English By The Pasteur Institute was a product of Louis Pasteur’s victory over rabies; for vaccination against rabies represented just that for the entire world. The great man of science is first and foremost one who is able to identify the right problems at the right time, when there is a possibility of finding a…

by Abraham Pais The year 1917 marked the turbulent birth of a new era. In March the Czar of all Russians abdicated, in October the communist revolution broke out. Germany and Russia signed an armistice at Brest-Litovsk. The first United States division arrived in France and the battle of Passchendaele raged. The Balfour declaration on…

by Øyvind Tønnesson Nobelprize.org Peace Editor, 1998-2000 During the Second World War no Nobel Peace Prize was awarded. Under the German occupation of Norway from 1940 to 1945 normal political activity was banned, and there was little the Nobel Committee of the Norwegian Storting could do except postpone the prize awards and defend its integrity.…

In their autobiographies, Nobel Prize laureates reveal their reading habits: how they got started, who spurred them to read on, and where they spent their time losing themselves between the pages of a book. Find out and compare with your own experience, or simply get inspired! Latest book “Indeed in elementary school I often kept…

French de L’Institut Pasteur est né, en 1888, de la victoire sur la maladie que représentait, pour le monde entier, la vaccination contre la rage par Pasteur. Le grand homme en science, c’est d’abord celui qui sait discerner les bons problèmes au bon moment, quand il y a une chance de leur apporter quelque solution.…

by David M. States During the 1930s, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research (KWImF) was one of the most dynamic scientific research laboratories in all of Germany. One of its research directors during this time, Otto Meyerhof, had already won the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physiology. Two others, Richard Kuhn and Walther Bothe, were…

by Jan Lindsten Prologue became an internationally well known biomedical scientist during the first decade of the 20th century. A series of works published in 1910 (“the seven little devils”) attracted special attention because he could demonstrate that “the absorption of oxygen and elimination of carbon dioxide in the lungs take place by diffusion and…

by Kenneth J. Carpenter* Introduction In the course of the 19th century, chemists and physiologists studying the composition of foods and the nutritional requirements of humans and animals found that our diets needed to include the complex nitrogenous compounds called “proteins” (that, with water, form the bulk of our lean tissues), together with fats, starch…

by Anders Cullhed* What is time? Time is one of the main problems of Western philosophy and literature. Ever since the thinkers of classical Greece tried to understand the swiftness of our seconds, minutes and hours – the impossibility of stepping into the same river twice – the problem of time has haunted our imagination.…

by David M. States* Ludolf von Krehl’s search for colleagues who would integrate the then quite separate disciplines of the natural sciences under the umbrella of biomedical research led him to . Meyerhof’s study of intermediate metabolism involved a mix of physiology, pharmacology, physics and pathology. His already well-known successes with the study of muscle…