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.…

I was born in 1943 at Neston in the Wirral, not far from Liverpool where my father, Richard William Hunt was a lecturer in paleography, the study of mediaeval manuscripts. Richard’s father was a doctor, and there is still a chemist’s shop (i.e. pharmacy) in Winchester that bears the family name. My mother’s father, Harry…

Paul Hermann Müller was born at Olten, Solothurn, Switzerland, on January 12th, 1899, and his early childhood was spent at Lenzburg, Aargau, the birthplace of his father who was an employee of the Swiss Federal Railway. The family moved to Basle where Paul attended primary school and, later, Free Evangelical elementary and secondary schools. He…

Daniel Bovet was born at Neuchâtel, Switzerland, on March 23, 1907. He was the son of Pierre Bovet, Professor of Pedagogy in the University of Geneva and his wife Amy Babut. After completing his secondary education at Geneva, Bovet graduated at the University of Geneva in 1927. He then spent some years as Assistant in…