I was born the eldest of three sons of Ryokichi Fukui, a foreign trade merchant and factory manager, and Chie Fukui, in Nara, Japan, on October 4, 1918. In my high school years, chemistry was not my favourite subject, but the most decisive occurrence in my educational career came when my father asked the advice…

Hermann Emil Fischer was born on October 9, 1852, at Euskirchen, in the Cologne district. His father was a successful business man. After three years with a private tutor, Emil went to the local school and then spent two years at school at Wetzlar, and two more at Bonn where he passed his final examination…

Irène Curie, born in Paris, September 12, 1897, was the daughter of , and since 1926 the wife of Frédéric Joliot. After having started her studies at the Faculty of Science in Paris, she served as a nurse radiographer during the First World War. She became Doctor of Science in 1925, having prepared a thesis…

Max Ferdinand Perutz was born in Vienna on May 19th, 1914. Both his parents, Hugo Perutz and Dely Goldschmidt, came from families of textile manufacturers who had made their fortune in the 19th century by the introduction of mechanical spinning and weaving into the Austrian monarchy. He was sent to school at the Theresianum, a…

Stanford Moore was born in 1913 in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, where his father was a member of the faculty of the School of Law of Vanderbilt University. His developmental years were in a home environment which made the pursuit of knowledge an eagerly adopted undertaking. He had the opportunity to…

more

  Presentation Speech by the former Rector of the National Archives Dr. C.T. Odhner, President of , on December 10, 1901 Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen. The Academy has awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry to Jacobus Henricus van ‘t Hoff, Professor in the University of Berlin, for his pioneering work on chemical dynamics…

Presentation Speech by Professor , member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry of Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen. The proteins are among the most complicated and enigmatic substances in Nature and appear to be particularly closely related to all that we call Life. To this group of key substances belong for example…

  The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2004             What proteins are marked? Surprisingly many of the proteins created in the cell are faulty from the start. They must be broken down and rebuilt since they can damage the organism. But perhaps the most important reason for a cell to get…

more