Nobel Prize

My father was a Jewish immigrant who settled in Argentina, and was left to his own devices at the age of 15. My mother was a teacher, herself the daughter of a poor immigrant family. For both my mother and my father, no sacrifice was too hard to make sure that their three sons (I…

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,…

Har Gobind Khorana was born of Hindu parents in Raipur, a little village in Punjab, which is now part of eastern Pakistan. The correct date of his birth is not known; that shown in documents is January 9th, 1922. He is the youngest of a family of one daughter and four sons. His father was…

Hermann Joseph Muller was born in New York City on December 21, 1890. His grandparents on his father’s side were of artisan and professional background and, though at first Catholics, had emigrated from the Rhineland during the wave of reaction of 1848 to seek the greater freedom of America. His father, born in New York,…

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…

Henry Hallett Dale was born in London on June 9, 1875. He attended Leys School, Cambridge, and in 1894 he entered Trinity College with a scholarship. He graduated through the Natural Sciences Tripos, specializing in physiology and zoology. From 1898 to 1900 he was a Coutts-Trotter Student in Physiology at Trinity College, working then under…

Bernard Katz was born on March 26th, 1911, in Leipzig, Germany, of Russian Jewish origin, only son of Max Katz and Eugenie Rabinowitz. His school education was at the Albert Gymnasium in Leipzig (1921-1929). He studied Medicine at the University of Leipzig, 1929-1934; received the Siegfried Garten Prize for physiological research in 1933 and obtained…

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…

Walter Rudolf Hess was born in Frauenfeld, East Switzerland, on March 17, 1881. His father was a teacher of physics who allowed him, at a very early age, great freedom in dealing with apparatus, and taught him a proper carefulness. He also obtained a self-reliant gift of observation during excursions through forests and meadows, and…