Nobel Prize

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…

I was born in 1951 in Kalgoorlie, a prosperous mining town 370 miles east of Perth, Western Australia. Kalgoorlie was a gold rush town which sprang up in the desert after the Irishman Paddy Hannan struck gold there in 1892. At the time I was born my father was 19 years old and in the…

Theodor Kocher was born on August 25, 1841, at Berne. His father, a Chief-Engineer, was a very keen worker and kept him constantly at work. The influence of a devoted mother and later the loving care of a selfsacrificing wife enabled him to pass without interruption through the continuous strait of secondary school and University,…

Peyton Rous was born in Baltimore in 1879. His mother’s ancestors were Huguenots who settled in Virginia after the Edict of Nantes. Just before the Civil War in the 1860’s her father, foreseeing disaster, bought land in Texas, moving his big family there after it ended. There he became a judge «riding three counties», and…

I was born on the 11th of June 1937, in North Adelaide, South Australia, the first child of middle-class parents. I am a fifth generation South Australian. South Australia is a charming state, a little overfull of the fact that, along with Victoria, it was settled by free settlers from England, who took part in…

Ludwig Karl Martin Leonhard Albrecht Kossel was born in Rostock on September 16, 1853. He was the eldest son of the merchant and Prussian consul Albrecht Kossel and his wife Clara, née Jeppe. He attended the secondary school in Rostock and went, in the autumn of 1872, to the newly founded University of Strassburg in…

Charles Brenton Huggins was born on September 22nd, 1901, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the elder son of Charles Edward Huggins, pharmacist, and his wife, Bessie Maria Spencer. Charles B. Huggins attended the public schools in Halifax; Acadia University (B.A., 1920), Wolfville, N.S.; and Harvard University (M.D., 1924), Boston, Massachusetts. He then interned at the University…

Selman Abraham Waksman was born in Priluka, near Kiev, Russia, on July 22nd, 1888, as the son of Jacob Waksman and Fradia London. He received his early education primarily from private tutors, and completed his school training in Odessa in an evening school and with private tutors. He obtained his matriculation diploma in 1910 from…