Nobel Prize

by Michael W. Doyle Peace and democracy are just two sides of the same coin, it has often been said. In a speech before the British parliament in June of 1982, President Ronald Reagan proclaimed that governments founded on a respect for individual liberty exercise “restraint” and “peaceful intentions” in their foreign policy. He then,…

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 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…

by 1985 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry Introduction The role of science and technology in future design will be discussed from the perspective of someone who has lived all his life in the United States and whose scientific experience has spanned the years since the late 1930s. It is likely that the reader will find in…

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 Auke R. Leen* In 1969, , aged 66, received the first Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, often mistakenly referred to as the “Nobel prize in economics.” Jan shared the prize with . Four years later, Jan’s younger brother, , too, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology…

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…

By Irwin Abrams Antioch University The Nobel Peace Prizes at their best set before us an array of great human spirits. The nine women Prizewinners clearly belong in this list. They come from a variety of backgrounds and represent a variety of forms of peace making. The earliest of these heroines of peace was the…

by Øyvind Tønnesson Nobelprize.org Peace Editor, 1998-2000 1 December 1999 Stable socialist dominance, strong commitment to the western military alliance and support for the United Nations were central features of Norwegian politics after the Second World War. To what extent did these features similarly apply to the Nobel Committee? Who were the committee members, what…

By Klaus Biedermann* Prize-awarded methods Among the Nobel Prizes in Physics, two scientists have been honored for their remarkable methods to record and present images: , awarded in 1908 “for his method of reproducing colours photographically based on the phenomenon of interference,” and , awarded in 1971, “for his invention and development of the holographic…