Nobel Prize

Axel Hugo Theodor Theorell was born at Linköping, Sweden, on July 6, 1903. He was the son of Thure Theorell, surgeon-major to the First Life Grenadiers practising medicine in Linköping, and his wife Armida Bill. Theorell was educated for nine years at a State Secondary School in Linköping and passed his matriculation examination there on…

I don’t remember much about my early childhood. I am told that before I began school, my older cousin would return from her school and teach me what she had learned. By the time I was 10 or so, I was displaying a curiosity that might have suggested an academic bent. I was an avid…

My paternal great, great grandfather emigrated from Koenigsberg, currently Kaliningrad, to St. Louis during the 1850s, a time of large-scale movement of Germans, including German Jews, to the Mid-Western United States. My paternal grandfather moved to Binghamton, New York, where my father was born. My father had success in vaudeville as a singer/dancer/comedian. He eventually…

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was born on September 14, 1849 at Ryazan, where his father, Peter Dmitrievich Pavlov, was a village priest. He was educated first at the church school in Ryazan and then at the theological seminary there. Inspired by the progressive ideas which D. I. Pisarev, the most eminent of the Russian literary critics…

My parents were born in Norfolk and spent their early years working in the big houses of that rural English county, my mother as a cook and my father as a handyman and chauffeur. After the 1930s recession they moved to Wembley, North-West London, where my father worked as a mechanic in the local H.J.…

I was born in 1943 at Neston in the Wirral, not far from Liverpool where my father, Richard William Hunt was a lecturer in paleography, the study of mediaeval manuscripts. Richard’s father was a doctor, and there is still a chemist’s shop (i.e. pharmacy) in Winchester that bears the family name. My mother’s father, Harry…

Paul Hermann Müller was born at Olten, Solothurn, Switzerland, on January 12th, 1899, and his early childhood was spent at Lenzburg, Aargau, the birthplace of his father who was an employee of the Swiss Federal Railway. The family moved to Basle where Paul attended primary school and, later, Free Evangelical elementary and secondary schools. He…

Daniel Bovet was born at Neuchâtel, Switzerland, on March 23, 1907. He was the son of Pierre Bovet, Professor of Pedagogy in the University of Geneva and his wife Amy Babut. After completing his secondary education at Geneva, Bovet graduated at the University of Geneva in 1927. He then spent some years as Assistant in…

An autobiography published a few years ago records many of the salient events in my life which led me to become a scientist and my Nobel Lecture covers the intellectual background and consequences of the research work for which the Prize has been awarded. In this somewhat compressed version, I start with my birth on…

I was born in the shadow of World War II, on December 18, 1939, on the south shore of Long Island, a product of the early twentieth century emigration of Eastern European Jewry to New York City and its environs. My father’s father, Jacob Varmus, left a village of uncertain name near Warsaw just after…