Nobel Prize

17 October 1975 has decided to award the 1975 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with one half to Professor John Warcup Cornforth, England for his work on the stereochemistry of enzyme-catalyzed reactions and with the other half to Professor Vladimir Prelog, Switzerland for his research into the stereochemistry of organic molecules and reactions Cornforth has been…

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Presentation Speech by Professor Arne Fredga of the Translation from the Swedish text Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, The laureates in chemistry of this year have both studied reaction mechanisms, especially from a stereochemical, i.e. a geometrical point of view. In a chemical experiment some compounds are mixed, then something happens, and…

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…

In chemistry, shape matters. For chemicals to function properly in the body it is not only important that the molecular components are connected in their correct order but also that these components occupy their correct three-dimensional positions in space. A wrongly positioned atom or structural element creates either an ineffective chemical, much like using the…

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Swedish Academy The Permanent Secretary Press release The Nobel Prize in Literature 1975 With his very first collection of poems, Ossi di seppia (Bones of the Cuttlefish, 1925), the then 29-year-old Eugenio Montale was ready to uphold his place in Italian poetry. As his work gradually became known outside his own country, he staked the…

Presentation Speech by Anders Österling, of the Translation from the Swedish text Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, As we all know, this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to Eugenio Montale, from Italy. He comes from Eastern Liguria, a coastal landscape whose harsh character is reflected in his poetry. In…

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Eugenio Montale, born in 1896, is one of the few obvious “true masters” of the last fifty years of Italian literature. Born in Genoa into a family of businessmen, he discontinued his secondary studies and started, on a private basis, to study singing with the baritone Ernesto Sivori. But the 1915-18 war (in which he…