George Wald – Nominations
Keffer Hartline – Nominations
Ragnar Granit – Nominations
Charles B. Huggins – Banquet speech
Charles B. Huggins’ speech at the Nobel Banquet in Stockholm, December 10, 1966
Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen:
I must express the profound gratitude of my family and myself for the distinction with which you honor us tonight. After the nightingales have sung the other birds should be still but it requires much restraint for a Laureate, even one 3 hours old, to be silent on any subject.
Book 2 of the Iliad is the catalog of the ships. The present remarks must be considered the catalog of the debts – indebtedness to all who facilitated my work. No adjectives in any language come to mind which are sufficiently superlative to describe the unsurpassable hospitality of the Swedish nation.
First in my thoughts on this happy occasion is gratitude to my wife who has endured much as a Science-Widow. She did not interfere with the self-discipline which is necessary to create and which is lit by the passion for discovery. It is possible that the wife of a lab worker is never quite sure whether she or Science comes first in her husband’s affections.
Secondly, is gratitude to the wonderful colleagues “with satchel and shining morning face.” They keep the pot stirred. There is plenty of emotion in our business of discovery which is bred in the heart and in the head. Inevitably one develops affection for all of the colleagues united in the common purpose.
Thirdly, there is gratitude for the wonderful advantage I have enjoyed of a medical education. The doctor is blessed above all men in possessing the right and privilege to care for sick folks. The University provided me with a clinic where one could minister unto the cancer patients for whom little could be done.
It is awesome. It is inspiring. It is terrible. It is wonderful. The agony of cancer was expressed by Sir Thomas Browne: “The long habit of living makes mere men the more hardly to part with life and all to be nothing but what is to come.”
A cancer worker utters the mariner’s prayer: “Oh, Lord, Thy sea is so vast and my bark is so small.”
Yet, a start has been made. Something emerges which has content and meaning for the people. Of less importance, but pleasing too, is the thought that our feeble efforts have gained the approval of fellow workers in the same field who also enjoy the opportunity to work 7 days each week on our common problem. By means of the early morning call they invited me to Scandinavia for 10 December 1966. Tusen tack för allt.
Ragnar Granit – Nobel Lecture
Nobel Lecture, December 12, 1967
The Development of Retinal Neurophysiology
Read the Nobel Lecture
Pdf 93 kB
George Wald – Nobel Lecture
Nobel Lecture, December 12, 1967
The Molecular Basis of Visual Excitation
Read the Nobel Lecture
Pdf 286 kB
George Wald – Banquet speech
George Wald’s speech at the Nobel Banquet in Stockholm, December 10, 1967
Your Majesty, Royal Highnesses, Exellencies, Ladies, Gentlemen, and fellow students:
A scientist should be the happiest of men. Not that science isn’t serious; but as everyone knows, being serious is one way of being happy, just as being gay is one way of being unhappy.
A scientist lives with all reality. There is nothing better. To know reality is to accept it, and eventually to love it.
I tell my students to try early in life to find an unattainable objective. The trouble with most of the things that people want is that they get them. No scientist needs to worry on that score. For him there is always the further horizon. Science goes from question to question; big questions, and little, tentative answers. The questions as they age grow ever broader, the answers are seen to be more limited.
A scientist is in a sense a learned small boy. There is something of the scientist in every small boy. Others must outgrow it. Scientists can stay that way all their lives.
I have lived much of my life among molecules. They are good company. I tell my students to try to know molecules, so well that when they have some question involving molecules, they can ask themselves, What would I do if I were that molecule? I tell them, Try to feel like a molecule; and if you work hard, who knows? Some day you may get to feel like a big molecule!
So we have much to be thankful for. With this great honor you cast a radiance upon our science. We who work in vision are happy to have it made so visible.
I am glad to be able to bring this offering to the memory of my teacher, Selig Hecht, whose widow Gelia is here with us tonight; to my wife, who is also my closest co-worker; and to my co-workers at home, particularly Paul Brown, who for twenty years has done so much himself, and with us all.
But there is something more. The grocer, the butcher, the taxi man, all seem delighted to share in our pleasure. The Nobel Prize is an honor unique in the world in having found its way into the hearts and minds of simple people everywhere. It casts a light of peace and reason upon us all; and for that I am especially grateful.
Ragnar Granit – Photo gallery
Medicine laureate Ragnar Granit receiving his Nobel Prize from the King of Sweden, Gustaf VI Adolf, 10 December 1967.
Unknown author. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Ragnar Granit at Karolinska Institutet, ca. 1956.
Copyright © The Nobel Foundation Photographer: Inge Holm
Nobel Laureates in Physiology or Medicine at Karolinska Institutet. From left: Ulf von Euler, Hugo Theorell and Ragnar Granit.
Copyright © Lennart Nilsson
Ragnar Granit – Banquet speech
Ragnar Granit’s speech at the Nobel Banquet in Stockholm, December 10, 1967 (in Swedish)
Eders Majestät, Eders Kungliga Högheter, Ärade Festförsamling:
Ingen kan ta emot ett nobelpris utan känslor av djup tacksamhet och glädje. Mitt tack riktar sig inte enbart till prisutdelarna – intill helt nyligen mitt eget lärarkollegium – utan också till personer och institutioner i fyra länder, Sverige, Finland, England och Förenta Staterna, lika mycket till enskilda individer som till vissa organisationer i dessa länder. Glädjen finner man sig dela med en så stor krets av vänner och kolleger, att det känns som om man icke blott fått utan även gett en stor gåva. Om jag särskilt ägnar min finlands-svenska hembygd en tanke denna kväll så är anledningen inte enbart personlig. Den måste också ses emot den historiska bakgrund, vars underlag i verkligheten min generation upplevt med sådan obönhörlig genomslagskraft.
Om ögat, vårt ädlaste sinnesorgan, sade Charles Darwin: “I remember well the time when the thought of the eye made me cold all over”. Också jag har känt dessa kalla kårar over ryggen inför ögats komplexa problematik, men just nu erfar jag bara den värme, som ögon kan utstråla och solar mig däri. – Tack.
Keffer Hartline – Other resources
Links to other sites