André Michel Lwoff was born on 8 May 1902 in Ainay-le-Château (Allier). He joined the Institut Pasteur at the age of 19. He had graduated in science and had done one year of medicine. Lwoff completed his studies while working in the laboratory. In 1921, he had the good fortune to study under a very…

Gerhard Johannes Paul Domagk was born on October 30, 1895, at Lagow, a beautiful, small town in the Brandenburg Marches. Until he was fourteen he went to school in Sommerfeld, where his father was assistant headmaster. His mother, Martha Reimer, came from farming stock in the Marches, where she lived in Sommerfeld until 1945 when…

Joshua Lederberg was born in Montclair, N.J. on May 23, 1925. He was brought up in the Washington Heights District of Upper Manhattan, New York City, where he received his education in Public School 46, Junior High School 164 and Stuyvesant High School. From 1941 to 1944 he studied at Columbia College, where he obtained…

Jacques Lucien Monod was born in Paris on February 9th, 1910. In 1917 his parents settled in the South of France, where Monod spent his early years, and he therefore thinks of himself as a Southerner rather than as a Parisian. His father was a painter, something of an unusual vocation for a Huguenot family…

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…

I was born in Ludwigsburg, Württemberg, in the southwestern part of the Federal Republic of Germany on July 18, 1948, as the elder son of Karl and Frieda Michel. My ancestors lived in that area for generations, mainly as farmers. There the inherited land is equally divided among sisters and brothers, and not enough land…