Nobel Prize

Carl Ferdinand Cori was born in Prague on December 5th, 1896. His father, Dr. Carl I. Cori, was Director of the Marine Biological Station in Trieste, and it was here that young Carl spent his childhood. He received an early introduction to science from his father and this was stimulated on summer visits to the…

Gerty Theresa Cori, née Radnitz, was born in Prague on August 15th, 1896. She received her primary education at home before entering a Lyceum for girls in 1906; she graduated in 1912 and studied for the University entrance examination, which she took and passed at the Tetschen Realgymnasium in 1914. She entered the Medical School…

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…

Presentation Speech by Professor A. Fredga, member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry of Your Majesty, Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen. One of the principal aims of organic chemistry is to make clear the chemical structure of substances found in living nature. Interest has been directed particularly towards substances with vital functions or otherwise obvious…

The undisputed master of chemistry is Nature, and the variety of substances it routinely creates has long been a source of inspiration and perspiration for chemists. Investigating and recreating the natural substances essential for life is a painstaking process; their size and complexity makes anything other than the simplest compounds almost impossible to reproduce under…

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Sir Robert Robinson was born at Rufford, near Chesterfield, Derbyshire on September 13th, 1886, the son of William Bradbury Robinson, a surgical dressing manufacturer who invented his own machines for the production of lint, bandages, etc., and the cardboard boxes for packaging them. He was educated at the Chesterfield Grammar School, Fulneck School, near Leeds,…

André Gide (1869-1951) came from a family of Huguenots and recent converts to Catholicism. As a child he was often ill and his education at the École Alsacienne was interrupted by long stays in the South, where he was instructed by private tutors. His Les Cahiers d’André Walter (1891) [The Notebooks of André Walter] opened…

Presentation Speech by Anders Österling, Permanent Secretary of the On the first page of the remarkable journal kept by André Gide for half a century, the author, then twenty years old, finds himself on the sixth floor of a building in the Latin Quarter, looking for a meeting place for «The Symbolists», the group of…