Richard F. Heck: Nobel Laureate in Chemistry by Luke R. Odell and Mats Larhed Richard F. Heck was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, U.S.A. on August 15, 1931. The only son of a housewife and a salesman, he moved to Los Angeles, California at the age of eight. His passion for chemistry began in his early…

I was born in Rome, Italy, the son of Enrico Modigliani and Olga Flaschel. My father was a leading pediatrician in the city and my mother was a volunteer social worker. My school performance in the early years was good though not outstanding. Then, in 1932, a major trauma occurred. My father died as a…

I was born on September 12, 1930, in Mukawa – a small town in Hokkaido, Japan. I attended primary school there and entered a secondary school in Tomakomai, which is home to one of the biggest paper companies in Japan. At high school, I was interested in mathematics. Consequently, when I entered Hokkaido University in…

Eduard Buchner was born in Munich on May 20, 1860, the son of Dr. Ernst Buchner, Professor Extraordinary of Forensic Medicine and physician at the University, and Friederike née Martin. He was originally destined for a commercial career but, after the early death of his father in 1872, his older brother Hans, ten years his…

I was born in 1921 in Tokyo and grew up in the provincial city of Fukui. I studied physics at the Imperial University of Tokyo from 1940 to 1942, graduating at the level of M.S. Then I was drafted into an army radar laboratory. After the end of the war, in 1946, I returned to…

My first encounters with McGill University came when I was still in a baby carriage. My mother used to wheel me about the campus when we lived in that neighborhood and, as she recounted years later, she would tell me that I would go to McGill. There was some precedent for my going there, since…

Alva Myrdal was born in Uppsala in 1902, graduated from University in 1924, and married the same year. Together with her husband she made a major contribution in the 1930s to the work of promoting social welfare. They were joint authors of a book entitled “The population problem in crisis”, and she was also actively…

I was born on December 31, 1937, in Karcag, Hungary. Karcag is a small town of around 25,000 inhabitants, about 150 kilometers east of Budapest. It had a Jewish community of nearly one thousand people. My father, Moshe Hershko, was a schoolteacher in the Jewish elementary school in Karcag; most of the Jewish children in…

Ancestors The Russian Revolution and the growing influence of the Soviet empire stimulated a migration of Jews to America and Israel. My father’s father, Norman, followed his brother Nathan to Massachusetts where he enlisted in the British foreign brigade to fight in Palestine. He returned to the US and settled in Minnesota, along with a…

What is it that makes a dedicated scientist out of a kid with an everyday background? Is it the ungovernable forces that seem to shape all our lives, or is it the development of our own curiosity and tastes that tips the balance of randomness? I’ve always been puzzled by those questions and can’t claim…