Robert Burns Woodward was born in Boston on April 10th, 1917, the only child of Margaret Burns, a native of Glasgow, and Arthur Woodward, of English antecedents, who died in October, 1918, at the age of thirty-three. Woodward was attracted to chemistry at a very early age, and indulged his taste for the science in…

Presentation Speech by Professor A. Fredga, member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry of Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen. In our days, the chemistry of natural products attracts a very lively interest. New substances, more or less complicated, more or less useful, are constantly discovered and investigated. For the determination of the…

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Robert B. Woodward’s speech at the Nobel Banquet in Stockholm, December 10, 1965 Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen. We are told that the Nobel festivities are a celebration of achievement. Therefore, I hope it will be regarded as appropriate for me to express my feeling that the things my fellow laureates and…

A central theme of organic chemistry is the desire to understand important biological processes through discovering and imitating the manner in which Nature constructs its key substances from their basic chemical elements. Constructing artificial versions of natural products from its chemical building blocks traditionally involved a large degree of trial and error, and consequently the…

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Presentation Speech by Anders Österling, Member of the This year’s Nobel Prize for Literature has, as you all know, been awarded to the Russian writer Mikhail Sholokhov, born in 1905, and now in his sixty-first year. Sholokhov’s childhood was spent in the country of the Don Cossacks; and the strong ties that have always bound…

Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov (1905-1984) was born in the land of the Cossacks, now known as the Kamenskaya region of the R.S.F.S.R. He attended several high schools until 1918. During the civil war he fought on the side of the revolutionaries, and in 1922 he moved to Moscow to become a journalist. There he published a…

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Julian Schwinger was born on 12th February 1918 in New York City. The principal direction of his life was fixed at an early age by an intense awareness of physics, and its study became an all-engrossing activity. To judge by a first publication, he debuted as a professional physicist at the age of sixteen. He…