Category Famous Nobel Laureates

          Otto Wallach was a German chemist born on 27th March, 1847. He received the 1910 Nobel Prize for his work on alicyclic compounds.

          In 1865, he went to the University of Gottingen to study chemistry. In 1889, he was made the Director of the Chemical Institute at Gottingen. For many years, Wallach studied the structure and characters of alicyclic compounds, including hydrogen chloride.

         Wallach spent much of his research on the molecular structure of essential oils. He separated from the oils a group of fragrant materials that he called terpenes. He showed that many substances were mixtures of a small number of terpenes and that terpenes can easily be altered and changes into each other. Otto Wallach’s work became significant within the chemical industry, where essential oils are used in perfume and food.

          In 1909, he published his results and conclusions in his book about the chemistry of Terpenes- ‘Terpene and Campher’.

          Otto Wallach died on 26th February 1931, at the age of 84.

          Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald almost single-handedly established physical chemistry as an acknowledged academic discipline. In 1909, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on catalysis, chemical equilibria, and reaction velocities.

          Ostwald, born on 2nd September 1853, was a German chemist. Ostwald, Jacobus Henricus van’t Hoff, and Svante Arrhenius are credited with being the modern founders of the field of physical chemistry.

          Ostwald went to Leipzig in 1887, where he carried out ground-breaking research on catalysis, while promoting the works of Arrhenius and van’t Hoff.

          In 1894, he revealed how a catalyst can affect a chemical reaction’s speed, but is not included in its end-products. This understanding shed great light on chemical reactions, occurring in both industrial processes and living organisms. Ostwald died in 1932, after a short illness. He was 79 years old.

            Sir Robert Robinson studied the chemical reactions involved in forming alkaloids, and won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1947. He isolated tropinone in 1917, and described the structure of morphine in 1925, and strychnine in 1946.

            Robert Robinson was born on 13th September, 1886 at Rufford in Derbyshire. He contributed greatly towards the definition of the arrangement of atoms within molecules of morphine, papaverine, narcotine etc. These discoveries led to the production of certain antimalarial drugs in future. He also invented the symbol for benzene having a circle in the middle whilst working at St. Andrews University in 1923.

            During the World War II, Robinson worked on topics of national importance such as chemotherapy and chemical defence.

            His closing years were marred by failing eyesight, and he became almost completely blind. Nevertheless, his intellect remained active, and he began an autobiography when he was 88-years-old, working at it even on the day he died, 8th February, 1975.

            Linus Pauling was one of the greatest scientists and humanitarians the world has seen. He was a much respected and beloved defender of civil liberties and health issues.

            Pauling was born on 28th February 1901, in the US. Linus Pauling has been awarded two undivided Nobel Prizes. In 1954, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Eight years later, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his opposition to weapons of mass destruction.

            He is one of four individuals to have won more than one Nobel Prize. Of these, he is the only person to be awarded two unshared Nobel Prizes, and one of the two legends to be awarded Nobel Prizes in different fields, the other being Marie Curie.

            After first studying at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon, Linus Pauling earned his Ph.D from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, with which he maintained ties for the rest of his career.

            In 1954, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research into the nature of the chemical bond and its application in the structure of complex substances.

            Linus Pauling died on 19th August 1994.

            Melvin Calvin won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1961 for his research on the carbon dioxide assimilation in plants. Through studies during the early 1950s, particularly of single-cell green algae, Calvin traced the path taken by carbon through different stages of photosynthesis, which was later named the Calvin cycle. For this, he made use of tools such as radioactive isotopes and chromatography. His findings included insight into the important role played by phosphorous compounds during the composition of carbohydrates.

            Calvin was born on 8th April 1911, at St. Paul, Minnesota in the US. He is well-known for his leadership quality. During the latter part of the 1940s, and throughout the following decade, he led, and inspired an outstanding group of researchers.

            In 1942, Calvin married Genevieve Jemtegaard, with later Nobel chemistry laureate Glenn T. Seaborg as his best man. The husband and wife duo worked on an interdisciplinary project to investigate the chemical factors in the Rh blood group system. He died on 8th January, 1997.

            Max Ferdinand Perutz was an Austrian-born British molecular biologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1962, jointly with English biochemist John Kendrew, for their investigation on the structure of haemoglobin.

          Max Perutz was born on 19th May 1914, in Vienna, Austria, where his father owned a textile factory. He took his Ph.D from Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in 1936.

          Max Perutz applied the most powerful device X-ray crystallography to analyze the structure of haemoglobin. During the 1930s, this method was used to map increasingly large and complex molecules. He began to map the structure of haemoglobin, for example – the protein that allows blood to transport energy-giving oxygen to the body’s muscles.

          He received several awards including the Royal Medal in 1971, and the Copley Medal in 1979 from the Royal Society’ of London.

          On 6th February, 2002, he succumbed to cancer.

        Sully Prudhomme, the French essayist and poet in 1901, had the honour of winning the first Nobel Prize in Literature.

          Born on the 16th March 1839, in Paris, little is recorded about his upbringing, but it is known that he was originally studying engineering but he changed streams and studied philosophy instead. He had already begun writing poetry as a student, and his debut came in 1865.

          Much of his work demonstrated a sometimes sentimental, and certainly personal, style with a heavy leaning towards his interests in philosophy and all things scientific.

          He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in special recognition of his poetic composition, which gives evidence of artistic perfection and a rare combination of the qualities of both heart and intellect. Sully Prudhomme died in1907.

            Rudyard Kipling was an English writer and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is best known for his poems and stories set in India during the  period  British imperial rule.

            Kipling was born in Bombay, but educated in England. In 1882, aged sixteen, he returned to Lahore, where his parents then lived. He worked for Anglo-Indian newspapers there.

           His literary career began with ‘Departmental Ditties’ published in 1886. His children’s books are classics of children’s literature. Rudyard Kipling wrote the most famous children’s book in world history- ‘The Jungle Book’ in 1894.

          In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in consideration of the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration.

         His other works are ‘Stalky and Co.’, ‘Kim’ and ‘Puck of Pook’s Hill’. The ‘Just So Stories’ were originally written for his daughter Josephine, who died of pneumonia aged six.

         Rudyard Kipling died on 18th January, 1936.

          William Butler Yeats is widely considered to be one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. Born in Dublin, Ireland, on 13th June 1865, William Butler Yeats was the son of a well-known Irish painter, John Butler Yeats.

          A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, he helped in founding the Abbey Theatre, and in his later years, served as an Irish Senator for two terms. Though his works after 1910 was strongly influenced by Ezra Pound, becoming more modern in its imagery, W. B. Yeats was loyal to the traditional verse forms.

          He won the Nobel Prize in the year 1923 for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation. William Butler Yeats used the occasion of his acceptance lecture at the Royal Academy of Sweden to present himself as a standard-bearer of Irish nationalism and Irish cultural independence.

          His first significant poem was ‘The Island of Statues’, a fantasy work that took Edmund Spenser and Shelley for its poetic models.

          His first solo publication was the pamphlet ‘Mosada: A Dramatic Poem’. Yeats died in 1939.

             George Bernard Shaw was born on 26th July 1856, in Dublin, Ireland. He was a renowned playwright, critic and polemicist. When Shaw was 15-years-old, his mother left him and his father.

            Later, Shaw’s plays, including ‘Misalliance’, are filled with problematic parent-child relationships: with children who are brought up in isolation from their parents.

            He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as ‘Widowers’ Houses’, ‘Pygmalion’ and ‘Candida’. George Bernard Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in the year 1925.

            Over a decade later in 1938 he earned an Academy Award for the film adaptation of ‘Pygmalion’. In the final decade of his life, he made fewer public statements, but continued to write prolifically until shortly before his death. Bernard Shaw refused all state honours including the Order of Merit in 1946.

          Bernard Shaw’s complete works appeared in thirty-six volumes between 1930 and 1950.

          Today he is considered as one of the greatest wits of English language. Film adaptations of his plays are considered classics.

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