Nobel Prize

I was born in Nagoya, Japan on September 5th, 1939, the second of three sons. I have also a younger sister. My father was an engineer working for a textile company that had several factories scattered in rural towns in the southern part of Japan. The company policy made it necessary for my father to…

I was born in the capital of Scotland on Victoria Day in the middle of World War II. The nursing home in Edinburgh where this cliff-hanger of an event took place, during the early evening of 24th May 1942, was located at 57 Manor Place. It was not anticipated that a little boy weighing in…

In 1936, when I was born in the small Silesian village of Waltersdorf in the county of Sprottau in the then eastern part of Germany, now part of Poland, the fine structure of the cell was still an enigma. After 300 years of staring through light microscopes, essentially all that biologists had learned was that…

I was born on October 21, 1944 in Paris, just before the end of the second world war and a few months after Paris had been liberated by the allies and the French army led by General Charles de Gaulle (August 19–25, 1944). My mother’s name was Lydie Angèle Arcelin and her family came mostly…

It is a great privilege to be able to stand on the shoulders of the giants of chemistry and in doing so experience the marvels of the molecular world and provide “challenges for our youth, dreams for the people, and opportunities for industry.” For me being a scientist engaged in designing new molecules and chemical…

Childhood I was born on June 22, 1943 in wartime Aberdeen, Scotland and lived there for the first sixteen years of my life. My parents, Hans Walter and Johanna Maria Kosterlitz (Gresshöner) had fled Hitler’s Germany in 1934 because my father, a non-practicing Jew, came from a Jewish family and was forbidden to marry a…

I was born in London in 1951, in a medical family who greatly valued science and education in general, but never tried to push their children to go into medicine, although my younger brother did choose that path. My father was a psychiatrist working in the newly-created National Health Service, and came from Scotland. He…

I was born on April 1, 1933 in Constantine, Algeria, which was then part of France. My family, originally from Tangier, settled in Tunisia and then in Algeria in the 16th century after having fled Spain during the Inquisition. In fact, our name, Cohen-Tannoudji, means simply the Cohen family from Tangiers. The Algerian Jews obtained…

“And what have kings that privates have not too,Save ceremony, save general ceremony?” William Shakespeare, in Henry the Fifth, IV. 1, 243-244 My youth held little forecast of a career in biomedical research. I was born on February 22, 1936, in York, Pennsylvania, and spent my childhood in a rural area on the west bank…

The Name The name Thouless is very rare. Fewer than 150 people with the name live in Britain, almost all of whom are connected to Norwich. This is because it is a relatively new spelling of an old name spelt variously Thules, Thewless, Thewlis etc. Five generations before David, his ancestor John was born Thules.…