Nobel Prize

Adolf Frederick Johann Butenandt was born on March 24, 1903 at Bremerhaven-Wesermünde. The son of a business man Otto Butenandt of Hamburg, he went to school at Bremerhaven and studied chemistry at the Universities of Marburg and Göttingen. In 1927 he graduated at the University of Göttingen, where he had studied under From 1927 until…

Robert Burns Woodward was born in Boston on April 10th, 1917, the only child of Margaret Burns, a native of Glasgow, and Arthur Woodward, of English antecedents, who died in October, 1918, at the age of thirty-three. Woodward was attracted to chemistry at a very early age, and indulged his taste for the science in…

Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949), born in Ghent, Belgium, came from a well-to-do family. He was educated at a Jesuit college and read law, but a short practice as a lawyer in his home town convinced him that he was unfit for the profession. He was drawn toward literature during a stay in Paris, where he associated…

André Gide (1869-1951) came from a family of Huguenots and recent converts to Catholicism. As a child he was often ill and his education at the École Alsacienne was interrupted by long stays in the South, where he was instructed by private tutors. His Les Cahiers d’André Walter (1891) [The Notebooks of André Walter] opened…

My father’s family came from Østerdalen. The first ancestor of ours of whom anything at all was known was one Peder Halvorsen who, in 1730, lived in Grytdalen in the Sollien valley of the river Atna where some men from Østerdalen had been allowed to settle and farm the land. My father’s folk remained there…

Heinrich Otto Wieland was born as the son of Württemberger parents, Dr. Theodor Wieland and Elise Blum, on June 4, 1877, in Pforzheim where his father was a pharmaceutical chemist. He studied at the Universities of Munich, Berlin and Stuttgart, and then returned to the Baeyer Laboratory in Munich where, in 1901, he received his…

Leopold Stephen Ruzicka was born on September 13, 1887, in Vukovar, a small Croatian town on the Danube, somewhat east of its confluence with the Drava. His father, Stjepan Ruzicka, was a cooper; his mother’s maiden name was Ljubica Sever. His great-grandparents included a Czech, from whom the name Ruzicka stems, an Upper Austrian and…

Claude Simon was born in 1913 at Tananarive (Madagascar). His parents were French, his father being a career officer who was killed in the first World War. He grew up with his mother and her family in Perpignan in the middle of the wine district of Roussillon. Among his ancestors was a general from the…

I was born in Halifax, Yorkshire on January 7th, 1941 to Thomas Ernest Walker and Elsie Walker (née Lawton). My father was a stone mason, and a talented amateur pianist and vocalist. I was brought up with my two younger sisters, Judith and Jennifer, in a rural environment overlooking the Calder valley near Elland, and…

Wole Soyinka was born on 13 July 1934 at Abeokuta, near Ibadan in western Nigeria. After preparatory university studies in 1954 at Government College in Ibadan, he continued at the University of Leeds, where, later, in 1973, he took his doctorate. During the six years spent in England, he was a dramaturgist at the Royal…