My father, Ju Chin Chu, came to the United States in 1943 to continue his education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in chemical engineering, and two years later, my mother, Ching Chen Li, joined him to study economics. A generation earlier, my mother’s father earned his advanced degrees in civil engineering at Cornell while…

1. Early life and influences I was born in 1945 in Fukuoka, half a year before the end of the World War II, to my father Yoshio and mother Shina. My father was employed at Kyushu University as a professor of mining engineering. At that time, everyone in Japan was equally poor, and even food…

I was born on December 9, 1926 in Boston, Massachusetts. My parents were Henry P. Kendall, a Boston businessman, and Evelyn Way Kendall, originally from Canada. I lived in Boston until the early 1930s when the family – there were five, for by then I had a younger brother and a younger sister – moved…

Medicine Hat is a small town in Southwestern Alberta founded just over 100 years ago in a valley where the Canadian Pacific Railway crossed the South Saskatchewan River. I was born there on November 2, 1929 and raised in comfortable if somewhat Spartan circumstances. My father was the son of a Northern Irish carpenter and…

I was born in Nagoya, Japan on September 5th, 1939, the second of three sons. I have also a younger sister. My father was an engineer working for a textile company that had several factories scattered in rural towns in the southern part of Japan. The company policy made it necessary for my father to…

I was born in the capital of Scotland on Victoria Day in the middle of World War II. The nursing home in Edinburgh where this cliff-hanger of an event took place, during the early evening of 24th May 1942, was located at 57 Manor Place. It was not anticipated that a little boy weighing in…

In 1936, when I was born in the small Silesian village of Waltersdorf in the county of Sprottau in the then eastern part of Germany, now part of Poland, the fine structure of the cell was still an enigma. After 300 years of staring through light microscopes, essentially all that biologists had learned was that…

I was born on October 21, 1944 in Paris, just before the end of the second world war and a few months after Paris had been liberated by the allies and the French army led by General Charles de Gaulle (August 19–25, 1944). My mother’s name was Lydie Angèle Arcelin and her family came mostly…

It is a great privilege to be able to stand on the shoulders of the giants of chemistry and in doing so experience the marvels of the molecular world and provide “challenges for our youth, dreams for the people, and opportunities for industry.” For me being a scientist engaged in designing new molecules and chemical…

Childhood I was born on June 22, 1943 in wartime Aberdeen, Scotland and lived there for the first sixteen years of my life. My parents, Hans Walter and Johanna Maria Kosterlitz (Gresshöner) had fled Hitler’s Germany in 1934 because my father, a non-practicing Jew, came from a Jewish family and was forbidden to marry a…