Nobel Prize

Emil Theodor Kocher by Bertil Hamberger This article was published on 23 July 1997. Theodor Kocher was born in Berne, Switzerland in 1841. He finished his medical studies in 1865 and went into surgery, where he had teachers like Demme, Lycke, Billroth and Langenbeck. In 1872, only 31 years old he was appointed professor of…

Life and discoveries of Santiago Ramón y Cajal by Marina Bentivoglio This article was published on 20 April 1998. Biographical sketch was born in May 1852 in the village of Petilla, in the region of Aragon in northeast Spain. His father was at that time the village surgeon (later on, in 1870, his father was…

On October 1, 1929, became first of the four KWImF research directors to move into the new laboratory on the banks of the Neckar River. At twenty-eight years of age, he was also by far the youngest. In addition to a growing reputation as an experimentalist in organic chemistry, he brought with him an encyclopedic…

The Max Planck Institute for Medical Research is the direct descendent of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research and member institute of the Max Planck Society. The four departments contribute their unique expertise in complementary areas: the determination of atomic structures (Ilme Schlichting), optical nanoscopy (), design of new reporter molecules (Kai Johnsson) and…

by John N. Bahcall What makes the sun shine? How does the sun produce the vast amount of energy necessary to support life on earth? These questions challenged scientists for a hundred and fifty years, beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century. Theoretical physicists battled geologists and evolutionary biologists in a heated controversy over…

The KWImF was conceived during Germany’s golden era of scientific development The opening of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research (KWImF) was the culmination of years of intensive planning and organizational efforts by Ludolf von Krehl. Krehl was one of the earliest promoters of the integration of discrete disciplines of the natural sciences under…

The KWImF was barely three years old when unanticipated difficulties began to create severe problems for the Institute. The first blow to Krehl’s vision for the KWImF came in 1933 with the death of Karl Hausser. Besides the loss to his family and friends, Hausser’s colleagues seriously missed the scientific approach of a man who…

by Lewis Wolpert How responsible are scientists for science and its applications? In a recent issue of the journal Science the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, , proposes a Hippocratic oath for scientists. He is strongly opposed to the idea that science is neutral and that scientists are not to be blamed for its misapplication.…

by Frank Fenner and Suzanne Cory Medical research in Australia in the early 20th century Although politically independent since 1901, in the 1920s Australia was still culturally, scientifically and industrially a dependency of the United Kingdom. The total population then was some 7 million and there were three medical schools, in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide.…

Frederick Grinnell UT Southwestern Medical Center In early 1985, when philanthropist Ralph Rogers spoke with Texas billionaire Ross Perot to ask for a “considerable” amount of money for UT Southwestern Medical School, he anticipated no great difficulty. Rogers, who recently had led the $80 million campaign to modernize Parkland Memorial Hospital, was friends with Perot…