medical men. His father, Dr. Louis Théodore Laveran, was…

Alexis Carrel was born at Lyons, France, on June 28, 1873. He was the son of a business man, also named Alexis Carrel, who died when his son was very young. Alexis was educated at home by his mother Anne Ricard, and also at St. Joseph School, Lyons. In 1889 he took the degree of…