Nobel Prize

Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet was born at Traralgon, Victoria, Australia, on September 3rd, 1899. He is the son of the Manager of the branch of the Colonial Bank in that town. He was educated at the Victoria State Schools and at Geelong College, completing his medical course at the University of Melbourne, where he graduated…

Memories of my early childhood are clouded with uncertainties because I was essentially separated from my parents since the early age of seven. I was born in Shanghai, China on April 6, 1920. My father had come there from Vienna, Austria after earning doctorates in law and business. My mother, born Renée Tapernoux, had arrived…

Peter Brian Medawar was born on February 28, 1915, in Rio de Janeiro. He is the son of a business man who is a naturalized British subject, born in the Lebanon. Medawar was educated at Marlborough College, England, where he went in 1928. Leaving this College in 1932, he went to Magdalen College, Oxford, to…

I was born in Lansing, Iowa on June 6, 1918, the third of the four children of William Carl Krebs and Louise Helen (Stegeman) Krebs. My maternal grandmother, Bertha Stegeman, lived with us for most of her life. My father was a Presbyterian minister, who had started his ministry in the Moravian Church in Wisconsin.…

Ernst Boris Chain was born on June 19, 1906, in Berlin, his father, Dr. Michael Chain, being a chemist and industrialist. He was educated at the Luisengymnasium, Berlin, where he soon became interested in chemistry, stimulated by visits to his father’s laboratory and factory. He next attended the Friedrich-Wilhelm University, Berlin, where he graduated in…

Sir Howard Walter Florey was born on September 24, 1898, at Adelaide, South Australia, the son of Joseph and Bertha Mary Florey. His early education was at St. Peter’s Collegiate School, Adelaide, following which he went on to Adelaide University where he graduated M.B., B.S. in 1921. He was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to Magdalen…

Alfred Day Hershey was born on December 4th, 1908, in Owosso, Michigan. He studied at the Michigan State College, where he obtained B.S. in 1930, and Ph.D. in 1934. In 1967 he got an honorary D.Sc. at the University of Chicago. From 1934 till 1950 he was engaged in teaching and research, at the Department…

New York City is my world. I was born in Brooklyn, the first child of immigrant parents whose education was disrupted by the Nazi invasion of Poland. Although not themselves learned, my parents shared a deep respect for learning. I grew up in a home rich in warmth, but empty of books, art or music.…

Salvador Edward Luria was born on August 13th, 1912, in Torino, Italy. He has been a naturalized citizen of the U.S.A. since January 1947. In 1929 he started his studies in Medicine at the University of Torino, where he obtained his M. D. summa cum laude in 1935. From 1938 to 1940 he was Research…

I was born in 1947 in Seattle, Washington, a city surrounded by mountains, forests, and the sea. My mother was the daughter of Swedish immigrants who had come to the US in the late nineteenth century while my father’s family had Irish roots on one side and ancestors extending back to the American Revolution on…