I was born, as were my father and his parents, in Milford, Massachusetts, a town 30 miles southwest of Boston. My father’s parents were of Southern Irish and English extraction. My mother was born in Providence, Rhode Island, soon after her parents had emigrated to the United States from Italy. Father was a lawyer and…

Paul Ehrlich was born on March 14, 1854 at Strehlen, in Upper Silesia, Germany. He was the son of Ismar Ehrlich and his wife Rosa Weigert, whose nephew was the great bacteriologist Karl Weigert. Ehrlich was educated at the Gymnasium at Breslau and subsequently at the Universities of Breslau, Strassburg, Freiburg-im-Breisgau and Leipzig. In 1878…

Rodney Robert Porter born 8 October 1917 at Newton-le-Willows, Lancashire, England. He was educated at the Ashton-in-Makerfield Grammar School taking his Hons.B.Sc. (Biochemistry) in 1939 at the University of Liverpool and his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge in 1948. After one year’s postdoctoral work at Cambridge, Professor Porter joined the scientific staff of the…

I was born in Uppsala Sweden in 1924, the youngest of five children. My father, Fritz S. Wiesel, was chief psychiatrist and head of Beckomberga Hospital, a mental institution located on the outskirts of Stockholm. We were brought up by my mother, Anna-Lisa (b. Bentzer), at the hospital and were sent by bus to Whitlockska…

My father, Dr. Edward E. Thomas was born in 1870 and moved to Texas with his family in a covered wagon in 1874. He grew up in frontier Texas and, with almost no formal schooling went to the University of Louisville, Kentucky, where he received his M. D. His first wife died of tuberculosis, and…

Christiaan Eijkman was born on August 11, 1858, at Nijkerk in Gelderland (The Netherlands), the seventh child of Christiaan Eijkman, the headmaster of a local school, and Johanna Alida Pool. A year later, in 1859, the Eijkman family moved to Zaandam, where his father was appointed head of a newly founded school for advanced elementary…

Carl Peter Henrik Dam was born in Copenhagen on 21st February 1895, to Emil Dam, apothecary, and his wife Emilie (née Peterson), a teacher. The young man graduated in chemistry from the Polytechnic Institute, Copenhagen in 1920, and the same year was appointed instructor (assistant) in chemistry at the School of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine,…

Frederick Gowland Hopkins was born on June 20, 1861, at Eastbourne, England. His father, a bookseller in Bishopsgate Street, London, was much interested in science, but he died when Gowland was an infant. For the next ten years Gowland lived with his mother at Eastbourne, showing as a child literary rather than scientific tastes, although,…

Edward Adelbert Doisy was born at Hume, Illinois, on November 13, 1893. He was the son of Edward Perez and his wife Ada, née Alley. He was educated at the University of Illinois, where he took his A.B. degree in 1914 and his M.S. degree in 1916. From there he went to Harvard University, where…

Selman Abraham Waksman was born in Priluka, near Kiev, Russia, on July 22nd, 1888, as the son of Jacob Waksman and Fradia London. He received his early education primarily from private tutors, and completed his school training in Odessa in an evening school and with private tutors. He obtained his matriculation diploma in 1910 from…