News from Nobelprize.org
January 25, 2008
January 25th marks the presumed anniversary of the birth of Scotland’s favourite son, the poet Robert Burns. Around the world, bands of Scots, alongside many of us with only the most tenuous connections with Scotland, will be holding Burns Suppers, complete with haggis and pipes. And so this month, News at Nobelprize.org takes advantage of the occasion to celebrate some of Scotland’s connections with the Nobel Prizes.
As illustrated below, these connections range from those of the founder of the Nobel Prizes, Alfred Nobel, to the Nobel Laureates themselves and the ways that Scotland has inspired their thinking. In fact the connections might even be stretched to extend to Burns himself in many cases, given the unexpected paths to discovery that many Laureates describe. His most famous poem, To a Mouse, contains the lines "The best-laid plans of mice and men / Go oft awry". Surely a description of research plans familiar to many a Laureate!
So happy Burns Night, and as always, please let us know your opinion of what you find on Nobelprize.org, and any suggestions for how we might improve.
Adam Smith
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"WITHOUT WORK THE PLACE WOULD BE INTOLERABLE"
Alfred Nobel himself was, for a time, a Scottish resident. Having tried, and failed, to set up a dynamite factory in England, he turned his attention to the more receptive Scots, and developed a site at Ardeer in Scotland. An article by John Dolan describes how this expanded to employ more than 13,000 people in its heyday.
Read the article » |
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"WORLD PEACE MUST BE BASED ON WORLD PLENTY"
Descended from Scottish farmers, the 1949 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Lord Boyd Orr was himself a nutritionist, most famous for being the first Director General of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. As described in his Nobel Lecture, his work for peace stemmed from his belief that the greatest danger of war stemmed from disparities in living standards.
Read, or listen to an excerpt of, the lecture » |
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"THE HIGHEST POINT OF MY NATIVE LAND"
Scotland has nurtured Nobel Laureates in more ways than one. C.T.R. Wilson, who received the 1927 Nobel Prize in Physics for his development of the cloud chamber, was first inspired to learn about clouds by observing them from the peak of Ben Nevis, Scotland's highest mountain. He described the encounter in his banquet speech.
Read the speech » |
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CELEBRATING PENICILLIN
Scottish Nobel Laureate Sir Alexander Fleming famously discovered penicillin when it drifted into one of the culture plates sitting on his lab bench. In 1954, a gathering marking the 25th anniversary of this lifesaving discovery at St. Mary's Hospital in London was caught on film.
View the archive footage » |
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"I FEEL I HAVE FOUND MY NICHE AT LAST"
Sir James Black, 1988 Nobel Laureate in Medicine, was the discoverer of two blockbuster drugs; propranolol and cimetidine. But, as described in his elegant and candid autobiography, for him these discoveries marked only stages of development in his progress from the coalfields of Fife to running his own eponymous research unit.
Read his autobiography » |
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THE WRONG INCENTIVE?
After receiving the 1996 Economics Prize for his work on incentives, Scottish Laureate James Mirrlees cautioned in his banquet speech that, "According to economic theory, a prize once awarded should actually induce recipients to work less hard." Hear him in conversation with Marika Griehsel in an interview from 2004.
Watch the interview » |
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"CAN ANYONE DESERVE SO CONCENTRATED AN ACCOLADE?"
And lastly, sharing a name with the poet himself (a gift no doubt of his Scottish mother) we have the 1965 Chemistry Laureate Robert Burns Woodward. In his banquet speech he was at pains to recognize the contribution of the "more than two hundred and fifty men and women" who had helped him to his discoveries.
Read the speech » |
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