Nobel Prize

Svante August Arrhenius was born on February 19, 1859, the son of Svante Gustaf Arrhenius and Carolina Christina Thunberg. His ancestors were farmers; his uncle became Professor of Botany and Rector of the Agricultural High School at Ultuna near Uppsala and later Secretary of The Swedish Academy of Agriculture. His father was a land surveyor…

Petrus (Peter) Josephus Wilhelmus Debye was born March 24, 1884, at Maastricht, the Netherlands. He received his early education at the elementary and secondary schools in his home town and from then on his life has been devoted to a search for knowledge. He continued his studies at the Aachen Institute of Technology (Technische Hochschule)…

Kurt Alder was born in Königshütte, Upper Silesia, on the 10th of July 1902. His childhood and school years were spent in these industrial surroundings, but after the end of the First World War he was forced to leave his home, due to political circumstances. He started reading chemistry at Berlin University in 1922, and…

Edwin Mattison McMillan was born on 18th September, 1907, at Redondo Beach, California. He is the son of Dr. Edwin Harbaugh McMillan, a physician, and his wife, Anne Marie McMillan, née Mattison, who both came from the State of Maryland and were both of English and Scottish descent. The boy spent his early years in…

Bruce Merrifield was born in Fort Worth, Texas, July 15, 1921, the only son of George E. and Lorene (Lucas) Merrifield. In the spring of 1923 they drove across the southwest desert to settle in California where they lived in several cities throughout the state. He attended nine grade schools and two high schools before…

I was born in Alice, Texas on August 23, 1933. My father was a Methodist minister, and my mother was what we then called a housewife. I have a sister, Mary, who is some years my elder. In those days, Methodist ministers moved often, and as a child I lived in a succession of mostly…

Fritz Pregl was born in Laibach on September 3, 1869, and attended the local “Gymnasium” (grammar school), from where he proceeded to the University of Graz to study medicine. He received his M.D. in 1894, but even prior to graduation he became assistant lecturer for physiology and histology under Alexander Rollett, taking over the chair…

Glenn Theodore Seaborg was born in Ishpeming, Michigan, on April 19, 1912. At the age of 10 he moved with his family to California, in 1929 he graduated at David Starr Jordan High School in Los Angeles as valedictorian of his class. He entered the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1929, and received the…

I was born on July 23rd, 1906 in Sarajevo in the province of Bosnia, which then belonged to the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy and later, in 1918, became part of Yugoslavia. In the western world my birthplace has a somewhat sinister reputation that was characterized by an older tax-inspector in the Midwest of America as “the place…

Although born in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, on December 9, 1919, I moved to Kentucky in 1920, and lived in Lexington through my university years. After my bachelors degree at the University of Kentucky, I entered graduate school at the California Institute of Technology in 1941, at first in physics. Under the influence of , I…