My ancestors apparently emigrated from Europe in the middle of the 19th century; the Lauterburs probably from Luxembourg, and my mother’s people, Wagners and Weingartners, from Baden-Baden or nearby. They settled in northern Ohio, where my mother’s father, Hans Christian Wagner, married Margaret (Maggie) Weingartner. They lived in Tiffin, Ohio when I was a child,…

I was born on October 2nd 1917, in Thames-Ditton, near London. My parents, of Belgian-German extraction, were Belgian nationals who had taken refuge in England during the war. They returned to Belgium in 1920, and I grew up in the cosmopolitan harbour city of Antwerp, at a time when education in the Flemish part of…

My parents were both New Englanders, though my father was born in Minnesota where his father had moved from Massachusetts to join a frontier community. My father moved east as a young man, and for a number of years was YMCA secretary in Haverhill, Massachusetts. Subsequently he invented and worked in the application of a…

  I was born on the first day of January 1941 in the front bedroom of my grandparents’ house in Rodborough near Stroud in Gloucestershire where my mother had come to escape the bombing in London. “A fine strapping lad” was the news my grandfather received as Dr Mold came to the top of the…

Charles Jules Henry Nicolle was born in Rouen on September 21, 1866, where his father, Eugène Nicolle, was a doctor in a local hospital. Charles received, together with his brothers, early tuition in biology from his father and, after education at the Lycée Corneille de Rouen, he entered the local medical school where he studied…

Severo Ochoa was born at Luarca, Spain, on September 24th, 1905. He is the son of Severo Ochoa, a lawyer and business man, and Carmen de Albornoz. Ochoa was educated at Málaga College, where he took his B.A. degree in 1921. His interest in biology was greatly stimulated by the publications of the great Spanish…

His mother originated from Lorraine, his father from the Pyrénées, two French provinces very distant from one another and with vast cultural differences. His parents met in Paris. During the First World War, his father, a doctor and captain in the army, sent Jean Dausset’s mother and the first three children to Toulouse. It was…

Buchloe is a small town in Bavaria, situated in a rolling countryside in view of the Alps, 70 km west from Munich. This is where I grew up and spent most of my life until 1963, when I entered university. I was born in Landsberg, another town close by on the 20th of March 1944.…

Max Theiler was born on January 30, 1899, in Pretoria, South Africa, one of the four children of Sir Arnold and Emma (née Jegge) Theiler. His father was a well-known veterinary scientist. He attended local schools except for one year in Basle, Switzerland (his father was of Swiss origin), then went on to Rhodes University…

Arthur Kornberg was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1918 and educated in its public schools. He received his undergraduate degree in science from the City College of New York in 1937 and the M.D. degree from the University of Rochester in 1941. After a year’s internship in internal medicine, he served as a commissioned…