Nobel Prize

Maurice Hugh Frederick Wilkins was born at Pongaroa, New Zealand, on December 15th, 1916. His parents came from Ireland; his father Edgar Henry Wilkins was a doctor in the School Medical Service and was very interested in research but had little opportunity for it. At the age of 6, Wilkins was brought to England and…

John Carew Eccles was born in Melbourne, Australia, on January 27th, 1903. He owes much to his early training by his father, William James Eccles, who was a teacher as also was his mother, née Mary Carew. He graduated from Melbourne University in Medicine with first class honours in 1925, and as Victorian Rhodes Scholar…

Alan Lloyd Hodgkin was born in Banbury, Oxfordshire, on February 5th, 1914. His parents were George Hodgkin (who died in Baghdad in 1918) and Mary (Wilson) Hodgkin, now Mrs. Lionel Smith. Alan Lloyd Hodgkin was educated at the Downs School, Malvern (1923-1927), Greshams School, Holt (1927-1932), and Trinity College, Cambridge (1932-1936). His grandfather, Thomas Hodgkin,…

Andrew Fielding Huxley was born in Hampstead, London, on 22nd November 1917. His father, Leonard Huxley, who was a son of the nineteenth – century scientist and writer Thomas Huxley, was for a time a classics master at Charterhouse School and later took up a literary career, writing a number of biographies and being editor…

Konrad E. Bloch was born on 21st January 1912, in Neisse, Upper Silesia, then Germany, the son of Fritz Bloch and his wife Hedwig, née Striemer. He attended the elementary school and the Real gymnasium in the same city and in 1930 went to Munich to study chemistry at the Technische Hochschule. He became soon…

Feodor Lynen was born in Munich on 6 April 1911, the son of Wilhelm Lynen, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Munich Technische Hochschule. His mother, Frieda, was the daughter of the manufacturer Gustav Prym. Lynen completed his primary and secondary schooling in Munich, and in 1930 matriculated at the chemistry department of Munich University.…

Ragnar Arthur Granit was born in the parish of Helsinge, Finland, on October 30th, 1900, eldest son of the Crown forester Arthur Wilhelm Granit and his wife Albertina Helena Malmberg. The family then moved to the neighbourhood of Helsingfors where his father opened a firm dealing with sylviculture and forest produce and the son became…

George Wald was born in New York City on November 18th, 1906, of immigrant parents, Isaac, who had come from a village near Przemysl, in what was then Austrian Poland, and Ernestine Rosenmann, from a small village near Munich, in Bavaria. After attending public primary and secondary I schools in Brooklyn, he received the degree…

Rodney Robert Porter born 8 October 1917 at Newton-le-Willows, Lancashire, England. He was educated at the Ashton-in-Makerfield Grammar School taking his Hons.B.Sc. (Biochemistry) in 1939 at the University of Liverpool and his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge in 1948. After one year’s postdoctoral work at Cambridge, Professor Porter joined the scientific staff of the…

Dr. Lewis received the B.A. degree from the University of Minnesota in 1939 and the Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1942. He served to the rank of captain in the United States Army Air Force from 1942-1945 as a meteorologist and oceanographer in the Pacific Theater. He joined the Caltech faculty in…