Nobel Prize

Hermann Emil Fischer was born on October 9, 1852, at Euskirchen, in the Cologne district. His father was a successful business man. After three years with a private tutor, Emil went to the local school and then spent two years at school at Wetzlar, and two more at Bonn where he passed his final examination…

Irène Curie, born in Paris, September 12, 1897, was the daughter of , and since 1926 the wife of Frédéric Joliot. After having started her studies at the Faculty of Science in Paris, she served as a nurse radiographer during the First World War. She became Doctor of Science in 1925, having prepared a thesis…

Max Ferdinand Perutz was born in Vienna on May 19th, 1914. Both his parents, Hugo Perutz and Dely Goldschmidt, came from families of textile manufacturers who had made their fortune in the 19th century by the introduction of mechanical spinning and weaving into the Austrian monarchy. He was sent to school at the Theresianum, a…

Stanford Moore was born in 1913 in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, where his father was a member of the faculty of the School of Law of Vanderbilt University. His developmental years were in a home environment which made the pursuit of knowledge an eagerly adopted undertaking. He had the opportunity to…

Translation from the German text I was born in Solln, near Munich, on 10 November 1918 as the third child of the Professor of Physics at the Technical College of Munich, Dr. Karl T. Fischer (died 1953), and his wife, Valentine, née Danzer (died 1935). After completing four years at elementary school I went on…

I was born on June 28, 1927, the second of three sons, in the small central Ohio town of Delaware, the home of Ohio Wesleyan University. My father and mother had moved there the previous year when he took the position of Professor of Mathematics and Chairman of the Department at Ohio Wesleyan. All of…

John Cowdery Kendrew was born on 24th March, 1917, in Oxford. His father, Wilfrid George Kendrew, was Reader in Climatology in the University of Oxford; his mother, Evelyn May Graham (Sandberg) Kendrew, was an art historian, for many years resident in Florence, Italy, where she published works on the Italian Primitives under the nom de…

Walter Norman Haworth was born at Chorley, Lancashire, on March 19, 1883. He attended the local school until the age of fourteen when he joined his father, Thomas Haworth, to learn linoleum design and manufacture. His interest in chemistry was aroused through the use of dyestuffs in his work and his thirst for further knowledge…

Karl Ziegler was born in Helsa near Kassel in Germany, on November 26, 1898. He graduated in 1920 under Prof. von Auwers at the University of Marburg/Lahn, and qualified as a lecturer in 1923. After working for a short period at the University of Frankfurt/Main, he spent 10 years as a lecturer at Heidelberg. His…

Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Adolf von Baeyer was born on October 31, 1835, in Berlin, as the son of Johann Jakob Baeyer and Eugenie née Hitzig. He came from a family distinguished both in literature and the natural sciences. His father, a lieutenant-general, was the originator of the European system of geodetic measurement. Even as a…