I recall a sunny September morning in Virginia. I remember the sound of the school bus taking away the older kids, including my two siblings Jean and Frank. My mother, no doubt, was busy with my baby brother Roger. I was playing in the creek as I often did, turning over stones, looking for small…

I was born on June 3rd, 1929 in Gränichen in the Canton of Aargau, Switzerland, where I went to the public schools until the age of 16. I then entered the gymnasium at the Kantonsschule Aarau where I got a B-type maturity in 1949. From 1949 to 1953 I studied towards the diploma in Natural…

Marshall Warren Nirenberg was born in New York City on April 10th, 1927, the son of Harry and Minerva Nirenberg. The family moved to Orlando, Florida in 1939. He early developed an interest in biology. In 1948 he received a B. Sc. degree, and in 1952, a M. Sc. degree in Zoology from the University…

My parents came to the United States in the early years of this century as part of a wave of Russian Jewish immigrants seeking freedom and opportunity in the New World. My mother, Sarah Levitan, came to America when she was 18. My father, Samuel, rebelling against an orthodox family, left home in his midteens…

I grew up in an academic middle-class family. In 1926, when I was 3 years old, my father was appointed professor of history at the University of Lund, Sweden, and moved there with his family from Uppsala, Sweden. My mother had passed a master-of-arts examination and my father a Ph.D. degree at the University of…

Axel Hugo Theodor Theorell was born at Linköping, Sweden, on July 6, 1903. He was the son of Thure Theorell, surgeon-major to the First Life Grenadiers practising medicine in Linköping, and his wife Armida Bill. Theorell was educated for nine years at a State Secondary School in Linköping and passed his matriculation examination there on…

I don’t remember much about my early childhood. I am told that before I began school, my older cousin would return from her school and teach me what she had learned. By the time I was 10 or so, I was displaying a curiosity that might have suggested an academic bent. I was an avid…

My paternal great, great grandfather emigrated from Koenigsberg, currently Kaliningrad, to St. Louis during the 1850s, a time of large-scale movement of Germans, including German Jews, to the Mid-Western United States. My paternal grandfather moved to Binghamton, New York, where my father was born. My father had success in vaudeville as a singer/dancer/comedian. He eventually…

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was born on September 14, 1849 at Ryazan, where his father, Peter Dmitrievich Pavlov, was a village priest. He was educated first at the church school in Ryazan and then at the theological seminary there. Inspired by the progressive ideas which D. I. Pisarev, the most eminent of the Russian literary critics…

My parents were born in Norfolk and spent their early years working in the big houses of that rural English county, my mother as a cook and my father as a handyman and chauffeur. After the 1930s recession they moved to Wembley, North-West London, where my father worked as a mechanic in the local H.J.…