I was born in Paterson, New Jersey on March 16, 1918, the youngest of four children. My parents, Israel and Gussie (Cohen), had met and married in New York City after emigrating to the United States from the same small town in Russia. A paternal relative in Russia, the Rabbi Isaac Jacob Reines (1839-1915), was…

Otto Loewi was born on June 3, 1873, in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, the son of Jacob Loewi, a merchant, and Anna Willstätter. After having attended the humanistic Gymnasium (grammar school) in his native town, he entered in 1891 the Universities of Munich and Strassburg (at that time part of Germany) as a medical student. Apart from…

I was born on 19 June, 1910, in Sterling, Illinois, of Huguenot-German parentage, mine being the sixth generation native to America. My father was Ezra Flory, a clergyman-educator; my mother, nee Martha Brumbaugh, had been a schoolteacher. Both were descended from generations of farmers in the New World. They were the first of their families…

I was born 1933 in Winterthur, Switzerland, where our ancestors resided at least since the 15th century. We lived in a home built in 1898 by my grandfather, a merchant. My father, Robert Ernst, was teaching as an architect at the technical high school of our city. I had the great luck to grow up,…

I was born on September 30 1939 in Rosheim, a small medieval city of Alsace in France. My father, Pierre Lehn, then a baker, was very interested in music, played the piano and the organ and became later, having given up the bakery, the organist of the city. My mother Marie kept the house and…

I have never wanted to check out the family folklore that we could be traced back to a dominie at the hamlet of Balquhidder in the Scottish highlands. The romantic notion that I might have tenuous roots with two great traditions – with the political rebelliousness of Rob Roy McGregor and with the Scottish tradition…

Ralph Norman Angell Lane (December 26, 1872-October 7, 1967) was one of six children of Thomas Angell Lane and Mary (Brittain) Lane. Raised in a well-to-do but unpretentious Victorian household in Holbeach in Lincolnshire, England, he was influenced by his older sister Carrie and by extensive reading of such authors as Herbert Spencer, Huxley, Voltaire,…

Frederick Chapman Robbins was born in Auburn, Alabama, on August 25, 1916. He is the son of William J. Robbins, a plant physiologist, who became Director of the New York Botanical Gardens, and Christine, née Chapman. He was educated at the University of Missouri, where he took the A.B. degree in 1936 and the B.S.…

I was born in 1926 in Windsor, Ontario. Three of my grandparents were also born in Canada: the fourth, my paternal grandfather, emigrated as a child to the U.S.A. from the Bavarian town of Nördlingen. He became a pharmacist and achieved some prosperity by inventing the first process for the mass producing of gelatin capsules.…

I was born in South Bend, Indiana on June 8, 1947, one of that large bumper crop of babies born in the United States after World War II. My family moved to Birmingham Alabama in 1953 when I was six. Although Birmingham was already a major industrial center in the South, the city still had…