I have never wanted to check out the family folklore that we could be traced back to a dominie at the hamlet of Balquhidder in the Scottish highlands. The romantic notion that I might have tenuous roots with two great traditions – with the political rebelliousness of Rob Roy McGregor and with the Scottish tradition…

NOBELFÖRSAMLINGEN KAROLINSKA INSTITUTET THE NOBEL ASSEMBLY AT THE KAROLINSKA INSTITUTE 11 October 1993 has today decided to award the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly to Richard J. Roberts and Phillip A. Sharp for their discovery of “split genes”. Summary Our knowledge regarding the genetic material, the genes, has increased dramatically during the…

Frederick Chapman Robbins was born in Auburn, Alabama, on August 25, 1916. He is the son of William J. Robbins, a plant physiologist, who became Director of the New York Botanical Gardens, and Christine, née Chapman. He was educated at the University of Missouri, where he took the A.B. degree in 1936 and the B.S.…

I was born in 1926 in Windsor, Ontario. Three of my grandparents were also born in Canada: the fourth, my paternal grandfather, emigrated as a child to the U.S.A. from the Bavarian town of Nördlingen. He became a pharmacist and achieved some prosperity by inventing the first process for the mass producing of gelatin capsules.…

I was born in South Bend, Indiana on June 8, 1947, one of that large bumper crop of babies born in the United States after World War II. My family moved to Birmingham Alabama in 1953 when I was six. Although Birmingham was already a major industrial center in the South, the city still had…

NOBELFÖRSAMLINGEN KAROLINSKA INSTITUTET THE NOBEL ASSEMBLY AT THE KAROLINSKA INSTITUTE 6 October 1997 has today decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 1997 to Stanley B. Prusiner for his discovery of “Prions – a new biological principle of infection”. Summary The 1997 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is awarded to…

Albert von Szent-Györgyi was born in Budapest on September 16, 1893, the son of Nicolaus von Szent-Györgyi, a great landed proprietor and Josefine, whose father, Joseph Lenhossék, and brother Michael were both Professors of Anatomy in the University of Budapest. He matriculated in 1911 and entered his uncle’s laboratory where he studied until the outbreak…

I was born in Catanzaro, Italy, from a Calabrese mother and a Ligurian father. I stayed in that city for a short time; my father was called into the army (World War I) and we moved to the north, Cuneo and Torino. At the end of the war my father, who was in the “Genio…

The Purkinje cell of the cerebellum is used as an example to illustrate the revelatory power of the Golgi stain, and why it was and still is important. The extension and orientation of dendrites of the Purkinje cells provided a key for the understanding of how the cerebellar cortex is built up and works (the…

KAROLINSKA INSTITUTET 14 October 1976 has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 1976 jointly to Baruch S. Blumberg and D. Carleton Gajdusek for their discoveries concerning “new mechanisms for the origin and dissemination of infectious diseases”. The main interest regarding epidemic diseases has concerned different acute diseases at which symptoms…