Elfriede Jelinek did not submit an autobiography.

Jules A. Hoffmann did not submit an autobiography.

My grandfathers were both immigrants to the US, one from Estonia, then part of the Russian empire, and the other from England. The Estonian, William Morris Leiserson, was Jewish. He fled Estonia in 1890 at the age of seven, through a forest in the dark of night, with his mother and two brothers. The family…

Emil Adolf Behring was born on March 15, 1854 at Hansdorf, Deutsch-Eylau as the eldest son of the second marriage of a schoolmaster with a total of 13 children. Since the family could not afford to keep Emil at a University, he entered, in 1874, the well-known Army Medical College at Berlin. This made his…

My scientific interests started before my school years, when as a boy of five years I wandered through gardens, fields and woods with my mother’s entomologist-sister, Tante Irene, as we overturned rocks and sought to find how many different plant and animal species of previously hidden life lay before us. We cut open galls to…

I was born in San Jose, California on June 18, 1932, the first of six children of Robert and Dorothy Herschbach. My father was then a building contractor and later a rabbit breeder. His family had lived in this part of California for three generations; although our surname comes from a pair of villages in…

I was born in Amsterdam on December, 3, 1933, the son of Anna Gurk and Jozef Crutzen. I have one sister who still lives in Amsterdam with her family. My mother’s parents moved to the industrial Ruhr region in Germany from East Prussia towards the end of the last century. They were of mixed German…

Cordell Hull (October 2, 1871-July 23, 1955) was born in a log cabin in Pickett County, Tennessee, the third of the five sons of William and Elizabeth (Riley) Hull. His father was a farmer and subsequently a lumber merchant. The only one of the five boys who showed an interest in learning, Cordell wanted to…

I was born in November 1912 in Jassy (Iasi), the old capital of Moldavia, the eastern province of Romania. My education was started in that city and was continued through a baccalaureate (continental style) at the “Al Hasdeu” Lyceum in Buzau. My father, Emil Palade, was professor of philosophy and my mother, Constanta Cantemir-Palade, was…

James Dewey Watson was born in Chicago, Ill., on April 6th, 1928, as the only son of James D. Watson, a businessman, and Jean Mitchell. His father’s ancestors were originally of English descent and had lived in the midwest for several generations. His mother’s father was a Scottish-born tailor married to a daughter of Irish…