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I don’t remember much about my early childhood. I am told that before I began school, my older cousin would return from her school and teach me what she had learned. By the time I was 10 or so, I was displaying a curiosity that might have suggested an academic bent. I was an avid…

    The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2001               The basic discoveries made by this year’s Laureates will have broad applications within many fields of biology and medicine. The discoveries are important in understanding how chromosomal instability develops in cancer cells, i.e. how parts of chromosomes are…

My parents were born in Norfolk and spent their early years working in the big houses of that rural English county, my mother as a cook and my father as a handyman and chauffeur. After the 1930s recession they moved to Wembley, North-West London, where my father worked as a mechanic in the local H.J.…

    The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2001                 The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet has awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly to Leland Hartwell, Tim Hunt and Paul Nurse for their discoveries of “key regulators of the cell cycle”. Using genetic and…

I was born in 1943 at Neston in the Wirral, not far from Liverpool where my father, Richard William Hunt was a lecturer in paleography, the study of mediaeval manuscripts. Richard’s father was a doctor, and there is still a chemist’s shop (i.e. pharmacy) in Winchester that bears the family name. My mother’s father, Harry…

    The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2001               Organisms consist of cells that multiply through cell division. Before a cell can divide it has to grow in size, duplicate its chromosomes and separate the chromosomes for distribution between the two daughter cells. These different processes are…

  The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2001                     (Nobel Prize 1901) was one of the first to realize that molecules are three-dimensional. This year’s Nobel Prize has its roots in research carried out by the first Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, J. H. van ‘t Hoff. In…

  The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2001                   (R)-alanine R refers to the Latin word rectus, meaning right. (S)-alanine S refers to the Latin word sinister, meaning left. When alanine is produced in a laboratory under normal conditions, a mixture is obtained, half of which consists of…

I was born on September 3, 1938 in a suburb of Kobe (now Ashiya), Japan, the first son of Kaneki and Suzuko Noyori. Our family moved to Kobe soon afterwards. I grew up with two younger brothers and a sister in a pleasant city blessed by beautiful natural surroundings. Except for a short period at…