Summary I was born (14 April 1951) in Leicester, England but spent most of my childhood in the Gold Coast (later Ghana). The family returned to England in 1964, settling in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. There I went to the Royal Grammar School, which developed my interests in chemistry and biology and set me on a path to…

Early life I was born March 10, 1941 to Albert Mark Smith II (March 2, 1908 to February 3, 1978) and Jessie Patton Biggs Smith (September 14, 1909 to June 14, 2000). My brother Mark (A. Mark Smith III) was born December 29, 1942 and my sister Helen (now Helen Boyd) was born June 22,…

A rthur Ashkin’s father, Isadore Ashkenazi, was born in Tsarist Russia in 1891. Isadore was brought up with his older brother, Harry, both shown in Figure 1, in an orphan asylum and never told of the circumstances of how they ended up there. As it turned out, his brother made the mistake of not leaving…

I’d like to write this autobiographical sketch in a concise, chronological way, based on the reliable passage of time and its usual markers – the years. Then I would see my life as a linear process, gradually accumulating knowledge and experience, even leading towards a goal of some kind. Or at least aiming for one.…

Prologue Burning wooden walls collapsed in front of us. I was on the back of my mother, who was running away from our burning house, gasping for air. Although I was just three and a half years old, I vividly remember this scene that seems to be engraved forever in my memory. It was one…

Life Donna Theo Strickland was born on May 27, 1959, in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. She studied engineering physics at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, and optics at the University of Rochester in the United States. She earned her doctorate in optics in 1989. Her PhD supervisor was Gérard Mourou, future Nobel Laureate. She worked at…

I was born in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on July 25, 1956, misshapen after my mother’s twenty-four-hour labor and with no hair. My father called me his ‘Swan’ (until that nickname was swapped for ‘Vampira’ when I was a teenager). William Howard Arnold and Josephine Inman Routheau, both twenty-five, already had two-and-a-half-year old Bill when I…

As a basic scientist, I have been fortunate to see my research findings translate into a powerful new potentially curative treatment strategy for cancer. The first patient I met was Sharon Belvin. I met her in 2006 at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC). Jedd Wolchok, an oncologist at MSKCC, called and asked me to meet…

‘Yesterday i had the honour of drinking coffee with Madam ’. Those were the words of my father, who was an engineer in charge of the electricity network of The Three Valleys in Savoy. He went on to say that she was a very important personality who had received the Nobel Prize. I was about…

Dr Denis Mukwege is a world-renowned gynaecologist, human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate from east Congo. He has become the world’s leading specialist in the treatment of wartime sexual violence and a global campaigner against the use of rape as a weapon of war. As a child Denis Mukwege accompanied his father, a…