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• Aaron Klug
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• 
  

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  United Kingdom
  The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (commonly known as the United Kingdom, the UK, or Britain) is a sovereign state located off the north-western coast of continental Europe. The country includes the island of Great Britain, the north-eastern part of the island of Ireland and many smaller islands. Northern Ireland is the only part of the UK that shares a land border with another sovereign state—the Republic of Ireland. Apart from this land border the UK is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, the North Sea, the English Channel and the Irish Sea.
  The United Kingdom is a unitary state governed under a constitutional monarchy and a parliamentary system, with its seat of government in the capital city of London. It is a country in its own right and consists of four countries: England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. There are three devolved administrations, each with varying powers, based in Belfast, Edinburgh and Cardiff, the capitals of Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Associated with the UK, but not constitutionally part of it, are three Crown Dependencies. The United Kingdom has fourteen overseas territories. These are remnants of the British Empire which, at its height in 1922, encompassed almost a quarter of the world's land surface and was the largest empire in history. British influence can still be observed in the language, culture and legal systems of many of its former territories.
  
  wn.com/United_Kingdom
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  United States
  The United States of America (commonly abbreviated to the United States, the U.S., the USA, America, and the States) is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its forty-eight contiguous states and Washington, D.C., the capital district, lie between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, bordered by Canada to the north and Mexico to the south. The state of Alaska is in the northwest of the continent, with Canada to the east and Russia to the west, across the Bering Strait. The state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific. The country also possesses several territories in the Pacific and Caribbean.
  At 3.79 million square miles (9.83 million km²) and with over 312 million people, the United States is the third or fourth largest country by total area, and the third largest by both land area and population. It is one of the world's most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, the product of large-scale immigration from many countries. The U.S. economy is the world's largest national economy, with an estimated 2011 GDP of $15.1 trillion (22% of nominal global GDP and over 19% of global GDP at purchasing-power parity). Per capita income is the world's sixth-highest.
  
  wn.com/United_States

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  Aaron Ciechanover
  Aaron Ciechanover (אהרן צ'חנובר; born October 1, 1947) is an Israeli biologist, and Nobel laureate in Chemistry.
  Ciechanover was born in Haifa, British mandate of Palestine, a year before the establishment of the State of Israel. His family had immigrated from Poland before the Second World War.
  He earned a master's degree in science in 1971 and graduated from Hadassah Medical School in Jerusalem in 1974. He received his doctorate in biochemistry in 1982 from the Technion (the Israel Institute of Technology), in Haifa. He is currently a Technion Distinguished Research Professor in the Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine and Research Institute at the Technion.
  Ciechanover is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and is a foreign associate of the United States National Academy of Sciences.
  In 2005, he was voted the co-31st-greatest Israeli of all time, in a poll by the Israeli news website Ynet to determine whom the general public considered the 200 Greatest Israelis. As one of Israel's first Nobel Laureates in Science, he is honored in playing a central role in the history of the State of Israel and in the History of the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. Along with Professor Guigen Li (as a Co-Director) from Texas Tech University, Professor Ciechanover is now trying to build a cross disciplinary Center in Nanjing University, where the accumulated knowledge in biology and chemistry will be translated into novel therapeutics.
  
  wn.com/Aaron_Ciechanover
• Aaron Klug
  Sir Aaron Klug, OM, PRS (born 11 August 1926) is a Lithuanian-born British chemist and biophysicist, and winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic acid-protein complexes.
  Klug was born in Želva, Lithuania to Jewish parents Lazar and Bella (née Silin) Klug with whom he moved to South Africa at the age of two. He later graduated with a degree in science at the University of Witwatersrand and studied crystallography at the University of Cape Town before moving to England, completing his doctorate at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1953.
  He moved to Birkbeck College in the University of London in late 1953, and started working with Rosalind Franklin in John Bernal's lab. This experience aroused a lifelong interest in the study of viruses, and during his time there he made discoveries in the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus. In 1962 he moved to the newly built MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Over the following decade Klug used methods from X-ray diffraction, microscopy and structural modelling to develop crystallographic electron microscopy in which a sequence of two-dimensional images of crystals taken from different angles are combined to produce three-dimensional images of the target.
  
  wn.com/Aaron_Klug
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  Adolf Butenandt
  Adolf Friedrich Johann Butenandt (24 March 1903 – 18 January 1995) was a German biochemist and member of the Nazi party. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1939 for his "work on sex hormones." He initially rejected the award in accordance with government policy, but accepted it in 1949 after World War II.
  Born in Lehe, near Bremerhaven, he started his studies at the University of Marburg.
  For his Ph.D he joined the working group of the Nobel laureate Adolf Windaus at the University of Göttingen and he finished his studies with a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1927.
  Adolf Windaus and Walter Schöller of Schering gave him the advice to work on hormones extraced from ovaries. This research lead to the discovery of estrone and other primary female sex hormones, which were extracted from several thousand liters of urine. For this research he won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1939 together with Leopold Ružička who was involved in the synthesis of several newly discovered steroids.
  After his Habilitation he became lecturer in Göttingen 1931. He was professor at the Technical University of Danzig 1933, and after a visit in the US, he became director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biochemistry (later the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry) in Berlin-Dahlem beginning in 1936.
  
  wn.com/Adolf_Butenandt
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  Adolf von Baeyer
  Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Adolf von Baeyer (German pronunciation: [ˈbaɪɐ]; (October 31, 1835 – August 20, 1917) was a German chemist who synthesized indigo, and was the 1905 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
  Born in Berlin, he initially studied mathematics and physics at Berlin University before moving to Heidelberg to study chemistry with Robert Bunsen. There he worked primarily in August Kekulé's laboratory, earning his doctorate (from Berlin) in 1858. He followed Kekulé to the University of Ghent, when Kekulé became professor there. He became a lecturer at the Berlin Trade Academy in 1860, and a Professor at the University of Strasbourg in 1871. In 1875 he succeeded Justus von Liebig as Chemistry Professor at the University of Munich.
  Baeyer's chief achievements include the synthesis and description of the plant dye indigo, the discovery of the phthalein dyes, and the investigation of polyacetylenes, oxonium salts, nitroso compounds (1869) and uric acid derivatives (1860 and onwards) (including the discovery of barbituric acid (1864), the parent compound of the barbiturates). He was the first to propose the correct formula for indole in 1869, after publishing the first synthesis three years earlier. His contributions to theoretical chemistry include the 'strain' (Spannung) theory of triple bonds and strain theory in small carbon rings.
  
  wn.com/Adolf_von_Baeyer
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  Ahmed Zewail
  Ahmed Hassan Zewail (Arabic: أحمد حسن زويل‎, IPA: [ˈæħmæd ˈħæsæn zeˈweːl]; born February 26, 1946) is an Egyptian-American scientist who won the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on femtochemistry. He is the Linus Pauling Chair Professor Chemistry and Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology.
  Ahmed's father, Hassan Zewail, was born on September 5, 1913 in Alexandria. The huge effect that World War II had on Alexandria was what eventually pushed Ahmed's father out of Alexandria and to Disuq. Hassan assembled bicycles and motorcycles and later became a government official. Ahmed's mother, Rawhia Dar, was ten years younger than Hassan, but they were married anyway. However, Rawhia did not meet her prospective groom until he had formally asked her family for her hand. They remained married for 50 years, until Hassan died on October 22, 1992.
  Ahmed Zewail was born on February 26, 1946 in Damanhour (The Town of Horus) , Egypt and raised in Disuq. As a child,visits to the mosque were common because it was an area of study. The mosque had a positive effect on Ahmed. It kept the influence of negative stimuli from reaching the youth that visited there. The peacefulness and trust of the community around him made it easy to grow and succeed. There was never any need for wants because everyone shared the same things. Ahmed's father was also a positive influence for him, Hassan was always sincere about his family and his work. He taught Ahmed that there is no contradiction between devotion to work and enjoyment of life and people. As for Ahmed's mother, she was never formally educated but always devoted to her children. She was the driving for supporting his education.
  
  wn.com/Ahmed_Zewail
• Alan J. Heeger
  Alan Jay Heeger (born January 22, 1936) is an American physicist, academic and Nobel Prize laureate in chemistry.
  Heeger was born in Sioux City, Iowa to a Jewish family. He earned a B.S. in physics and mathematics from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1957, and a Ph.D in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1961. From 1962 to 1982 he was on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania. In 1982 he commenced his present appointment as a professor in the Physics Department and the Materials Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research has led to the formation of numerous start-up companies including Uniax, Konarka, and Sirigen, founded in 2003 by Guillermo C. Bazan, Patrick J. Dietzen, Brent S. Gaylord. Alan Heeger was a founder of Uniax, which was acquired by DuPont.
  He won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2000 along with Alan G. MacDiarmid and Hideki Shirakawa "for their discovery and development of conductive polymers;" They published their results on polyacetylene a conductive polymer in 1977
  
  wn.com/Alan_J._Heeger
• Alan MacDiarmid
  Alan Graham MacDiarmid ONZ (14 April 1927 – 7 February 2007) was a chemist, and one of three recipients of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2000.
  He was born in Masterton, New Zealand as one of five children – three brothers and two sisters. His family was relatively poor, and the Great Depression made life difficult in Masterton, due to which his family shifted to Lower Hutt, a few miles from Wellington, New Zealand. At around age ten, he developed an interest in chemistry from one of his father's old textbooks, and he taught himself from this book and from library books. He was educated at Hutt Valley High School and Victoria University of Wellington.
  In 1943, MacDiarmid passed the University of New Zealand's University Entrance Exam and its Medical Preliminary Exam. He then took up a part-time job as a "lab boy" or janitor in Victoria University of Wellington, during his studies for a BSc degree, which he completed in 1947. He was then appointed demonstrator in the undergraduate laboratories. After completing an MSc in chemistry from the same university, he later worked as an assistant in its chemistry department. It was here that he had his first publication in 1949, in the scientific journal Nature. He graduated in 1951 with first class honours, and won a Fulbright Fellowship to the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He majored in inorganic chemistry, receiving his M.S. degree in 1952 and his PhD in 1953. He then won a Shell Graduate Scholarship, which enabled him to go to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he completed a second PhD in 1955.
  
  wn.com/Alan_MacDiarmid
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  Alfred Werner
  Alfred Werner (December 12, 1866 - November 15, 1919) was a Swiss chemist who was a student at ETH Zurich and a professor at the University of Zurich. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1913 for proposing the octahedral configuration of transition metal complexes. Werner developed the basis for modern coordination chemistry. He was the first inorganic chemist to win the Nobel prize, and the only one prior to 1973.
  Werner was born in 1866 in Mulhouse, Alsace (which was then part of France, but which was annexed by Germany in 1871). He went to Switzerland to study chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute (Polytechnikum) in Zurich where he obtained his doctorate in 1890 at the same institution. After postdoctoral study in Paris, he returned to the Swiss Federal Institute to teach (1892), in 1893 he moved to the University of Zurich where he became a professor in 1895. The same year he became a Swiss citizen.
  In 1893, Werner was the first to propose correct structures for coordination compounds containing complex ions, in which a central transition metal atom is surrounded by neutral or anionic ligands.
  
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  Antoine Lavoisier
  Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier (also Antoine Lavoisier after the French Revolution); 26 August 1743 – 8 May 1794; French pronunciation: [ɑ̃twan lɔʁɑ̃ də lavwazje]), the "father of modern chemistry", was one of the French nobleman prominent in the histories of chemistry and biology. He named both oxygen (1778) and hydrogen (1783) and helped construct the metric system, put together the first extensive list of elements, and helped to reform chemical nomenclature. He was also the first to establish that sulfur was an element (1777) rather than a compound. He discovered that, although matter may change its form or shape, its mass always remains the same.
  He was an administrator of the "Ferme Générale" and a powerful member of a number of other aristocratic councils. All of these political and economic activities enabled him to fund his scientific research. At the height of the French Revolution he was accused by Jean-Paul Marat of selling watered-down tobacco, and of other crimes and was eventually guillotined a year after Marat's death. Benjamin Franklin was familiar with Antoine as they were both members of the "Benjamin Franklin inquiries" into Mesmer and animal magnetism.
  
  wn.com/Antoine_Lavoisier
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  Arne Tiselius
  Arne Wilhelm Kaurin Tiselius (10 August 1902 – 29 October 1971) was a Swedish biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1948.
  Tiselius was born in Stockholm. Following the death of his father, the family moved to Gothenburg where he went to school, and after graduation at the local "Realgymnasium" in 1921, he studied at the University of Uppsala, specializing in chemistry. He became research assistant in The Svedberg's laboratory in 1925 and obtained his doctor's degree in 1930 on the moving-boundary method of studying the electrophoresis of proteins. From then to 1935 he published a number of papers on diffusion and adsorption in naturally occurring base-exchanging zeolites, and these studies were continued during a year's visit to H.S. Taylor's laboratory in Princeton with support of a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship. On his return to Uppsala he resumed his interest in proteins, and the application of physical methods to biochemical problems. This led to a much-improved method of electrophoretic analysis which he refined in subsequent years.
  
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  Arthur Harden
  Sir Arthur Harden FRS (12 October 1865 Manchester – 17 June 1940 Bourne End, Buckinghamshire) was an English biochemist. He shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1929 with Hans Karl August Simon von Euler-Chelpin for their investigations into the fermentation of sugar and fermentative enzymes.
  His parents were Albert Tyas Harden and Eliza Macalister. He was educated at a private school and at Tettenhall College, Staffordshire, and entered Owens College, now the University of Manchester, in 1882, graduating in 1885.
  In 1886 Harden was awarded the Dalton Scholarship in Chemistry and spent a year working with Otto Fischer at Erlangen. He returned to Manchester as lecturer and demonstrator, and remained there until 1897 when he was appointed chemist to the newly founded British Institute of Preventive Medicine, which later became the Lister Institute. In 1907 he was appointed Head of the Biochemical Department, a position which he held until his retirement in 1930 (though he continued his scientific work at the Institute after his retirement).
  
  wn.com/Arthur_Harden
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  Avram Hershko
  Avram Hershko (Hebrew: אברהם הרשקו‎; born 31 December 1937) is a Hungarian-Israeli biochemist and Nobel laureate in Chemistry.
  Born Herskó Ferenc in Karcag, Hungary, Hershko emigrated to Israel in 1950. Received his M.D. in 1965 and his Ph.D in 1969 from the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School, Jerusalem, Israel. He is currently a Distinguished Professor at the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine at the Technion in Haifa.
  Along with Aaron Ciechanover and Irwin Rose, he was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation. The ubiquitin-proteasome pathway has a critical role in maintaining the homeostasis of cells and is believed to be involved in the development and progression of diseases such as: cancer, muscular and neurological diseases, immune and inflammatory responses.
  His contributions to science directly helped cure his long-time friend from cancer.
  In 2005, he was voted the co-31st-greatest Israeli of all time, in a poll by the Israeli news website Ynet to determine whom the general public considered the 200 Greatest Israelis. Hershko's work and reception of the Nobel Prize is cited as a historic milestone in the unique history of the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology.
  
  wn.com/Avram_Hershko
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  Charles J. Pedersen
  Charles John Pedersen (October 3, 1904 – October 26, 1989) was an American organic chemist best known for describing methods of synthesizing crown ethers. He shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1987 with Donald J. Cram and Jean-Marie Lehn. His Japanese first name was Yoshio (良男^?).
  Pedersen was born in Busan, on the coast of south-eastern Korea, then under the rule of Japan, to a Norwegian father and a Japanese mother, in 1904. He moved to Japan with his family at an early age and went to an international school, called Saint Joseph College in Yokohama, Japan. He came to the United States in 1922 to study chemical engineering at the University of Dayton in Ohio. After receiving a bachelor's degree, he went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he received a master's degree in organic chemistry. Although his professors encouraged him to pursue a Ph.D. at MIT, Pedersen decided to start his career instead, partially because he no longer wanted to be supported by his father. He is one of the few people to win a Nobel prize in the sciences without having a Ph.D.
  
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  Dan Shechtman
  Dan Shechtman (Hebrew: דן שכטמן; born January 24, 1941 in Tel Aviv) is the Philip Tobias Professor of Materials Science at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, an Associate of the US Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory, and Professor of Materials Science at Iowa State University. On April 8, 1982, while on sabbatical at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C., Shechtman discovered the icosahedral phase, which opened the new field of quasiperiodic crystals. He was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "the discovery of quasicrystals". Shechtman is the fourth Israeli to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in under a decade.
  Dan Shechtman was born in Tel Aviv, British Mandate of Palestine. He is married to Prof. Tzipora Shechtman, Head of the Department of Counseling and Human Development at Haifa University, and author of two books on psychotherapy. They have a son Yoav Shechtman (a PhD student in physics) and three daughters: Tamar Finkelstein (an organizational psychologist at the Israeli police leadership center), Ella Shechtman-Cory (a PhD in clinical psychology), and Ruth Dougoud-Nevo (also a PhD in clinical psychology).
  
  wn.com/Dan_Shechtman
• Derek Barton
  Sir Derek Harold Richard Barton FRS (8 September 1918 – 16 March 1998) was a British organic chemist and Nobel Prize laureate.
  Barton was born to William Thomas and Maude Henrietta Barton. He attended Tonbridge School and in 1938 he entered Imperial College London, where he graduated in 1940 and obtained his Ph.D. degree in Organic Chemistry in 1942. From then to 1944 he was a government research chemist, from 1944 to 1945 he was with Albright and Wilson in Birmingham. He then became assistant lecturer in the Department of Chemistry of Imperial College, and from 1946 to 1949 he was ICI Research Fellow. During 1949 and 1950 he was Visiting Lecturer in the Chemistry of Natural Products, at Harvard University, and was then appointed Reader in Organic Chemistry and, in 1953, Professor at Birkbeck College. In 1955 he became Regius Professor of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow, in 1957 he was appointed Professor of Organic Chemistry at Imperial College.
  In 1950, Professor Barton showed that organic molecules could be assigned a preferred conformation based upon results accumulated by chemical physicists, in particular by Odd Hassel. Using this new technique of conformational analysis, he later determined the geometry of many other natural product molecules. In 1969, Barton shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Odd Hassel for "contributions to the development of the concept of conformation and its application in chemistry."
  
  wn.com/Derek_Barton
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  Dmitri Mendeleev
  Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev (also romanized Mendeleyev or Mendeleef; Russian: Дми́трий Ива́нович Менделе́ев  listen (help·info); 8 February [O.S. 27 January] 1834 – 2 February [O.S. 20 January] 1907) was a Russian chemist and inventor. He is credited as being the creator of the first version of the periodic table of elements. Using the table, he predicted the properties of elements yet to be discovered.
  Mendeleev was born in the village of Verkhnie Aremzyani, near Tobolsk in Siberia, to Ivan Pavlovich Mendeleev and Maria Dmitrievna Mendeleev (née Kornilieva). His grandfather was Pavel Maximovich Sokolov, a priest of the Russian Orthodox Church from the Tver region. Ivan, along with his brothers and sisters, obtained new family names while attending the theological seminary.
  Mendeleev is thought to be the youngest of either 11, 13, 14 or 17 siblings; the exact number differs among sources. His father was a teacher of fine arts, politics and philosophy. Unfortunately for the family's financial well being, his father became blind and lost his teaching position. His mother was forced to work and she restarted her family's abandoned glass factory. At the age of 13, after the passing of his father and the destruction of his mother's factory by fire, Mendeleev attended the Gymnasium in Tobolsk.
  
  wn.com/Dmitri_Mendeleev
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  Donald J. Cram
  Donald James Cram (April 22, 1919 – June 17, 2001) was an American chemist who shared the 1987 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Jean-Marie Lehn and Charles J. Pedersen "for their development and use of molecules with structure-specific interactions of high selectivity." They were the founders of the field of host-guest chemistry.
  Cram was born and raised in Chester, Vermont, to a Scottish immigrant father, and a German immigrant mother. His father died before Cram turned four, leaving him the only male in a family of five. He grew up on Aid to Dependent Children, and learned to work at an early age, doing jobs such as picking fruit, tossing newspapers, and painting houses, while bartering for piano lessons. By the time he turned eighteen, he had worked at least eighteen different jobs.
  Cram attended the Winwood High School in Long Island, N.Y. From 1938 to 1941, he attended Rollins College, in Winter Park, Florida on a national honorary scholarship, where he worked as an assistant in the chemistry department, and was active in theater, chapel choir, Lambda Chi Alpha, Phi Society, and Zeta Alpha Epsilon. It was at Rollins that he became known for building his own chemistry equipment. In 1941, he graduated from Rollins College with a B.S. in Chemistry.
  
  wn.com/Donald_J._Cram
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  Dorothy Hodgkin
  Dorothy Mary Hodgkin OM, FRS (12 May 1910 – 29 July 1994), née Crowfoot, was a British chemist, credited with the development of protein crystallography.
  She advanced the technique of X-ray crystallography, a method used to determine the three dimensional structures of biomolecules. Among her most influential discoveries are the confirmation of the structure of penicillin that Ernst Boris Chain had previously surmised, and then the structure of vitamin B₁₂, for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
  In 1969, after 35 years of work and five years after winning the Nobel Prize, Hodgkin was able to decipher the structure of insulin. X-ray crystallography became a widely used tool and was critical in later determining the structures of many biological molecules such as DNA where knowledge of structure is critical to an understanding of function. She is regarded as one of the pioneer scientists in the field of X-ray crystallography studies of biomolecules.
  Dorothy Mary Crowfoot was born on 12 May 1910 in Cairo, Egypt, to John Winter Crowfoot (1873–1959), archaeologist and classical scholar, and Grace Mary née Hood (1877–1957). For the first four years of her life she lived in the English expatriate community in Egypt, returning to England only a few months each year. She spent the period of World War I in the United Kingdom under the care of relatives and friends, but separated from her parents. After the war, her mother decided to stay home in England for one year and educate her children, a period that Hodgkin later described as the happiest in her life.
  
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  Eduard Buchner
  Eduard Buchner (20 May 1860 – 13 August 1917) was a German chemist and zymologist, awarded with the 1907 Nobel Prize in Chemistry thanks to his work on fermentation.
  Buchner was born in Munich to a physician and Doctor Extraordinary of Forensic Medicine. His older brother was Hans Ernst August Buchner. In 1884, he began studies of chemistry with Adolf von Baeyer and of botany with Professor C. von Naegeli, at the Botanic Institute in Munich. After a period working with Otto Fischer in Erlangen, Buchner was awarded a doctorate from the University of Munich in 1888.
  The experiment for which Buchner won the Nobel Prize consisted of producing a cell-free extract of yeast cells and showing that this "press juice" could ferment sugar. This dealt yet another blow to vitalism by showing that the presence of living yeast cells was not needed for fermentation. The cell-free extract was produced by combining dry yeast cells, quartz and kieselguhr and then pulverizing the yeast cells with a pestle and mortar. This mixture would then become moist as the yeast cells' contents would come out of the cells. Once this step was done, the moist mixture would be put through a press and the resulting "press juice" had glucose, fructose, or maltose added and carbon dioxide was seen to evolve, sometimes for days. Microscopic investigation revealed no living yeast cells in the extract. One interesting thing is that Buchner hypothesized that yeast cells secrete proteins into their environment in order to ferment sugars, instead of the fermentation occurring inside the yeast cells, which is the actual mechanism.
  
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• Edwin McMillan
  Edwin Mattison McMillan (September 18, 1907 – September 7, 1991) was an American physicist and Nobel laureate credited with being the first ever to produce a transuranium element. He shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Glenn Seaborg in 1951.
  McMillan was born in Redondo Beach, California, but his family moved to Pasadena the following year. He attended some of the public lectures at the California Institute of Technology as a high school student and began his studies there in 1924. He did a research project with Linus Pauling as an undergraduate and received his Bachelor of Science degree in 1928 and his Master of Science degree in 1929, both from the California Institute of Technology.
  He then took his Doctor of Philosophy from Princeton University in 1932 for the thesis: "Deflection of a Beam of HCI Molecules in a Non-Homogeneous Electric Field" under the supervision of Edward Condon.
  He joined the group of Ernest Lawrence at the University of California, Berkeley upon receiving his doctorate, moving to the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory when it was founded at Berkeley in 1934.
  
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  Ei-ichi Negishi
  Ei-ichi Negishi (根岸 英一, Negishi Eiichi^?, born July 14, 1935) is a Japanese chemist who has spent most of his career at Purdue University, United States. He is best known for his discovery of the Negishi coupling. He was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for palladium catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis" jointly with Richard F. Heck and Akira Suzuki.
  Negishi was born in Hsinking (新京), capital of Manchukuo, now Changchun of China, and raised in Seoul of Korea under Japanese rule. He graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1958, and did his internship at Teijin. He went on to study in the United States and obtained his PhD from University of Pennsylvania in 1963 under the supervision of professor Allan R. Day. In 1966, He became a postdoctoral researcher at Purdue University, and became assistant professor in 1968, working with Nobel laureate Herbert C. Brown. In 1972, he went on to become associate professor at Syracuse University where, in 1979, he was promoted to professor. In the same year, he went back to Purdue University.
  
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  Ernest Rutherford
  Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson OM, FRS (30 August 1871 – 19 October 1937) was a New Zealand chemist and physicist who became known as the father of nuclear physics. In early work he discovered the concept of radioactive half-life, proved that radioactivity involved the transmutation of one chemical element to another, and also differentiated and named alpha and beta radiation, proving that the former was essentially helium ions. This work was done at McGill University in Canada. It is the basis for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry he was awarded in 1908 "for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances".
  Rutherford performed his most famous work after he had moved to the Victoria University of Manchester in the UK in 1907 and was already a Nobel laureate. In 1911, he theorized that atoms have their positive charge concentrated in a very small nucleus, and thereby pioneered the Rutherford model of the atom, through his discovery and interpretation of Rutherford scattering in his gold foil experiment. He is widely credited with first "splitting the atom" in 1917 in a nuclear reaction between nitrogen and alpha particles, in which he also discovered (and named) the proton. This led to the first experiment to split the nucleus in a fully controlled manner, performed by two students working under his direction, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, in 1932. After his death in 1937, he was honoured by being interred with the greatest scientists of the United Kingdom, near Sir Isaac Newton's tomb in Westminster Abbey. The chemical element rutherfordium (element 104) was named after him in 1997.
  
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• Ernst Otto Fischer
  Ernst Otto Fischer (November 10, 1918 – July 23, 2007) was a German chemist who won the Nobel Prize for pioneering work in the area of organometallic chemistry.
  He was born in Solln, near Munich. His parents were Karl T. Fischer, Professor of Physics at the Technical University of Munich (TU), and Valentine née Danzer. He graduated in 1937 with Abitur. Before the completion of two years' compulsory military service, the Second World War broke out, and he served in Poland, France, and Russia. During a period of study leave, towards the end of 1941 he began to study chemistry at the Technical University of Munich. Following the end of the War, he was released by the Americans in the autumn of 1945 and resumed his studies, graduating in 1949.
  Fischer worked on his doctoral thesis as an assistant to Professor Walter Hieber in the Inorganic Chemistry Institute, His thesis was entitled "The Mechanisms of Carbon Monoxide Reactions of Nickel(II) Salts in the Presence of Dithionites and Sulfoxylates". After receiving his doctorate in 1952, he continued his research on the organometallic chemistry of the transition metal and indicated with his lecturer thesis on "The Metal Complexes of Cyclopentadienes and Indenes". that the structure postulated by Pauson and Kealy might be wrong. Shortly after he published the structural data of ferrocene, the sandwich structure of the η⁵ (pentahapto) compound. He was appointed a lecturer at the TU in 1955 and, in 1957, professor and then, in 1959, C4 professor. In 1964 he took the Chair of Inorganic Chemistry at the TU.
  
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  Frederick Sanger
  Frederick Sanger, OM, CH, CBE, FRS (born 13 August 1918) is an English biochemist and a two-time Nobel laureate in chemistry, the only person to have been so. In 1958 he was awarded a Nobel prize in chemistry "for his work on the structure of proteins, especially that of insulin". In 1980, Walter Gilbert and Sanger shared half of the chemistry prize "for their contributions concerning the determination of base sequences in nucleic acids". The other half was awarded to Paul Berg "for his fundamental studies of the biochemistry of nucleic acids, with particular regard to recombinant-DNA".
  He is the fourth (and only living) person to have been awarded two Nobel Prizes, either individually or in tandem with others.
  Frederick Sanger was born on 13 August 1918 in Rendcomb, a small village in Gloucestershire, the second son of Frederick Sanger, a general practitioner, and his wife, Cicely Sanger née Crewdson. He was one of three children. His brother, Theodore was only a year older while his sister May (Mary) was five years younger. His father, Frederick Sanger senior, had worked as an Anglican medical missionary in China but returned to England because of ill health. He was 40 in 1916 when he married Cicely who was 4 years younger. Sanger’s father converted to Quakerism soon after his two sons were born and brought up the children as Quakers. Sanger’s mother was the daughter of a wealthy cotton manufacturer and had a Quaker background but Cicely herself was not a Quaker.
  
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  Frederick Soddy
  Frederick Soddy (2 September 1877 – 22 September 1956) was an English radiochemist and monetary economist who explained, with Ernest Rutherford, that radioactivity is due to the transmutation of elements, now known to involve nuclear reactions. He also proved the existence of isotopes of certain radioactive elements. He received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1921, and named after him is small crater on the far side of the Moon and the radioactive Uranium mineral, Soddyite.
  Soddy was born at 6 Bolton Road, Eastbourne, England. He went to school at Eastbourne College, before going on to study at University College of Wales at Aberystwyth and at Merton College, Oxford. He was a researcher at Oxford from 1898 to 1900.
  In 1900 he became a demonstrator in chemistry at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, where he worked with Ernest Rutherford on radioactivity. He and Rutherford realized that the anomalous behaviour of radioactive elements was because they decayed into other elements. This decay also produced alpha, beta, and gamma radiation. When radioactivity was first discovered, no one was sure what the cause was. It needed careful work by Soddy and Rutherford to prove that atomic transmutation was in fact occurring.
  
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  Friedrich Bergius
  Friedrich Karl Rudolf Bergius (October 11, 1884 – March 30, 1949) was a German chemist known for the Bergius process for producing synthetic fuel from coal, Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1931, together with Carl Bosch) in recognition of contributions to the invention and development of chemical high-pressure methods. Having worked with IG Farben during World War II, his citizenship came into question following the war, where he ultimately fled to Argentina, advising the Ministry of Industry.
  Bergius was born near Breslau (Wrocław), within the German Empire's Prussian Province of Silesia.
  Before studying chemistry, Bergius was sent to work for 6 months at the steel works in Mühlheim. His studies started at the University of Breslau in 1903 and ended with a PhD in chemistry at the University of Leipzig in 1907, after only 4 years. His thesis on sulfuric acid as solvent was supervised by Arthur Rudolf Hantzsch. In 1909 Bergius worked for one semester with Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch at the University of Karlsruhe in the development of the Haber-Bosch Process. On the same year he was invited to work at the University of Hanover with Max Bodenstein, who developed the idea of chemical kinetics and held a position as professor.
  
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  Fritz Pregl
  Fritz Pregl (in Slovene also Friderik Pregl) (3 September 1869 – 13 December 1930), was an Austrian chemist and physician from a mixed Slovene-German-speaking background. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1923 for making important contributions to quantitative organic microanalysis, one of which was the improvement of the combustion train technique for elemental analysis.
  Pregl was born in Ljubljana within Austria-Hungary to a Slovene-speaking father and German-speaking mother. He died in Graz, Austria in 1930.
  Pregl started his career as physician after he studied medicine at the University of Graz. With his focus on physiology and especially chemical physiology, he suffered from the limitations of quantitative organic microanalysis. The small quantities of substances he obtained during the research of bile acid made it necessary to improve the process of elemental analysis by reducing the necessary components. At the end of his research, he had lowered the minimal amount of substance necessary for the analysis process by a factor of 50. He invited chemists to learn his method of elemental analysis, so that the method was soon widely accepted.
  
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  Gabriël Metsu
  Gabriël Metsu (January 1629 – buried 24 October 1667) was a Dutch painter of history paintings, genre works and portraits.
  Metsu was the son of the Flemish painter Jacques Metsu (c.1588-1629), who lived most of his days at Leiden, and Jacomijntje Garniers, his third wife, whom he married in 1625. Jacomijntje was the widow of a painter with three children of her own. Two months after Gabriël's birth, his father died.
  According to Jacobus Houbraken, Metsu was taught by Gerard Dou, though his early works do not lend colour to this assertion. He was influenced by painters of Leiden such as Jan Steen, and later by Frans van Mieris the Elder.
  Metsu was registered among the first members of the painters' corporation at Leiden; and the books of the guild also tell us that he remained a member in 1649. In Leiden, it was alleged that Metsu left a brothel at six in the morning and took a prostitute to the Academy. In 1650 he ceased to subscribe, and works bearing his name and the date of 1653 support the belief that he had moved. Metsu was trained in Utrecht by Jan Baptist Weenix and Nicolaus Knüpfer.
  
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  Geoffrey Wilkinson
  Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson FRS (14 July 1921 – 26 September 1996) was a Nobel laureate English chemist who pioneered inorganic chemistry and homogeneous transition metal catalysis.
  Wilkinson was born at Springside, Todmorden, in Yorkshire. His father, also a Geoffrey, was a master house painter and decorator; his mother worked in a local cotton mill. One of his uncles, an organist and choirmaster, had married into a family that owned a small chemical company making Epsom and Glauber's salts for the pharmaceutical industry; this is where he first developed an interest in chemistry.
  He was educated at the local council primary school and, after winning a County Scholarship in 1932, went to Todmorden Secondary School. His physics teacher there, Luke Sutcliffe, had also taught Sir John Cockcroft, who received a Nobel Prize for "splitting the atom".
  In 1939 he obtained a Royal Scholarship for study at Imperial College London, from where he graduated in 1941. In 1942 Professor Friedrich Paneth was recruiting young chemists for the nuclear energy project. Wilkinson joined and was sent out to Canada, where he stayed in Montreal and later Chalk River Laboratories until he could leave in 1946. For the next four years he worked with Professor Glenn T. Seaborg at University of California, Berkeley, mostly on nuclear taxonomy. He then became a Research Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and began to return to his first interest as a student - transition metal complexes of ligands such as carbon monoxide and olefins.
  
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• Georg Wittig
  Georg Wittig (June 16, 1897 – August 26, 1987) was a German chemist who reported a method for synthesis of alkenes from aldehydes and ketones using compounds called phosphonium ylides in the Wittig reaction. He shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Herbert C. Brown in 1979.
  
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  George Andrew Olah
  George Andrew Olah (born May 22, 1927 in Budapest, as Oláh György) is a Hungarian-American chemist. His research involves the generation and reactivity of carbocations via superacids. For this research, Olah was awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1994. He has also been awarded the Priestley Medal, the highest honor granted by the American Chemical Society.
  Olah was born in Budapest, Hungary, on May 22, 1927. After the high school of Budapesti Piarista Gimnazium (Scolopi fathers), he studied, then taught, at what is now Budapest University of Technology and Economics. As a result of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, he and his family moved briefly to England and then to Canada, where he joined Dow Chemical in Sarnia, Ontario, with another Hungarian chemist, Stephen J. Kuhn. Olah's pioneering work on carbocations started during his eight years with Dow. In 1965 he returned to academia at Case Western Reserve University and then to the University of Southern California in 1977. In 1971, Olah became a naturalized citizen of the United States.
  
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  George de Hevesy
  George Charles de Hevesy, Georg Karl von Hevesy, (1 August 1885 – 5 July 1966) was a Hungarian radiochemist and Nobel laureate, recognized in 1943 for his key role in the development of radioactive tracers to study chemical processes such as in the metabolism of animals. He also co-discovered the element hafnium.
  Hevesy György was born in Budapest, Hungary to a wealthy and ennobled Hungarian Jewish family, the fifth of eight children to his parents Lajos (Louis) Bischitz and Baroness Eugenia (Jenny) Schossberger (ennobled as "De Tornya"). Grandparents from both sides of the family had provided the presidents of the Jewish community of Pest. George grew up in Budapest and graduated high school in 1903 from Piarista Gimnázium. The family's name in the 1904 was Hevesy-Bischitz, and Hevesy later changed his own.
  De Hevesy began his studies in chemistry at the University of Budapest for one year, and at the Technical University of Berlin for several months, but changed to the University of Freiburg. There he came in contact with Ludwig Gattermann. In 1906 he started his Ph.D. thesis with Georg Franz Julius Meyer, acquiring his doctorate in physics in 1908. In 1908 Hevesy got a position at the ETH.
  
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  George Porter
  George Hornidge Porter, Baron Porter of Luddenham, OM, FRS (6 December 1920 – 31 August 2002) was a British chemist.
  Porter was born in Stainforth, near Thorne, South Yorkshire. He was educated at Thorne Grammar School, then won a scholarship to the University of Leeds and gained his first degree in chemistry. He then served in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve during the Second World War.
  Porter then went on to do research at Cambridge under Norrish where he began the work that ultimately led to them becoming Nobel Laureates.
  His original research in developing the technique of flash photolysis to obtain information on short-lived molecular species provided the first evidence of free radicals. His later research utilised the technique to study the minutiae of the light reactions of photosynthesis, with particular regard to possible applications to a hydrogen economy, of which he was a strong advocate.
  He was Assistant Director of the British Rayon Research Association from 1953–4, where he studied the phototendering of dyed cellulose fabrics in sunlight.
  
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  Gerhard Ertl
  Gerhard Ertl (born 10 October 1936) is a German physicist and a Professor emeritus at the Department of Physical Chemistry, Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft in Berlin, Germany. Ertl’s research laid the foundation of modern surface chemistry, which has helped explain how fuel cells produce energy without pollution, how catalytic converters clean up car exhausts and even why iron rusts, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.
  His work has paved the way for development of cleaner energy sources and will guide the development of fuel cells, said Astrid Graslund, secretary of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.
  He won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his studies of chemical processes on solid surfaces. The Nobel academy said Ertl provided a detailed description of how chemical reactions take place on surfaces. His findings applied in both academic studies and industrial development, the academy said. “Surface chemistry can even explain the destruction of the ozone layer, as vital steps in the reaction actually take place on the surfaces of small crystals of ice in the stratosphere,” the award citation reads.
  
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  Gerhard Herzberg
  Gerhard Heinrich Friedrich Otto Julius Herzberg, PC CC FRSC FRS (December 25, 1904 – March 3, 1999) was a German pioneering physicist and physical chemist, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1971, "for his contributions to the knowledge of electronic structure and geometry of molecules, particularly free radicals". Herzberg's main work concerned atomic and molecular spectroscopy. He is well known for using these techniques that determine the structures of diatomic and polyatomic molecules, including free radicals which are difficult to investigate in any other way, and for the chemical analysis of astronomical objects. Herzberg served as Chancellor of Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada from 1973 to 1980.
  Herzberg was born in Hamburg, Germany on December 25, 1904 to Albin H. Herzberg and Ella Biber. He had an older brother, Walter, who was born in January 1904. Herzberg started Vorschule (elementary school) late, after contracting measles. His father died in 1914, at 43 years of age, after having suffered from dropsy and complications due to an earlier heart condition. Herzberg graduated Vorschule shortly after his father's death.
  
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  Giulio Natta
  Giulio Natta (26 February 1903 – 2 May 1979) was an Italian chemist and Nobel laureate. He won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1963 with Karl Ziegler for work on high polymers. He was also a recipient of Lomonosov Gold Medal in 1969.
  Natta was born in Imperia, Italy. He earned his degree in chemical engineering from the Politecnico di Milano university in Milan in 1924. In 1927 he passed the exams for becoming a professor there. In 1933 he became a full professor and the director of the Institute of General Chemistry of Pavia University, where he stayed until 1935. In that year he was appointed full professor in physical chemistry at the University of Rome.
  From 1936 to 1938 he moved as a full professor and director of the Institute of Industrial Chemistry at the Polytechnic Institute of Turin. In 1938 he took over as the head of the Department of chemical engineering at the Politecnico di Milano university, in a somewhat controversial manner, when his predecessor Mario Giacomo Levi was forced to step down because of racial laws against Jews being introduced in Fascist Italy.
  
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  Glenn T. Seaborg
  Glenn Theodore Seaborg (Swedish: Glenn Teodor Sjöberg; April 19, 1912 – February 25, 1999) was an American scientist who won the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "discoveries in the chemistry of the transuranium elements", contributed to the discovery and isolation of ten elements, and developed the actinide concept, which led to the current arrangement of the actinoid series in the periodic table of the elements. He spent most of his career as an educator and research scientist at the University of California, Berkeley where he became the second Chancellor in its history and served as a University Professor. Seaborg advised ten presidents from Harry S. Truman to Bill Clinton on nuclear policy and was the chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission from 1961 to 1971 where he pushed for commercial nuclear energy and peaceful applications of nuclear science. Throughout his career, Seaborg worked for arms control. He was signator to the Franck Report and contributed to the achievement of the Limited Test Ban Treaty, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Seaborg was a well-known advocate of science education and federal funding for pure research. He was a key contributor to the report "A Nation at Risk" as a member of President Reagan's National Commission on Excellence in Education and was the principal author of the Seaborg Report on academic science issued in the closing days of the Eisenhower administration.
  
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  Hans Fischer
  Hans Fischer (July 27, 1881 – March 31, 1945) was a German organic chemist and the recipient of the 1930 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
  Fischer was born in Höchst on Main. His parents were Dr. Eugen Fischer, Director of the firm of Kalle & Co, Wiesbaden, and Privatdozent at the Technical High School, Stuttgart, and Anna Herdegen. He went to a primary school in Stuttgart, and later to the "Humanistisches Gymnasium" in Wiesbaden, matriculating in 1899. He read chemistry and medicine, first at the University of Lausanne and then at Marburg. He graduated in 1904, and in 1908 he qualified for his M.D.
  He worked first at a Medical Clinic in Munich and then at the First Berlin Chemical Institute under Emil Fischer. He returned to Munich in 1911 and qualified as lecturer on internal medicine one year later. In 1913 he became a lecturer in physiology at the Physiological Institute in Munich. In 1916 he became Professor of Medical Chemistry at the University of Innsbruck and from there he went to the University of Vienna in 1918.
  
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  Harold Urey
  Harold Clayton Urey FRS (April 29, 1893 – January 5, 1981) was an American physical chemist whose pioneering work on isotopes earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1934. He played a significant role in the development of the atom bomb, but may be most prominent for his contribution to theories on the development of organic life from non-living matter.
  Urey was born in Walkerton, Indiana to Reverend Samuel Clayton Urey and Cora Rebecca Reinoehl. After briefly teaching in rural schools, Urey earned a degree in zoology from the University of Montana and a Ph.D. in chemistry, studying thermodynamics under Gilbert N. Lewis at the University of California at Berkeley.
  At Berkeley, Urey was influenced by the work of physicist Raymond T. Birge and soon joined Niels Bohr in Copenhagen to work on atomic structure at the Institute for Theoretical Physics. On his return to the U.S. and between 1924 and 1928, he taught at The Johns Hopkins University as 'Associate in Chemistry', and then at Columbia where he assembled a team of associates that included Rudolph Schoenheimer, David Rittenberg and T. I. Taylor. After completion of his text with Arthur Ruark, Atoms, Quanta and Molecules, one of the first English texts on quantum mechanics and its applications to atomic and molecular systems, Urey became interested in nuclear systematics. This led to his discovery of deuterium.
  
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  Harry Kroto
  Sir Harold (Harry) Walter Kroto, FRS (born 7 October 1939 as Harold Walter Krotoschiner), is a British chemist and one of the three recipients to share the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley.
  He is the Francis Eppes Professor of Chemistry at the Florida State University, which he joined in 2004; prior to that he spent a large part of his career at the University of Sussex, where he holds an emeritus professorship.
  Kroto was born in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, England, to Edith and Heinz Krotoschiner, with his name being of Silesian origin. His father's family came from Bojanowo, Poland, and his mother's from Berlin, Germany. Both his parents were born in Berlin but came to Great Britain in the 1930s as refugees from the Nazis because his father was Jewish.
  He was raised in Bolton, Lancashire, England, and attended Bolton School, where he was a contemporary of the highly acclaimed actor Ian McKellen. In 1955, the family name was shortened to Kroto.
  As a child, he became fascinated by a Meccano set. Kroto credits Meccano — amongst other things — with developing skills useful in scientific research. He developed an interest in chemistry, physics, and mathematics in secondary school, and because his sixth form chemistry teacher (Harry Heaney – who subsequently became a University Professor) felt that the University of Sheffield had the best chemistry department in the United Kingdom, he went to Sheffield.
  
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• Hartmut Michel
  Hartmut Michel is a German biochemist and Nobel Laureate.
  He was born 18 July 1948 in Ludwigsburg. After compulsory military service, he studied biochemistry at the University of Tübingen, working for his final year at Dieter Oesterhelt’s laboratory on ATPase activity of halobacteria.
  In 1986, he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which is the highest honour awarded in German research.
  He later worked on the crystallisation of membrane proteins - essential for their structure elucidation by X-ray crystallography. He received the Nobel Prize jointly with Johann Deisenhofer and Robert Huber in 1988. Together with Michel and Huber, Deisenhofer determined the three-dimensional structure of a protein complex found in certain photosynthetic bacteria. This membrane protein complex, called a photosynthetic reaction center, was known to play a crucial role in initiating a simple type of photosynthesis. Between 1982 and 1985, the three scientists used X-ray crystallography to determine the exact arrangement of the more than 10,000 atoms that make up the protein complex. Their research increased the general understanding of the mechanisms of photosynthesis, revealed similarities between the photosynthetic processes of plants and bacteria and established a methodology for crystallising membrane proteins.
  
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  Henri Moissan
  Ferdinand Frederick Henri Moissan (September 28, 1852 – February 20, 1907) was a French chemist who won the 1906 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work in isolating fluorine from its compounds.
  The family Moissan originated from Toulouse and moved to Paris, where Moissan was born September 28, 1852, the son of a lesser officer of the eastern railway company and a seamstress. In 1864 they moved to Meaux, where he attended the local school. In 1870 he left the school without the "grade universitaire" necessary to attend the university. He started working at a chemist's in Paris where he was able to save a person intoxicated with arsenic. He decided to study chemistry and started first at the laboratory of Edmond Frémy and later at that of Pierre Paul Dehérain. Dehérain argued him into an academic career. The baccalauréat which was necessary to study at the university Moissan obtained in 1874 after a failed attempt. During his time in Paris he became friend of the chemist Alexandre Léon Étard and botanist Vasque.
  
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  Henry Taube
  Henry Taube, Ph.D, M.Sc, B.Sc, FRSC (November 30, 1915 – November 16, 2005) was a Canadian-born American chemist noted for having been awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "his work in the mechanisms of electron-transfer reactions, especially in metal complexes." He was the first Canadian-born chemist to win the Nobel Prize. Taube completed his undergraduate and Masters degrees at the University of Saskatchewan, and his Ph.D from the University of California, Berkeley. After finishing graduate school, Taube worked at Cornell University, the University of Chicago and Stanford University.
  In addition to the Nobel Prize, Taube also received many other major scientific awards, including the Priestley Medal in 1985 and two Guggenheim Fellowships early in his career (1949 and 1955), as well as numerous honorary doctorates. His research focused on redox reactions, transition metals and the use of isotopically labeled compounds to follow reactions. He had over 600 publications including one book, and had mentored over 200 students during his career. Taube and his wife Mary had three children, his son Karl is an anthropologist at the University of California Riverside.
  
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  Herbert A. Hauptman
  Herbert Aaron Hauptman (February 14, 1917 – October 23, 2011) was an American mathematician and Nobel laureate. He pioneered and developed a mathematical method that has changed the whole field of chemistry and opened a new era in research in determination of molecular structures of crystallized materials. Today, Hauptman's direct methods, which he has continued to improve and refine, are routinely used to solve complicated structures. It was the application of this mathematical method to a wide variety of chemical structures that led the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to name Hauptman and Jerome Karle recipients of the 1985 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
  He was born in New York City, the oldest child of Israel Hauptman and Leah Rosenfeld. He was married to Edith Citrynell since November 10, 1940, with two daughters, Barbara (1947) and Carol (1950).
  He was interested in science and mathematics from an early age which he pursued at Townsend Harris High School, graduated from the City College of New York (1937) and obtained an M.A. degree in mathematics from Columbia University in 1939.
  
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• Herbert C. Brown
  Herbert Charles Brown (May 22, 1912 – December 19, 2004) was a chemist and Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate for his work with organoboranes.
  Brown was born Herbert Brovarnik in London to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants from Zhitomir. He moved to the United States in June 1914, at the age of two. In autumn 1935, he entered the University of Chicago, completed two years of studies in three quarters, and earned a B.S. in 1936. That same year, he became a naturalized United States citizen. On February 6, 1937, Brown married Sarah Baylen, the person he credits with making him interested in hydrides of boron, a topic related to the work in which he with Georg Wittig won the Nobel prize in Chemistry in 1979. Two years after starting graduate studies, he earned a Ph.D. in 1938, also from the University of Chicago. Unable to find a position in industry, he decided to accept an offer for a position as a post-doctorate. This became the beginning of his academic career. He became an Instructor at the University of Chicago in 1939, and held the position for four years before moving to Wayne University in Detroit as an Assistant Professor. In 1946, he was promoted to an Associate Professor. He became a Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at Purdue University in 1947 and joined Alpha Chi Sigma there in 1960. He held the position of Professor Emeritus from 1978 until his death in 2004. The Herbert C. Brown Laboratory of Chemistry was named after him on Purdue University's campus. He was an honorary member of the International Academy of Science.
  
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  Hermann Emil Fischer
  Hermann Emil Fischer, Emil Fischer (9 October 1852, Euskirchen, Rhine Province – 15 July 1919) was a German chemist and 1902 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He discovered the Fischer esterification. He developed the Fischer projection, a symbolic way of drawing asymmetric carbon atoms.
  Fischer was born in Euskirchen, near Cologne, the son of a businessman. After graduating he wished to study natural sciences, but his father compelled him to work in the family business until determining that his son was unsuitable. Fischer then attended the University of Bonn in 1872, but switched to the University of Strasbourg in 1872. He earned his doctorate in 1874 with his study of phthalein and was appointed to a position at the university.
  In 1875 von Baeyer was asked to succeed Liebig at the University of Munich and Fischer went there with him to become an assistant in organic chemistry.
  In 1878 Fischer qualified as a Privatdozent at Munich, where he was appointed Associate Professor of Analytical Chemistry in 1879. In the same year he was offered, but refused, the Chair of Chemistry at Aachen.
  
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  Hermann Staudinger
  Hermann Staudinger (23 March 1881 – 8 September 1965) was a German chemist who demonstrated the existence of macromolecules, which he characterized as polymers. For this work he received the 1953 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He is also known for his discovery of ketenes and of the Staudinger reaction.
  Hermann Staudinger was born in 1881 in Worms, Germany. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Halle in 1903, Staudinger took a position at the University of Strasbourg.
  It was here that he discovered the ketenes, a family of molecules characterized by the general form depicted in Figure 1. Ketenes would prove a synthetically important intermediate for the production of yet-to-be-discovered antibiotics such as penicillin and amoxicillin.
  In 1907, Staudinger began an assistant professorship at the Technical University of Karlsruhe. Here, he successfully isolated a number of useful organic compounds (including a synthetic coffee flavoring) as more completely reviewed by Rolf Mülhaupt.
  In 1912, Staudinger took on a new position at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. One of his earliest discoveries came in 1919, when he and colleague Meyer reported that azides react with triphenylphosphine to form phosphazide (Figure 2). This reaction – commonly referred to as the Staudinger reaction – produces a high phosphazide yield.
  
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• Hideki Shirakawa
  Hideki Shirakawa (白川 英樹 Shirakawa Hideki, born in Tokyo on August 20, 1936) is a Japanese chemist and winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of conductive polymers together with physics professor Alan J. Heeger and chemistry professor Alan G. MacDiarmid at the University of Pennsylvania.
  While employed as an assistant at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) in Japan, he developed polyacetylene, which has a metallic appearance. This result interested Alan MacDiarmid when MacDiarmid visited TITech in 1975.
  In 1976, he was invited to work in the laboratory of Alan MacDiarmid as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. The two developed the electrical conductivity of polyacetylene along with American physicist Alan Heeger.
  In 1977 they discovered that doping with iodine vapor could enhance the conductivity of polyacetylene. The three scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2000 in recognition of the discovery. With regard to the mechanism of electric conduction, it is strongly believed that nonlinear excitations in the form of solitons play a role.
  
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• Ilya Prigogine
  Ilya, Viscount Prigogine (Russian: Илья́ Рома́нович Приго́жин, Ilya Romanovich Prigozhin) (25 January 1917 – 28 May 2003) was a Belgian physical chemist and Nobel Laureate noted for his work on dissipative structures, complex systems, and irreversibility.
  Prigogine was born in Moscow a few months before the Russian Revolution of 1917, into a Jewish family. His father, Roman (Ruvim Abramovich) Prigogine, was a chemical engineer at the Moscow Institute of Technology; his mother, Yulia Vikhman, was a pianist. Because the family was critical of the new Soviet system, they left Russia in 1921. They first went to Germany and in 1929, to Belgium, where Prigogine received Belgian citizenship in 1949.
  Prigogine studied chemistry at the Free University of Brussels, where in 1950, he became professor. In 1959, he was appointed director of the International Solvay Institute in Brussels, Belgium. In that year, he also started teaching at the University of Texas at Austin in the United States, where he later was appointed Regental Professor and Ashbel Smith Professor of Physics and Chemical Engineering. From 1961 until 1966 he was affiliated with the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago. In Austin, in 1967, he co-founded what is now called The Center for Complex Quantum Systems. In that year, he also returned to Belgium, where he became director of the Center for Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics.
  
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  Irving Langmuir
  Irving Langmuir (31 January 1881 – 16 August 1957) was an American chemist and physicist. His most noted publication was the famous 1919 article "The Arrangement of Electrons in Atoms and Molecules" in which, building on Gilbert N. Lewis's cubical atom theory and Walther Kossel's chemical bonding theory, he outlined his "concentric theory of atomic structure". Langmuir became embroiled in a priority dispute with Lewis over this work; Langmuir's presentation skills were largely responsible for the popularization of the theory, although the credit for the theory itself belongs mostly to Lewis. While at General Electric, from 1909–1950, Langmuir advanced several basic fields of physics and chemistry, invented the gas-filled incandescent lamp, the hydrogen welding technique, and was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work in surface chemistry. He was the first industrial chemist to become a Nobel laureate. The Langmuir Laboratory for Atmospheric Research near Socorro, New Mexico was named in his honor as was the American Chemical Society journal for Surface Science, called Langmuir.
  
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  Irwin Rose
  Irwin A. Rose (born July 16, 1926) is an American biologist. Along with Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Hershko, he was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation.
  Rose attended Washington State University for one year prior to serving in the Navy during WWII. Upon returning from the war he received his B.S. in 1948 and his Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1952, both from the University of Chicago. He served on the faculty of Yale School of Medicine's department of biochemistry from 1954 to 1963. He then joined Fox Chase Cancer Center's division of basic in 1963 and stayed there until he retired in 1995. He joined University of Pennsylvania during the 1970s and served as a Professor of Physical Biochemistry. He is currently a distinguished professor-in-residence in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine.
  Irwin (Ernie) trained several postdoctoral fellows while at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, where the groundbreaking Ub work was done. These included Art Haas, the first to see Ubiquitin chains, Keith Wilkinson, the one to first identify APF-1 as Ubiquitin, and Cecile Pickart, a world class enzymologist in many parts of the Ub system.
  
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  Irène Joliot-Curie
  Irène Joliot-Curie (12 September 1897 – 17 March 1956) was a French scientist, the daughter of Marie Skłodowska-Curie and Pierre Curie and the wife of Frédéric Joliot-Curie. Jointly with her husband, Joliot-Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1935 for their discovery of artificial radioactivity. This made the Curies the family with most Nobel laureates to date. Both children of the Joliot-Curies, Hélène and Pierre, are also esteemed scientists.
  Curie was born in Paris. After a year of traditional education, which began when she was 10 years old, her parents realized her obvious mathematical talent and decided that Irène’s academic abilities needed a more challenging environment. Marie joined forces with a number of eminent French scholars, including the prominent French physicist Paul Langevin to form “The Cooperative,” a private gathering of some of the most distinguished academics in France. Each contributed to educating one another’s children in their respective homes. The curriculum of The Cooperative was varied and included not only the principles of science and scientific research but such diverse subjects as Chinese and sculpture and with great emphasis placed on self expression and play.
  
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  James B. Sumner
  James Batcheller Sumner (November 19, 1887 – August 12, 1955) was an American chemist. He shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1946 with John Howard Northrop and Wendell Meredith Stanley.
  Sumner graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor's degree in 1910 where he was acquainted with prominent chemists Roger Adams, Farrington Daniels, Frank C. Whitmore, James Bryant Conant and Charles Loring Jackson. In 1912, he went to study biochemistry in Harvard Medical School and obtained his Ph.D. degree in 1914 with Otto Folin. He then worked as Assistant Professor of Biochemistry at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY.
  Sumner married Cid Ricketts (born Bertha Louise Ricketts in Brookhaven, Mississippi) when she attended medical school at Cornell. They married on July 10, 1915 and had four children (although the Nobel website for Sumner indicated that they had six children, one of whom died young). They were divorced in 1930. Cid Ricketts Sumner went on to become an author, writing books that included "Tammy Tell Me True," a book which was made into the movie "Tammy and the Bachelor" with Debbie Reynolds and Leslie Nielsen. Mrs. Sumner was murdered by their grandson, John R. Cutler, in 1970.
  
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  Jaroslav Heyrovský
  Jaroslav Heyrovský (Czech pronunciation: [ˈjaroslaf ˈɦɛjrofskiː] ( listen)) (December 20, 1890 – March 27, 1967) was a Czech chemist and inventor. Heyrovský was the inventor of the polarographic method, father of the electroanalytical method, and recipient of the Nobel Prize in 1959. His main field of work was polarography.
  Jaroslav Heyrovský was born in Prague on December 20, 1890, the fifth child of Leopold Heyrovský, Professor of Roman Law at the Charles University in Prague, and his wife Clara, née Hanl von Kirchtreu. He obtained his early education at secondary school until 1909 when he began his study of chemistry, physics, and mathematics at the Charles University in Prague. From 1910 to 1914 he continued his studies at University College, London, under Professors Sir William Ramsay, W. C. McC. Lewis, and F. G. Donnan, taking his B.Sc. degree in 1913. He was particularly interested in working with Professor Donnan, on electrochemistry.
  During the First World War Heyrovský worked in a military hospital as a dispensing chemist and radiologist, which enabled him to continue his studies and to take his Ph.D. degree in Prague in 1918 and D.Sc. in London in 1921.
  
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  Jean-Marie Lehn
  Jean-Marie Lehn (born September 30, 1939) is a French chemist. He received the Nobel Prize together with Donald Cram and Charles Pedersen in 1987 for his work in Chemistry, particularly his synthesis of the cryptands. Lehn was an early innovator in the field of supramolecular chemistry, i.e., the chemistry of host-guest molecular assemblies created by intermolecular interactions, and continues to innovate in this field. His group has published in excess of 800 peer-reviewed articles in chemistry literature.
  Lehn was born in Rosheim, France to Pierre and Marie Lehn. His father was a baker, but because of his interest for music, he later became the city organist. Lehn also studied music, saying that it became his major interest after science. He has continued to play the organ throughout his professional career as a scientist. His high school studies in Obernai, from 1950 to 1957, included Latin, Greek, German, and English languages, French literature, and he later became very keen of both philosophy and science, particularly chemistry. In July 1957, he obtained the baccalauréat in philosophy, and in September of the same year, the baccalauréat in Natural Sciences.
  
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  Jens Christian Skou
  Jens Christian Skou (Danish pronunciation: [ˈjɛns kʁæsdjæn ˈsɡʌʊ̯ˀ]; born October 8, 1918) is a Danish chemist and Nobel laureate.
  Skou was born in Lemvig, Denmark to a wealthy family. His father Magnus Martinus Skou was a timber and coal merchant. His mother Ane-Margrethe Skou took over the company after the death of his father. At the age of 15 Skou entered a boarding school in Haslev, Zealand. He graduated in medicine from the University of Copenhagen in 1944 and received his doctorate in 1954. He began working at the University of Aarhus in 1947 and was appointed professor of biophysics in 1977. He retired from the University of Aarhus in 1988, but has kept his offices at the institute.
  In 1997 he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (together with Paul D. Boyer and John E. Walker) for his discovery of Na⁺,K⁺-ATPase [1].
  Skou had taken a few years away from his clinical training in the early 1950s to study the action of local anaesthetics. He had discovered that a substance’s anaesthetic action was related to its ability to dissolve in a layer of the lipid part of the plasma membrane, the anaesthetic molecules affected the opening of sodium channels which he assumed to be protein. This, he argued, would affect the movement of sodium ions and make nerve cells inexcitable, thus causing anaesthesia.
  
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  Jerome Karle
  Jerome Karle, born Jerome Karfunkel (born June 18, 1918) is an American physical chemist. Jointly with Herbert A. Hauptman, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1985, for the direct analysis of crystal structures using X-ray scattering techniques.
  Karle was born in New York City on June 18, 1918. He was born into a Jewish family with a strong interest in the arts. He had played piano as a youth and had participated in a number of competitions, but he was far more interested in science. He attended Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, and would later join Arthur Kornberg (awarded the Nobel in Medicine in 1959) and Paul Berg (a winner in Chemistry in 1980), as graduates of the school to win Nobel Prizes. As a youth, Karle enjoyed handball, ice skating, touch football and swimming in the nearby Atlantic Ocean.
  He started college at the age of 15 and received his bachelor's degree from the City College of New York in 1937, where he took additional courses in biology, chemistry and math in addition to the required curriculum there. He earned a master's degree from Harvard University in 1938, having majored in biology.
  
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  John Cornforth
  Sir John Warcup 'Kappa' Cornforth, AC, CBE, FRS (born 7 September 1917), is an Australian scientist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1975 for his work on the stereochemistry of enzyme-catalyzed reactions.
  Stereochemistry, a subdiscipline of chemistry, involves the study of the relative spatial arrangement of atoms within molecules. An important branch of stereochemistry is the study of chiral molecules.[1] Stereochemistry includes methods for determining and describing these relationships; the effect on the physical or biological properties these relationships impart upon the molecules in question, and the manner in which these relationships influence the reactivity of the molecules in question (dynamic stereochemistry).
  Cornforth investigated enzymes that catalyze change in organic compounds (substrates) by taking the place of hydrogen atoms in a substrate’s chains and rings. In his syntheses and descriptions of the structure of various terpenes, olefins, and steroids, he determined specifically which cluster of hydrogen atoms in a substrate is replaced by an enzyme to cause a given change in the substrate. This allowed Cornforth to detail the biosynthesis of cholesterol, an exceptionally complex molecule. He received the Nobel Prize in 1975 and was knighted in 1977.
  
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  John Fenn (chemist)
  John Bennett Fenn (June 15, 1917 – December 10, 2010) was an American research professor of analytical chemistry who was awarded a share of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2002. Fenn shared half of the award with Koichi Tanaka for their work in mass spectrometry. The other half of the 2002 award went to Kurt Wüthrich. Fenn's contributions specifically related to the development of electrospray ionization, now a commonly used technique for large molecules and routine liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry. Early in his career, Fenn did research in the field of jet propulsion at Project SQUID, and focused on molecular beam studies. Fenn finished his career with more than 100 publications, including one book.
  Fenn was born in New York City, and moved to Kentucky with his family during the Great Depression. Fenn did his undergraduate work at Berea College, and received his Ph. D. from Yale. He worked in industry at Monsanto and at private research labs before moving to academic posts including Yale and Virginia Commonwealth University.
  
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  John Howard Northrop
  John Howard Northrop (July 5, 1891 – May 27, 1987) was an American biochemist who won, with James Batcheller Sumner and Wendell Meredith Stanley, the 1946 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The award was given for these scientists' isolation, crystallization, and study of enzymes, proteins, and viruses. Northrop was a Professor of Bacteriology and Medical Physics, Emeritus at University of California, Berkeley.
  Northrop was born in Yonkers, New York to John I., a zoologist and instructor at Columbia University, and Alice R. Northrop, a teacher of botany at Hunter College. His father died in a lab explosion two weeks before John H. Northrop was born. The son was educated at Columbia University, where he earned his PhD in chemistry in 1915. During World War I, he conducted research for the U.S. Army Chemical Warfare Service on the production of acetone and ethanol through fermentation. This work led to studying enzymes.
  In 1929, Northrop isolated and crystallized the gastric enzyme pepsin and determined that it was a protein. In 1938 he isolated and crystallized the first bacteriophage (a small virus that attacks bacteria), and determined that it was a nucleoprotein. Northrop also isolated and crystallized pepsinogen (the precursor to pepsin), trypsin, chymotrypsin, and carboxypeptidase.
  
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  John Kendrew
  Sir John Cowdery Kendrew, CBE, FRS (24 March 1917 – 23 August 1997) was an English biochemist and crystallographer who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Max Perutz; their group in the Cavendish Laboratory investigated the structure of heme-containing proteins.
  He was born in Oxford, son of Wilford George Kendrew, reader in climatology in the University of Oxford and Evelyn May Graham Sandburg, art historian. After prep school at the Dragon School in Oxford, he was educated at Clifton College in Bristol, 1930–1936. He attended Trinity College, Cambridge in 1936, as a Major Scholar, graduating in chemistry in 1939. He spent the early months of World War II doing research on reaction kinetics, and then became a member of the Air Ministry Research Establishment, working on radar. In 1940 he became engaged in operational research at the Royal Air Force headquarters, holding the honorary rank of Wing Commander R.A.F.
  During the war years, he became increasingly interested in biochemical problems, and decided to work on the structure of proteins.
  
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• John Polanyi
  John Charles Polanyi, PC CC FRSC OOnt FRS, (born January 23, 1929) is a Canadian chemist who won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, for his research in chemical kinetics. Polanyi was educated at Manchester University, and did postdoctoral research at the National Research Council in Canada and Princeton University in New Jersey. Polanyi's first academic appointment was at the University of Toronto, and he remains there as of 2011^[update]. In addition to the Nobel Prize, Polanyi has received numerous other awards, including 25 honorary degrees, the Wolf Prize in Chemistry and the Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering. Outside of his scientific pursuits, Polanyi is active in public policy discussion, especially concerning science and nuclear weapons. His father, Michael, was a noted chemist and philosopher. His uncle Karl was an economist.
  
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• John Pople
  Sir John Anthony Pople, KBE, FRS, (October 31, 1925 – March 15, 2004) was a Nobel-Prize winning theoretical chemist. Born in Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset, England, he attended Bristol Grammar School. He won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1943. He received his B. A. in 1946. Between 1945 and 1947 he worked at the Bristol Aeroplane Company. He then returned to Cambridge University and was awarded his doctorate degree in mathematics in 1951. He moved to the United States of America in 1964, where he lived the rest of his life, though he retained British citizenship. Pople considered himself more of a mathematician than a chemist, but theoretical chemists consider him one of the most important of their number.
  His scientific contributions are in four different areas:
  His early paper on the statistical mechanics of water, according to Michael J. Frisch, "remained the standard for many years. This was his thesis topic for his Ph D at Cambridge supervised by John Lennard-Jones.
  In the early days of nuclear magnetic resonance he studied the underlying theory, and in 1959 he coauthored the text book High Resolution Nuclear Magnetic Resonance with W.G. Schneider and H.J. Bernstein.
  
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• Karl Barry Sharpless
  Karl Barry Sharpless (born 28 April 1941) is an American chemist known for his work on stereoselective reactions.
  Sharpless was born in Philadelphia. He graduated from Friends' Central School in 1959. He continued his studies at Dartmouth College (1963) and earned his Ph.D from Stanford University in 1968. He continued post-doctoral work at Stanford University and Harvard University. He holds honorary degree of Technical University of Munich.
  Sharpless has been a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University. He currently holds the W. M. Keck professorship in chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute.
  In 2001 he won a half-share of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on stereoselective oxidation reactions (Sharpless epoxidation, Sharpless asymmetric dihydroxylation, Sharpless oxyamination). The other half of the year's Prize was shared between William S. Knowles and Ryōji Noyori (for their work on stereoselective hydrogenation). He also successfully epoxidized (using racemic tartaric acid) a C-86 Buckminster Fullerene ball, employing p-Cresol as solvent. Currently he spends much of his time promoting click chemistry, a set of highly selective, exothermic reactions which occur under mild conditions; the most successful variant of which is the azide alkyne Huisgen cycloaddition to form 1,2,3-triazoles.
  
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  Kary Mullis
  Kary Banks Mullis (born December 28, 1944) is a Nobel Prize winning American biochemist, author, and lecturer. In recognition of his improvement of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique, he shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Michael Smith and earned the Japan Prize in the same year. The process was first described by Kjell Kleppe and 1968 Nobel laureate H. Gobind Khorana, and allows the amplification of specific DNA sequences. The improvements made by Mullis allowed PCR to become a central technique in biochemistry and molecular biology, described by The New York Times as "highly original and significant, virtually dividing biology into the two epochs of before P.C.R. and after P.C.R."
  Since winning the Nobel Prize, Mullis has been criticized in The New York Times for promoting ideas in areas in which he has no expertise. He has promoted AIDS denialism,climate change denial and his belief in astrology.
  Mullis was born in Lenoir, North Carolina, near the Blue Ridge Mountains, on December 28, 1944. His family had a background in farming in this rural area. As a child, Mullis recalls, he was interested in observing organisms in the countryside. He grew up in Columbia, South Carolina, where he attended Dreher High School.
  
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  Kenichi Fukui
  Kenichi Fukui (福井 謙一 Fukui Ken'ichi, October 4, 1918 – January 9, 1998) was a Japanese chemist.
  Kenichi Fukui was co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1981 with Roald Hoffmann, for their independent investigations into the mechanisms of chemical reactions. His prize-winning work focused on the role of frontier orbitals in chemical reactions: specifically that molecules share loosely bonded electrons which occupy the frontier orbitals, that is the Highest Occupied Molecular Orbital (HOMO) and the Lowest Unoccupied Molecular Orbital (LUMO).
  Fukui was the eldest of three sons of Ryokichi Fukui, a foreign trade merchant, and Chie Fukui. He was born in Nara, Japan. In his student days between 1938 and 1941, Fukui's interest was stimulated by quantum mechanics and Erwin Schrödinger's famous equation. He also had developed the belief that a breakthrough in science occurs through the unexpected fusion of remotely related fields.
  
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• Koichi Tanaka
  Koichi Tanaka (田中 耕一, Tanaka Kōichi^?, born August 3, 1959) is a Japanese scientist who shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2002 for developing a novel method for mass spectrometric analyses of biological macromolecules with John Bennett Fenn and Kurt Wuthrich (the latter for work in NMR spectroscopy).
  Tanaka was born and raised in Toyama, Japan. He attended Toyama Chubu High School in Toyama City. In 1983, he graduated from Tohoku University with a bachelor's degree in engineering. As of 2008, he is the only person without a post-bachelor's degree to have won a Nobel Prize in a scientific field. After graduation, he joined Shimadzu Corporation, where he engaged in the development of mass spectrometers.
  For mass spectrometry analyses of a macromolecule, such as a protein, the analyte must be ionized and vaporized by laser irradiation. The problem is that the direct irradiation of an intense laser pulse on a macromolecule causes cleavage of the analyte into tiny fragments and the loss of its structure. In February 1985, Tanaka found that by using a mixture of ultra fine metal powder in glycerol as a matrix, an analyte can be ionized without losing its structure. His work was filed as a patent application in 1985, and after the patent application was made public reported at the Annual Conference of the Mass Spectrometry Society of Japan held in Kyoto, in May 1987 and became known as soft laser desorption (SLD).
  
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  Kurt Alder
  Kurt Alder (10 July 1902 – 20 June 1958) was a German chemist and Nobel laureate.
  Alder was born in the industrial area of Königshütte, Silesia (modern day Chorzów, Upper Silesia, Poland), where he received his early schooling. Alder left the area for political reasons^{[citation needed]} when Königshütte became part of Poland in 1922, he studied chemistry at the University of Berlin from 1922, and later at the University of Kiel where his PhD was awarded in 1926 for work supervised by Diels.
  In 1930 Alder was appointed reader for chemistry at Kiel, and promoted to lecturer in 1934. In 1936 he left Kiel to join I G Farben Industrie at Leverkusen, where he worked on synthetic rubber. Then in 1940 he was appointed Professor of Experimental Chemistry and Chemical Technology at the University of Cologne and Director of the Institute of Chemistry there. Throughout this time and despite the many obstacles to original research in Europe at the time, he continued a systematic program of investigations of his particular interests in the synthesis of organic compounds. In all he published more than 151 papers in this field.
  
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  Kurt Wüthrich
  Kurt Wüthrich (born October 4, 1938 in Aarberg, Canton of Bern) is a Swiss chemist and Nobel Chemistry laureate.
  Born in Aarberg, Switzerland, Wüthrich was educated in chemistry, physics, and mathematics at the University of Berne before pursuing his Ph.D. under the direction of Silvio Fallab at the University of Basel, awarded in 1964. He continued post-doctoral work with Fallab for a short time before leaving to work at the University of California, Berkeley for two years from 1965 with Robert E. Connick. That was followed by a stint working with Robert G. Shulman at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey from 1967 to 1969.
  Wüthrich returned to Switzerland, to Zürich, in 1969, where he began his career there at the ETH Zürich, rising to Professor of Biophysics by 1980. He currently maintains a laboratory both at the ETH Zürich and at The Scripps Research Institute, in La Jolla, California.
  During his graduate studies Wüthrich started out working with electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy and the subject of his Ph. D thesis was "the catalytic activity of copper compounds in autoxidation reactions". During his time as a postdoc in Berkeley he began working with the newly developed and related technique of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to study the hydration of metal complexes. When Wüthrich joined the Bell Labs, he was put in charge of one of the first superconducting NMR spectrometers, and started studying the structure and dynamics of proteins. He has pursued this line of research ever since.
  
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  Lars Onsager
  Lars Onsager (November 27, 1903 – October 5, 1976) was a Norwegian-born American physical chemist and theoretical physicist, winner of the 1968 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He held the Gibbs Professorship of Theoretical Chemistry at Yale University.
  Lars Onsager was born in Kristiania (today's Oslo), Norway. His father was a lawyer. After completing secondary school in Oslo, he attended the Norwegian Institute of Technology (NTH) in Trondheim, graduating as a chemical engineer in 1925.
  In 1925 he arrived at a correction to the Debye-Hückel theory of electrolytic solutions, to specify Brownian movement of ions in solution, and during 1926 published it. He traveled to Zürich, where Peter Debye was teaching, and confronted Debye, telling him his theory was wrong. He impressed Debye so much that he was invited to become Debye's assistant at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH), where he remained until 1928.
  Eventually in 1928 he went to the United States of America to take a faculty position at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. At JHU he had to teach freshman classes in chemistry, and it quickly became apparent that, while he was a genius at developing theories in physical chemistry, he had little talent for teaching. He was dismissed by JHU after one semester.
  
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  Leopold Ružička
  Lavoslav Ružička FRS born as Lavoslav ( Leopold ) Ružička (13 September 1887 – 26 September 1976) was a Croatian scientist and winner of the 1939 Nobel Prize in Chemistry who worked most of his life in Switzerland. He received eight honoris causa doctorates in science, medicine, and law; seven prizes and medals; and twenty-four honorary memberships in chemical, biochemical, and other scientific societies.
  Ružička was born in Vukovar, Croatia, then part of Kingdom of Hungary, Austro-Hungarian Empire. His family of craftsmen and farmers was mostly of Croatian origin, with a Czech great grandparent, and a great grandmother and a great grandfather from Austria.
  Ružička attended the classics-program secondary school in Osijek. He changed his original idea of becoming a priest and switched to studying technical disciplines. Chemistry was his choice, probably because he hoped to get a position at the newly opened sugar refinery built in Osijek.
  Due to the excessive hardship of everyday and political life, he left and chose the High Technical School in Karlsruhe in Germany. He was a good student in areas he liked and that he thought would be necessary and beneficial in future, which was organic chemistry. That is why his physical chemistry professor, Fritz Haber (Nobel laureate in 1918), opposed his summa cum laude degree. However, in the course of his studies, Ružička set up excellent cooperation with Hermann Staudinger (a Nobel laureate in 1953). Studying within Staudinger's department, he obtained his doctor's degree in 1910. With Staudinger, Ružička went to Zurich and was his assistant.
  
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  Linus Pauling
  Linus Carl Pauling (February 28, 1901 – August 19, 1994) was an American chemist, biochemist, peace activist, author, and educator. He was one of the most influential chemists in history and ranks among the most important scientists of the 20th century. Pauling was among the first scientists to work in the fields of quantum chemistry and molecular biology.
  Pauling is one of only four individuals to have won more than one Nobel Prize. He is one of only two people awarded Nobel Prizes in different fields (the Chemistry and Peace prizes), the other being Marie Curie (the Chemistry and Physics prizes), and the only person awarded two unshared prizes.
  Pauling was born in Portland, Oregon, as the first-born child of Herman Henry William Pauling (1876–1910) and Lucy Isabelle "Belle" Darling (1881–1926). He was named "Linus Carl," in honor of Lucy's father, Linus, and Herman's father, Carl. Herman and Lucy – then 23 and 18 years old, respectively – had met at a dinner party in Condon. Six months later, the two were married.
  
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  Luis Federico Leloir
  Luis Federico Leloir FRS (September 6, 1906 – December 2, 1987) was an Argentine doctor and biochemist who received the 1970 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He was the first Spanish-speaking scientist to ever receive the award. Although born in France, Leloir received the majority of his education at the University of Buenos Aires and was director of the private research group Fundación Instituto Campomar until his death in 1987. Although his laboratories were often plagued by lack of financial support and second-rate equipment, his research into sugar nucleotides, carbohydrate metabolism, and renal hypertension has garnered international attention and fame and has led to significant progress in understanding, diagnosing and treating the congenital disease galactosemia. Luis Leloir is buried in La Recoleta Cemetery, Buenos Aires.
  Leloir's parents, Federico Leloir and Hortensia Aguirre de Leloir, traveled from Buenos Aires to Paris in the middle of 1906 with the intention of treating Federico's illness. However, Federico died in late August, and a week later Luis was born in an old house at 81 Víctor Hugo Road in Paris, a few blocks away from the Arc de Triomphe. After returning to Argentina in 1908, Leloir lived together with his eight siblings on their family's extensive property El Tuyú that his grandparents had purchased after their immigration from the Basque Country of northern Spain: El Tuyú comprises 400 km² of rocky land that along the coastline from San Clemente del Tuyú to Mar de Ajó which has since become a popular tourist attraction.
  
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  Manfred Eigen
  Manfred Eigen (born May 9, 1927) is a German biophysical chemist who won the 1967 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work on measuring fast chemical reactions.
  He received his PhD at the University of Göttingen and has been former director of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen. He is an honorary doctor of the TU Braunschweig. From 1982 to 1993, Eigen was president of the German National Merit Foundation.
  In 1967, Eigen was awarded, along with Ronald George Wreyford Norrish and George Porter, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. They were distinguished for their studies of extremely fast chemical reactions induced in response to very short pulses of energy.
  In addition, Eigen's name is linked with the theory of the chemical hypercycle, the cyclic linkage of reaction cycles as an explanation for the self organization of prebiotic systems, which he described with Peter Schuster in 1977. Eigen is a member of the Board of Sponsors of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He founded two biotechnology companies, Evotec and Direvo.
  
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  Marie Curie
  Marie Skłodowska-Curie (7 November 1867 – 4 July 1934) was a French-Polish physicist and chemist famous for her pioneering research on radioactivity. She was the first person honored with two Nobel Prizes—in physics and chemistry. She was the first female professor at the University of Paris, and in 1995 became the first woman to be entombed on her own merits in the Panthéon in Paris.
  She was born Maria Salomea Skłodowska ([ˈmarja salɔˈmɛa skwɔˈdɔfska]) in Warsaw, in what was then the Kingdom of Poland. She studied at Warsaw's clandestine Floating University and began her practical scientific training in Warsaw. In 1891, aged 24, she followed her older sister Bronisława to study in Paris, where she earned her higher degrees and conducted her subsequent scientific work. She shared her 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband Pierre Curie and with the physicist Henri Becquerel. Her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie and son-in-law, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, would similarly share a Nobel Prize. She was the sole winner of the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Skłodowska-Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the only woman to date to win in two fields, and the only person to win in multiple sciences.
  
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  Mario J. Molina
  Mario José Molina-Pasquel Henríquez (born March 19, 1943 in Mexico City) is a Mexican chemist and one of the most prominent precursors to the discovering of the Antarctic ozone hole. He was a co-recipient (along with Paul J. Crutzen and F. Sherwood Rowland) of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his role in elucidating the threat to the Earth's ozone layer of chlorofluorocarbon gases (or CFCs), becoming the first Mexican-born citizen to ever receive a Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
  Molina is the son of Roberto Molina Pasquel, a lawyer and diplomat who went on to serve as chief Ambassador to Ethiopia, Australia and the Philippines in 1923, and Leonor Henríquez de Molina. After completing his basic studies in Mexico City and Switzerland he earned a bachelor's degree in Chemical Engineering at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1965, a postgraduate degree from the Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg, West Germany, in 1967 and a doctoral degree in Chemistry from University of California, Berkeley in 1972.
  
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  Martin Chalfie
  Martin Chalfie (born January 15, 1947) is an American scientist. He is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, where he is also chair of the department of biological sciences. He shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Osamu Shimomura and Roger Y. Tsien "for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP". He holds a Ph.D. in neurobiology from Harvard University.
  Chalfie grew up in Chicago, Illinois, son of the guitarist Eli Chalfie (1910—1996) and owner of an apparel store Vivian Chalfie (née Friedlen, 1913—2005). His maternal grandfather, Meyer L. Friedlen, immigrated to Chicago from Moscow at an early age; his paternal grandparents, Benjamin and Esther Chalfie, came to Cincinnati from Brest-Litovsk.
  He matriculated at Harvard University in 1965, intending to be a math major, but he switched to biochemistry because it combined his interests in chemistry, math, and biology. He spent the summer after his junior year working in the laboratory of Klaus Weber at Harvard, but "It was so disheartening to completely fail that I decided I shouldn’t be in biology." As a result, in his senior year, he completed his major and took courses in law, theater, and Russian literature.
  
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  Max Perutz
  Max Ferdinand Perutz, OM, CH, CBE, FRS (19 May 1914, Vienna, Austria – 6 February 2002, Cambridge, United Kingdom) was an Austrian-born British molecular biologist, who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with John Kendrew, for their studies of the structures of hemoglobin and globular proteins. He went on to win the Royal Medal of the Royal Society in 1971 and the Copley Medal in 1979. At Cambridge he founded and chaired (1962–79) The Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, fourteen of whose scientists have won Nobel Prizes. Perutz's contributions to molecular biology in Cambridge are documented in The History of the University of Cambridge: Volume 4 (1870 to 1990) published by the Cambridge University Press in 1992.
  Max Ferdinand Perutz was born in Vienna on 19 May 1914. Both his parents, Hugo Perutz and Dely Goldschmidt, came from families of textile manufacturers who had made their fortune in the 19th century by the introduction of mechanical spinning and weaving into the Austrian monarchy. He was sent to school at the Theresianum, a grammar school derived from an officers academy of the days of the empress Maria Theresa, and his parents suggested that he should study law in preparation for entering the family business. However, a good schoolmaster awakened his interest in chemistry, and he had no difficulty in persuading his parents to let him study the subject of his choice.
  
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  Melvin Calvin
  Melvin Ellis Calvin (April 8, 1911 – January 8, 1997) was an American chemist most famed for discovering the Calvin cycle along with Andrew Benson and James Bassham, for which he was awarded the 1961 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He spent most of his five-decade career at the University of California, Berkeley.
  Calvin was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. His father was born in Tsarist Lithuania and his mother in Tsarist Georgia. As a small child, Calvin's family moved to Detroit; he graduated from Central High School in 1928. Melvin Calvin earned his Bachelor of Science from the Michigan College of Mining and Technology (now known as Michigan Technological University) in 1931 and his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Minnesota in 1935. He then spent the next four years doing postdoctoral work at the University of Manchester. He married Genevieve Jemtegaard in 1942, and they had three children, two daughters and a son.
  
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  Nikolay Semyonov
  Nikolay Nikolayevich Semyonov FRSRussian: Никола́й Никола́евич Семёнов) (April 15 (April 3, Old Style), 1896 – September 25, 1986) was a Russian/Soviet physicist and chemist. Semyonov was awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on the mechanism of chemical transformation.
  Semyonov was born in Saratov and graduated from the department of physics of Petrograd University (1913–1917), where he was a student of Abram Fyodorovich Ioffe. In 1918, he moved to Samara, where he was enlisted into Kolchak's White Army during Russian Civil War.
  In 1920, he returned to Petrograd and took charge of the electron phenomena laboratory of the Petrograd Physico-Technical Institute. He also became the vice-director of the intstitute. In 1921, he married philologist Maria Boreishe-Liverovsky (student of Zhirmunsky). She died two years later. In 1923, Nikolay married Maria's niece Natalia Nikolayevna Burtseva. She brought Nikolay a son (Yuri) and a daughter (Lyudmila).
  During that difficult time, Semyonov, together with Pyotr Kapitsa, discovered a way to measure the magnetic field of an atomic nucleus (1922). Later the experimental setup was improved by Otto Stern and Walther Gerlach and became known as Stern-Gerlach experiment.
  
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• Odd Hassel
  Odd Hassel (17 May 1897 – 11 May 1981) was a Norwegian physical chemist and Nobel Laureate.
  Odd Hassel was born on May 17, 1897 in Christiana (now called Oslo), Norway. His father Ernst Hassel died while Hassel was only eight years old. Hassel had a twin brother, Leif. This left his mother, Mathilde Klaveness to raise Hassel and his three brothers and one sister. Hassel attended the University of Oslo in 1915 to study chemistry. In the beginning of World War II, Germany invaded Norway and sent the staff of the University of Oslo, including Hassel, to an internment camp. Hassel continued his research until his freedom in 1944. After his retirement in 1964, Hassel continued his research. It was not until 1969 that the Nobel Prize in chemistry with Barton for their work in the 1940s. By this time, Hassel had already received the Fridtjof Nansen Award of Sciences as well as the Guldberg-Waage medal from the Norwegian Chemical Society in 1964. Hassel died on May 15, 1981.
  Odd Hassel was a Norwegian physical chemist who established the three-dimensionality of molecular geometry. While an instructor at the University of Oslo in 1925, he focused his research on ring-shaped carbon molecules which he suspected filled three dimensions instead of two, the common belief of the time. By using the number of bonds between the carbon and hydrogen atoms, Hassel demonstrated the impossibility of the molecules existing on only one plane. In 1930, by means of X-ray crystallography, Hassel proved the three-dimensionality of the molecules. This discovery became increasingly important because it incited Derek H.R. Barton’s realization of the correspondence between molecular function and structure. This discovery is still applicable today because it has been proved multiple times that molecules are three-dimensional. This discovery is very important in the study of the shape of orbitals.
  
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  Osamu Shimomura
  Osamu Shimomura (下村 脩, Shimomura Osamu^?, born August 27, 1928) is a Japanese organic chemist and marine biologist, and Professor Emeritus at Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and Boston University Medical School. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2008 for the discovery and development of green fluorescent protein (GFP) with two American scientists: Martin Chalfie of Columbia University and Roger Tsien of the University of California-San Diego.
  Born in Fukuchiyama, Kyoto in 1928, Shimomura was brought up in Manchukuo (Manchuria, China) and Osaka, Japan while his father served as an officer in the Imperial Japanese Army. Later, his family moved to Isahaya, Nagasaki, 15 miles from the epicenter of the August 1945 atomic bombing of the city. He recalls hearing, as a 16-year-old boy, the bomber plane before the atom bomb exploded. The explosion flash blinded Shimomura for about thirty seconds, and he was later drenched by the "black rain" bomb fallout. He overcame great odds in the following 11 years to earn an education and achieve academic success.
  
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  Otto Diels
  Otto Paul Hermann Diels (23 January 1876 – 7 March 1954) was a German chemist. He was the son of a professor of philology at the University of Berlin, where he himself earned his doctorate in chemistry, in the group of Emil Fischer.
  Diels taught until 1916 at the University of Berlin and from 1916 till 1945 at the University of Kiel. Two of his sons were killed in World War II.
  In 1950 he and his student, Kurt Alder, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for their discovery and development of the cycloaddition synthesis". This organic synthesis is known as the Diels-Alder reaction. It regioselectively produces up to four chiral centers and is one of the most useful reactions of its type.
  
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  Otto Hahn
  Otto Hahn FRS (8 March 1879 – 28 July 1968) was a German chemist and Nobel laureate, a pioneer in the fields of radioactivity and radiochemistry. He is regarded as "the father of nuclear chemistry". Hahn was a courageous opposer of Jewish persecution by the Nazis and after World War II he became a passionate campaigner against the use of nuclear energy as a weapon. He served as the last President of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (KWG) in 1946 and as the founding President of the Max Planck Society (MPG) from 1948 to 1960. Considered by many to be a model for scholarly excellence and personal integrity, he became one of the most influential citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany.
  Hahn was the youngest son of Heinrich Hahn (1845–1922), a prosperous glazier and entrepreneur ("Glasbau Hahn"), and Charlotte Hahn, née Giese (1845–1905). Together with his brothers Karl, Heiner and Julius, Otto was raised in a sheltered environment. At the age of 15, he began to take a special interest in chemistry and carried out simple experiments in the laundry room of the family home. His father wanted Otto to study architecture, as he had built or acquired several residential and business properties. But Otto persuaded him that his ambition was to become an industrial chemist.
  
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  Paul Berg
  Paul Berg (born June 30, 1926) is an American biochemist and professor emeritus at Stanford University. He was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1980, along with Walter Gilbert and Frederick Sanger. The award recognized their contributions to basic research involving nucleic acids. Berg received his undergraduate education at Penn State University, where he majored in biochemistry. He received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from Case Western Reserve University in 1952. Berg worked as a professor at Washington University School of Medicine and Stanford University School of Medicine, in addition to serving as the director of the Beckman Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine. In addition to the Nobel Prize, Berg was presented with the National Medal of Science in 1983 and the National Library of Medicine Medal in 1986.
  Berg graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School in 1943, received his B.S. in biochemistry from Penn State University in 1948 and Ph.D. in biochemistry from Case Western Reserve University in 1952. He is a member of the Beta Sigma Rho fraternity (now Beta Sigma Beta).
  
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• Paul D. Boyer
  Paul Delos Boyer (born July 31, 1918) is an American biochemist and analytical chemist. He shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for research on the "enzymatic mechanism underlying the biosynthesis of adenosine triphosphate (ATP)" (ATP synthase) with John E. Walker; the remainder of the Prize in that year was awarded to Danish chemist Jens Christian Skou for his discovery of the Na+/K+-ATPase.
  Boyer was born in Provo, Utah. He grew up in a nonpracticing Mormon family. He attended Provo High School, where he was active in student government and the debating team. He received a B.S. in chemistry from Brigham Young University in 1939 and obtained a Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation Scholarship for graduate studies. Five days before leaving for Wisconsin, Paul married Lyda Whicker. They remain married and have three children: Gail B. Hayes, Alexandra Boyer and Dr. Douglas Boyer; and eight grandchildren: Imran Clark, Mashuri Clark, Rashid Clark, Djahari Clark, Faisal Clark, Lisa A. Hayes, Leah Boyer and Josh Boyer.
  
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  Paul Flory
  Paul John Flory (June 19, 1910 – September 9, 1985) was an American chemist and Nobel laureate who was known for his prodigious volume of work in the field of polymers, or macromolecules. He was a leading pioneer in understanding the behavior of polymers in solution, and won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1974 "for his fundamental achievements, both theoretical and experimental, in the physical chemistry of macromolecules."
  After graduating from Elgin High School in Elgin, Illinois in 1927, Flory received a bachelor's degree from Manchester College (Indiana) in 1931 and a Ph.D. from the Ohio State University in 1934. His first position was at DuPont with Wallace Carothers.
  Flory's earliest work in polymer science was in the area of polymerization kinetics at the DuPont Experimental station. In condensation polymerization, he challenged the assumption that the reactivity of the end group decreased as the macromolecule grew, and by arguing that the reactivity was independent of the size, he was able to derive the result that the number of chains present decreased with size exponentially. In addition polymerization, he introduced the important concept of chain transfer to improve the kinetic equations and remove difficulties in understanding the polymer size distribution.
  
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  Paul J. Crutzen
  Paul Jozef Crutzen (born December 3, 1933, Amsterdam) is a Dutch Nobel prize winning atmospheric chemist.
  Early Life Crutzens childhood began just a few years before the start of WWII. In September 1940, the same year Germany invaded The Netherlands, Crutzen entered his first year of elementary school. After many delays and school switches all caused by happenings in the war, Crutzen graduated from elementary school and moved onto “Hogere Burgerschool” (Higher Citizens School) in 1946 in which time he became fluent in French, English, and German. Along with languages his main focus were natural sciences in this school from which he graduated from in 1951. After this he entered a Middle Technical School where he studied Civil Engineering. However his schooling would be cut short as he had to serve 21 months of compulsory military service in the Netherlands.
  1956 Crutzen metTerttu Soininem whom he would marry a few years later in February, 1958. December of that same year the couple had a daughter by the name of Liona. In March of 1964 the couple had another daughter by the name of Sylvia.
  
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  Paul Karrer
  Paul Karrer (21 April 1889 – 18 June 1971) was a Swiss organic chemist best known for his research on vitamins. He and Walter Haworth won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1937.
  Karrer was born in Moscow, Russia to Paul Karrer and Julie Lerch, both Swiss nationals. In 1892 Karrer's family returned to Switzerland where he was educated at Wildegg and at the grammar school in Lenzburg, Aarau, where he matriculated in 1908. He studied chemistry at the University of Zurich under Alfred Werner and after gaining his Ph.D. in 1911, he spent a further year as assistant in the Chemical Institute. He then took a post as chemist with Paul Ehrlich at the Georg Speyer Haus, Frankfurt-am-Main. In 1919 he became Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Chemical Institute.
  Karrer's early research concerned complex metal compounds but his most important work has concerned plant pigments, particularly the yellow carotenoids. He elucidated their chemical structure and showed that some of these substances are transformed in the body into vitamin A. His work led to the establishment of the correct constitutional formula for beta-carotene, the chief precursor of vitamin A; the first time that the structure of a vitamin or provitamin had been established. George Wald worked briefly in Karrer's lab while studying the role of vitamin A in the retina. Later, Karrer confirmed the structure of ascorbic acid (vitamin C) and extended his researches into the vitamin B₂ and E. His important contributions to the chemistry of the flavins led to identification of lactoflavin as part of the complex originally thought to be vitamin B₂.
  
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  Peter Agre
  Peter Agre (pronounced "ahg-ray") (born January 30, 1949) is an American medical doctor, professor, and molecular biologist who was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (which he shared with Roderick MacKinnon) for his discovery of aquaporins. Aquaporins are water-channel proteins that move water molecules through the cell membrane. In February 2009, Peter Agre was inducted as the 163rd president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the nation's largest scientific organization. He is currently a professor at Johns Hopkins University.
  Agre was born in Northfield, Minnesota, to a Norwegian American father and a mother of Swedish and Norwegian descent. He received his B.A. from Augsburg College in Minneapolis and his M.D. in 1974 from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. From 1975 to 1978 he completed his clinical training in Internal Medicine at Case Western Reserve University's Case Medical Center under Charles C.J. Carpenter. He served as the Vice Chancellor for science and technology at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, where he guided the development of Duke's biomedical research. Agre leads the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute (JHMRI). Agre became director at JHMRI and joined the faculty of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health on January 1, 2008. He was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences in 2000 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003. He is also a founding member of Scientists and Engineers for America (SEA).
  
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  Peter D. Mitchell
  Peter Dennis Mitchell, FRS (29 September 1920–10 April 1992) was a British biochemist who was awarded the 1978 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his discovery of the chemiosmotic mechanism of ATP synthesis.
  Mitchell was born in Mitcham, Surrey, England.
  Peter D. Mitchell was born in Mitcham, Surrey on 29 September 1920. His parents were Christopher Gibbs Mitchell, a civil servant, and Kate Beatrice Dorothy (née) Taplin. His Uncle was Sir Godfrey Way Mitchell, chairman of George Wimpey. He was educated at Queen's College, Taunton, and at Jesus College, Cambridge where he studied the Natural Sciences Tripos specialising in biochemistry.
  He accepted a research post in the Department of Biochemistry, Cambridge, in 1942, and received the degree of Ph.D. in early 1951 for work on the mode of action of penicillin. In 1955 he was invited by Professor Michael Swann to set up a biochemical research unit, called the Chemical Biology Unit, in the Department of Zoology, Edinburgh University, where he was appointed to a Senior Lectureship in 1961, to a Readership in 1962, although ill health led to his resignation in 1963.
  
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  Peter Debye
  Peter Joseph William Debye FRS (March 24, 1884 – November 2, 1966) was a Dutch physicist and physical chemist, and Nobel laureate in Chemistry.
  Born Petrus Josephus Wilhelmus Debije in Maastricht, Netherlands, Debye attended the Aachen University of Technology, Rhenish Prussia just 30 km away in 1901. He studied mathematics and classical physics, and, in 1905, received a degree in electrical engineering. In 1907, he published his first paper, a mathematically elegant solution of a problem involving eddy currents. At Aachen, he studied under the theoretical physicist Arnold Sommerfeld, who later claimed that his most important discovery was Peter Debye.
  In 1906, Sommerfeld received an appointment at Munich, Bavaria, and took Debye with him as his assistant. Debye got his Ph.D. with a dissertation on radiation pressure in 1908. In 1910, he derived the Planck radiation formula using a method which Max Planck agreed was simpler than his own.
  In 1911, when Albert Einstein took an appointment as a professor at Prague, Bohemia, Debye took his old professorship at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. This was followed by moves to Utrecht in 1912, to Göttingen in 1913, to ETH Zurich in 1920, to Leipzig in 1927, and in 1934 to Berlin, where, succeeding Einstein, he became director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics (now named the Max-Planck-Institut) whose facilities were built only during Debye's era. He was awarded the Lorentz Medal in 1935. From 1937 to 1939 he was the president of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft.
  
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  Richard F. Heck
  Richard Fred Heck (born August 15, 1931) is an American chemist noted for the discovery and development of the Heck reaction, which uses palladium to catalyze organic chemical reactions that couple aryl halides with alkenes.
  Heck was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on October 6, 2010, with the Japanese chemists Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki, for their work in palladium-catalyzed coupling reactions in organic synthesis.
  Heck was born in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1931. He earned both his bachelor's degree (1952) and his doctor of philosophy degree (1954) at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), working under the supervision of Dr. Saul Winstein. After two periods of postdoctoral research at the ETH in Zurich, Switzerland, and then back at UCLA, Heck took a position with the Hercules Corporation in Wilmington, Delaware in 1957. After productive research work at Hercules, he was hired by the University of Delaware's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in 1971. Heck was a professor of chemistry at the University of Delaware until his retirement in the year 1989.
  
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  Richard Kuhn
  Richard Kuhn (December 3, 1900 – August 1, 1967) was an Austrian-German biochemist and Nobel laureate.
  Kuhn was born in Vienna, Austria where he attended grammar school and high school. His interest in chemistry surfaced early; however he had many interests and decided late to study chemistry. Between 1910 and 1918 he was a schoolmate of Wolfgang Pauli, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1945. Beginning in 1918 Kuhn attended lectures at the University of Vienna in chemistry. He finished his chemistry studies at University of Munich and received his doctoral degree in 1922 with Richard Willstätter for a scientific work on enzymes.
  After graduating Kuhn continued his scientific career, first in Munich, then at the ETH Zurich and from 1929 onwards at the University of Heidelberg, where he was head of the chemistry department beginning in 1937. In 1928 he married Daisy Hartmann and the couple subsequently had two sons and four daughters.
  Kuhn's areas of study included: investigations of theoretical problems of organic chemistry (stereochemistry of aliphatic and aromatic compounds; syntheses of polyenes and cumulenes; constitution and colour; the acidity of hydrocarbons), as well as extensive fields in biochemistry (carotenoids; flavins; vitamins and enzymes). Specifically, he carried out important work on vitamin B₂ and the antidermatitis vitamin B₆.
  
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  Richard R. Ernst
  Richard Robert Ernst (born August 14, 1933) is a Swiss physical chemist and Nobel Laureate.
  Born in Winterthur, Switzerland, Ernst was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1991 for his contributions towards the development of Fourier Transform nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy while at Varian Associates, Palo Alto and the subsequent development of multi-dimensional NMR techniques. These underpin applications of NMR both to chemistry (NMR spectroscopy) and to medicine (MRI). He also received the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize in 1991.
  Early Life
  Ernst lived in house that his grandfather, a merchant, had built in 1898. Ernst's father, Robert Ernst, was teaching as an architect at the technical high school of their town. He also had two sisters. His town had a lot of art and industry in it, a lot of the art had to do with music. Winterthur had a small but first rank orchestra that was famous throughout Switzerland and also an industry in diesel motors and rail way engines.
  
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  Richard R. Schrock
  Richard Royce Schrock (born 4 January 1945) is an American chemist and Nobel laureate recognized for his contributions to the metathesis reaction used in organic chemistry.
  Born in Berne, Indiana, Schrock went to Mission Bay High School in San Diego, California. He holds a B.A. (1967) from the University of California, Riverside and a Ph. D. (1971) from Harvard University. At Harvard he studied under J.A. Osborn. In 1971-72, he carried out postdoctoral studies at the University of Cambridge with Lord Jack Lewis. In 1972, he was hired by DuPont, where he worked at the Experimental Station in Wilmington, Delaware in the group of George Parshall. He joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975 and became full professor in 1980.
  He has held his current post, the Frederick G. Keyes Professor of Chemistry, at MIT since 1989. Schrock is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, National Academy of Sciences and was elected to the Board of Overseers of Harvard University in 2007.
  
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  Richard Smalley
  Richard Errett Smalley (June 6, 1943 – October 28, 2005) was the Gene and Norman Hackerman Professor of Chemistry and a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Rice University, in Houston, Texas. In 1996, along with Robert Curl, also a professor of chemistry at Rice, and Harold Kroto, a professor at the University of Sussex, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of a new form of carbon, buckminsterfullerene ("buckyballs"), and was a leading advocate of nanotechnology and its many applications, including its use in creating strong but lightweight materials as well as its potential to fight cancer.
  Smalley, the youngest of 4 siblings, was born in Akron, Ohio, and grew up in Kansas City, Missouri.
  Smalley attended Hope College before transferring to the University of Michigan where he received his B.S. in 1965. Between his studies, he worked in industry, where he developed his unique managerial style. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1973. He completed postdoctoral work at the University of Chicago, with Lennard Wharton and Donald Levy, where he was a pioneer in the development of supersonic beam laser spectroscopy.
  
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  Richard Willstätter
  Richard Martin Willstätter FRS (13 August 1872 – 3 August 1942) was a German organic chemist whose study of the structure of plant pigments, chlorophyll included, won him the 1915 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Willstätter invented paper chromatography independently of Mikhail Tsvet.
  Willstätter was born in to a Jewish family in Karlsruhe. He went to school there and, when his family moved, he attended the Technical School in Nuremberg. At age 18 he entered the University of Munich to study science and stayed for the next fifteen years. He was in the Department of Chemistry, first as a student of Adolf von Baeyer -- he received his doctorate in 1894 - then as a faculty member. His doctoral thesis was on the structure of cocaine. Willstätter continued his research into other alkaloids and synthesized several of them. In 1896 he was named Lecturer and in 1902 Professor extraordinarius (professor without a chair).
  In 1905 he left Munich to become professor at the ETH Zürich and there he worked on the plant pigment chlorophyll. He first determined its structure.
  
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  Roald Hoffmann
  Roald Hoffmann (born July 18, 1937) is an American theoretical chemist who won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He is the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters, Emeritus, at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York.
  Hoffmann was born in Zolochiv,(Ukraine) to a Jewish family and was named in honor of the Norwegian explorer, Roald Amundsen. After Germany invaded Poland and occupied the town, his family was placed in a labor camp where his father, a civil engineer familiar with much of the local infrastructure, was a valued prisoner. As the situation grew more dangerous, with prisoners being transferred to liquidation camps, the family bribed guards to allow an escape and arranged with Ukrainian neighbors for Hoffman, his mother, two uncles and an aunt to hide in the attic and a storeroom of the local schoolhouse, where they remained for fifteen months, while Hoffman was aged 5 to 7.
  His father remained at the labor camp, but was able to occasionally visit, until he was tortured and killed by the Germans for his involvement in a plot to arm the camp prisoners. When she received the news, his mother attempted to contain her sorrow by writing down her feelings in a notebook her husband had been using to take notes on a relativity textbook he had been reading. While in hiding his mother kept Hoffman entertained by teaching him to read and having him memorize geography from textbooks stored in the attic, then quizzing him on it. He referred to the experience as having been enveloped in a cocoon of love.
  
  wn.com/Roald_Hoffmann
• Robert Curl
  Robert Floyd Curl, Jr. (born August 23, 1933) is an emeritus professor of chemistry at Rice University. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1996 for the discovery of fullerene (with the late Richard Smalley, also of Rice University, and Harold Kroto of the University of Sussex).
  Born in Alice, Texas, United States, Curl was the son of a Methodist Minister. He is a graduate of Thomas Jefferson High School in San Antonio, Texas. Curl received a B.A. from Rice Institute in 1954 and a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1957. Professor Curl's current research interests involve physical chemistry, developing DNA genotyping and sequencing instrumentation, and creating quantum cascade laser-based mid-infrared trace gas monitoring instrumentation. Curl often attended the German table at Hanszen College at Rice University. However, he is more known in the residential college life at Rice University for being the first master of Lovett College.
  
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  Robert H. Grubbs
  Robert (Bob) Howard Grubbs (b. 27 February 1942 near Possum Trot, Kentucky) is an American chemist and Nobel laureate.
  As he noted in his official Nobel Prize autobiography, "In some places, my birthplace is listed as Calvert City and in others Possum Trot [NB: both in Marshall County]. I was actually born between the two, so either one really is correct." He spent his early childhood in Marshall County and attended public school at McKinley Elementary, Franklin Junior High and Paducah Tilghman High School in Paducah, Kentucky. Grubbs studied chemistry at the University of Florida (B.S. and M.S.), where he worked with Merle Battiste, and Columbia University, where he obtained his Ph.D. under Ronald Breslow in 1968.
  He next spent a year with James Collman at Stanford University. He was then appointed to the faculty of Michigan State University. In 1978 he moved to California Institute of Technology where he is presently Victor and Elizabeth Atkins Professor of Chemistry.
  His main interests in organometallic chemistry and synthetic chemistry are catalysts, notably Grubbs' catalyst for olefin metathesis and ring-opening metathesis polymerization with cyclic olefins such as norbornene. He also contributed to the development of so-called "living polymerization".
  
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  Robert Huber
  Robert Huber is a German biochemist and Nobel laureate.
  He was born 20 February 1937 in Munich where his father, Sebastian, was a bank cashier. He was educated at the Humanistisches Karls-Gymnasium from 1947 to 1956 and then studied chemistry at the Technische Hochschule, receiving his diploma in 1960. He stayed, and did research into using crystallography to elucidate the structure of organic compounds.
  In 1971 he became a director at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry where his team developed methods for the crystallography of proteins.
  In 1988 he received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry jointly with Johann Deisenhofer and Hartmut Michel. The trio were recognized for their work in first crystallizing an intramembrane protein important in photosynthesis in purple bacteria, and subsequently applying X-ray crystallography to elucidate the protein's structure. The information provided the first insight into the structural bodies that performed the integral function of photosynthesis. This insight could be translated to understand the more complex analogue of photosynthesis in cyanobacteria which is essentially the same as that in chloroplasts of higher plants.
  
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  Robert S. Mulliken
  Robert Sanderson Mulliken FRS (June 7, 1896 – October 31, 1986) was an American physicist and chemist, primarily responsible for the early development of molecular orbital theory, i.e. the elaboration of the molecular orbital method of computing the structure of molecules. Dr. Mulliken received the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1966. He received the Priestley Medal in 1983.
  Mulliken was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts. His father, Samuel Parsons Mulliken, was a professor of organic chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a child, Robert Mulliken learned the name and botanical classification of plants and, in general, had an excellent, but selective, memory. For example, he learned German well enough to skip the course in scientific German in college, but could not remember the name of his high school German teacher. He also made the acquaintance, while still a child, of the physical chemist Arthur Amos Noyes.
  Mulliken helped with some of the editorial work when his father wrote his four-volume text on organic compound identification, and thus became an expert on organic chemical nomenclature.
  
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  Roderick MacKinnon
  Roderick MacKinnon (born 19 February 1956) is a professor of Molecular Neurobiology and Biophysics at Rockefeller University who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry together with Peter Agre in 2003 for his work on the structure and operation of ion channels.
  MacKinnon was born in Burlington, Massachusetts and initially attended the University of Massachusetts Boston. MacKinnon then transferred to Brandeis University after one year, and there he received a bachelor's degree in biochemistry in 1978, studying calcium transport through the cell membrane for his honors thesis in Christopher Miller's laboratory. It was also at Brandeis where MacKinnon met his future wife and working-colleague Alice Lee.
  After receiving his degree from Brandeis, MacKinnon entered medical school at Tufts University. He got his M.D. in 1982 and received training in Internal Medicine at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. He did not feel satisfied enough with the medical profession, so in 1986 he returned to Christopher Miller's laboratory at Brandeis for postdoctoral studies.
  
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  Roger D. Kornberg
  Roger David Kornberg (born (1947-04-24)April 24, 1947) is an American biochemist and professor of structural biology at Stanford University School of Medicine.
  Kornberg was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2006 for his studies of the process by which genetic information from DNA is copied to RNA, "the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription."
  Kornberg was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of Sylvy Ruth (Levy) and biophysicist Arthur Kornberg, who won the Nobel Prize. He earned his bachelor's degree in chemistry from Harvard University in 1967 and his Ph.D. in chemical physics from Stanford in 1972. He became a postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge England and then an Assistant Professor of Biological Chemistry at Harvard Medical School in 1976, before moving to his present position as Professor of Structural Biology at Stanford Medical School in 1978. His closest collaborator has been his wife, Professor Yahli Lorch.
  All organisms are controlled by their genes, which are coded by DNA, which is copied to RNA, which creates proteins, which are sequences of amino acids. DNA resides in the nucleus. When a cell expresses a gene, it copies (transcribes) that gene's DNA sequence onto a messenger RNA (mRNA) sequence. mRNA is transported out of the nucleus to ribosomes. The ribosomes read the mRNA and translate the code into the right amino acid sequence to make that gene's protein.
  
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  Roger Y. Tsien
  Roger Yonchien Tsien ( born February 1, 1952) is a American biochemist. He is a professor at the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, San Diego. He was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in chemistry "for his discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein (GFP) with two other chemists: Martin Chalfie of Columbia University and Osamu Shimomura of Boston University and Marine Biological Laboratory.
  Tsien and his family are descendants of the royal family of the Kingdom of Wuyue. According to historic records, Tsien is the 34th-generational grandson of the King Qian Liu (Tsien Liu).
  Tsien had a number of accomplished engineers in his extended family, including his father Hsue-Chu Tsien who was a mechanical engineer and his mother's brothers who were engineering professors at MIT. Both of Tsien's parents came from Zhejiang Province, China. The famous rocket scientist Tsien Hsue-shen, regarded as the co-founding father of JPL of Caltech and later the director of the Chinese ballistic-missile and space programs, is a cousin of Tsien's father. Tsien's brother Richard Tsien is also a renowned scientist at Stanford. Tsien, who calls his own work molecular engineering, once said, "I'm doomed by heredity to do this kind of work."
  
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  Rudolph A. Marcus
  Rudolph "Rudy" Arthur Marcus (born July 21, 1923) is a Canadian-born chemist who received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his theory of electron transfer. Marcus theory, named after him, provides a thermodynamic and kinetic framework for describing one electron outer-sphere electron transfer. A type of chemical reaction linked to his many studies of electron transfer would be the transfer of an electron between metal ions in different states of oxidation. An example of this type of chemical reaction would be one between a bivalent and a trivalent iron ion in an aqueous solution. In Marcus's time chemists were astonished at the slow rate in which this specific reaction took place. This attracted many chemists in the 1950s and is also what began Marcus's interests in electron transfer. Marcus made many studies based on the principles that were found within this chemical reaction, and through his studies was able to create his famous Marcus theory. This theory gave way to new experimental programs that contributed to all branches within chemistry.
  
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  Ryōji Noyori
  Ryōji Noyori (野依 良治, Noyori Ryōji^?, born September 3, 1938) is a Japanese chemist. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2001. Noyori shared half of the prize with William S. Knowles for the study of chirally catalyzed hydrogenations; the second half of the Prize went to K. Barry Sharpless for his study in chirally catalyzed oxidation reactions (Sharpless epoxidation).
  Ryōji Noyori was born in Kobe, Japan. He became fascinated with chemistry at age twelve, after hearing a presentation on nylon. He saw the power of chemistry as being the ability to "produce high value from almost nothing". He was a student at Kyoto University, an instructor in the research group of Hitoshi Nozaki, and an associate professor at Nagoya University. After postdoctoral work with Elias J. Corey at Harvard he returned to Nagoya, becoming a full professor in 1972. He is still based at Nagoya, though he is also now president of RIKEN, a multi-site national research initiative with an annual budget of $800 million. In 2000 Noyori became Honorary Doctor at the University of Rennes 1 where he taught in 1995, and in 2005, he became Honorary Doctor at Technical University of Munich and RWTH Aachen University, Germany.
  
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  Sidney Altman
  Sidney Altman (born May 7, 1939) is a Canadian Americanmolecular biologist, who is currently the Sterling Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology and Chemistry at Yale University. In 1989 he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Thomas R. Cech for their work on the catalytic properties of RNA.
  Altman was born on May 7, 1939 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. His parents were immigrants to Canada, each coming from Eastern Europe as a young adult, in the 1920s. Altman's mother was from Bialystok in Poland, and had come to Canada with her sister at the age of eighteen, learning English and working in a textile factory to earn money to bring the rest of their family to Quebec. Altman's father, born in Ukraine, had been a worker on a collective farm in the Soviet Union. He was originally sponsored to come to Canada as a farm worker, but later, as a husband and a father of two sons, he supported the family by running a small grocery store in Montreal. Sidney Altman was later to look back on his parents' lives as an illustration of the value of the work ethic: "It was from them I learned that hard work in stable surroundings could yield rewards, even if only in infinitesimally small increments."
  
  wn.com/Sidney_Altman
• Stanford Moore
  Stanford Moore (September 4, 1913 – August 23, 1982) was a U.S. biochemist. He shared a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1972 (with Christian B. Anfinsen and William Howard Stein, for work done at Rockefeller University on the structure of the enzyme ribonuclease and for contributing to the understanding of the connection between the chemical structure and catalytic activity of the ribonuclease molecule.
  Moore attended Peabody Demonstration School, now known as University School of Nashville, and in 1935 graduated summa cum laude from Vanderbilt University, where he was a member of Phi Kappa Sigma. He earned his doctorate in Organic Chemistry from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1938. Moore then joined the staff of the Rockefeller Institute, later Rockefeller University, where he spent his entire professional career, with the exception of a period of government service during World War II. He became Professor of Biochemistry in 1952.
  In 1958 he and William H. Stein developed the first automated amino acid analyzer, which facilitated the determination of protein sequences. In 1959 Moore and Stein announced the first determination of the complete amino acid sequence of an enzyme, ribonuclease, work which was cited in the Nobel award.
  
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  Svante Arrhenius
  Svante August Arrhenius (19 February 1859 – 2 October 1927) was a Swedish scientist, originally a physicist, but often referred to as a chemist, and one of the founders of the science of physical chemistry. He received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1903. The Arrhenius equation, lunar crater Arrhenius and the Arrhenius Labs at Stockholm University are named after him.
  Arrhenius was born on February 19, 1859 at Vik (also spelled Wik or Wijk), near Uppsala, Sweden, the son of Svante Gustav and Carolina Thunberg Arrhenius. His father had been a land surveyor for Uppsala University, moving up to a supervisory position. At the age of three, Arrhenius taught himself to read without the encouragement of his parents, and by watching his father's addition of numbers in his account books, became an arithmetical prodigy. In later life, Arrhenius enjoyed using masses of data to discover mathematical relationships and laws.
  At age 8, he entered the local cathedral school, starting in the fifth grade, distinguishing himself in physics and mathematics, and graduating as the youngest and most able student in 1876.
  
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  Theodor Svedberg
  Theodor H. E. ("The") Svedberg (30 August 1884 – 25 February 1971) was a Swedish chemist and Nobel laureate, active at Uppsala University. His work with colloids supported the theories of Brownian motion put forward by Einstein and the Polish geophysicist Marian Smoluchowski. During this work, he developed the technique of analytical ultracentrifugation, and demonstrated its utility in distinguishing pure proteins one from another.
  The unit svedberg (symbol S), a unit of time amounting to 10⁻¹³ s or 100 fs, is named after him.
  
  
  
  
  
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  Thomas A. Steitz
  Thomas Arthur Steitz (born August 23, 1940) is a Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA. Steitz was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Ada Yonath "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome". Steitz also won the Gairdner International Award in 2007 "for his studies on the structure and function of the ribosome which showed that the peptidyl transferase was an RNA catalyzed reaction, and for revealing the mechanism of inhibition of this function by antibiotics".
  Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Steitz studied chemistry as an undergraduate at Lawrence University. While there he was a member of the fraternity, Delta Tau Delta,the Delta Nu chapter.
  He received a Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology from Harvard University in 1966 where he worked under direction of subsequent 1976 chemistry Nobel Prize winner William N. Lipscomb, Jr. While at Harvard after the training task of determining the structure of the small molecule methyl ethylene phosphate, Steitz made these contributions to determining the atomic structures of carboxypeptidase A and aspartate carbamoyltransferase, each the largest atomic structure determined in its time. The structure of the large 50S ribosomal subunit, which Steitz later determined in his own lab at Yale University, and for which Steitz was awarded the Nobel Prize is even larger.
  
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  Thomas Cech
  Thomas Robert Cech (born December 8, 1947 in Chicago) is a chemist who shared the 1989 Nobel prize in chemistry with Sidney Altman, for their discovery of the catalytic properties of RNA. Cech discovered that RNA could itself cut strands of RNA, which showed that life could have started as RNA. He also studied telomeres, and his lab discovered an enzyme, TERT (telomerase reverse transcriptase), which is part of the process of restoring telomeres after they are shortened during cell division. As president of Howard Hughes Medical Institute, he promoted science education, and he teaches an undergraduate chemistry course at the University of Colorado.
  Cech was born to parents of Czech origin (his grandfather was Czech, his other grandparents were first-generation Americans) in Chicago, he grew up in Iowa City, Iowa. In junior high school, he knocked on the doors of geology professors at the University of Iowa, and asked them to discuss crystal structures, meteorites and fossils.
  In 1966, he entered Grinnell College where he studied Homer's Odyssey, Dante's Inferno, constitutional history and chemistry. He married his organic chemistry lab partner, Carol Lynn Martinson, and graduated with a B.A. in 1970.
  
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  Victor Grignard
  François Auguste Victor Grignard (May 6, 1871 in Cherbourg - December 13, 1935 in Lyon) was a Nobel Prize-winning French chemist.
  Grignard was the son of a sail maker. After studying mathematics at Lyon he transferred to chemistry and discovered the synthetic reaction bearing his name (the Grignard reaction) in 1900. He became a professor at the University of Nancy in 1910 and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1912. During World War I he studied chemical warfare agents, particularly the manufacture of phosgene and the detection of mustard gas. His counterpart on the German side was another Nobel Prize winning Chemist, Fritz Haber.
  Grignard is most noted for devising a new method for generating carbon-carbon bonds using magnesium to couple ketones and alkyl halides. This reaction is valuable in organic synthesis. It occurs in two steps:
  The Grignard reaction is an important means of preparing organic compounds from smaller precursor molecules. For this work, Grignard was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1912 jointly with fellow Frenchman Paul Sabatier.
  
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• Vincent du Vigneaud
  Vincent du Vigneaud (May 18, 1901 – December 11, 1978) was an American biochemist. He won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1955 for the isolation, structural identification, and total synthesis of the cyclic peptide, oxytocin.
  du Vigneaud was graduated from Schurz High School in 1918. He began studying chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was influenced by lectures of Carl Shipp Marvel. After receiving his M.S. in 1924 he joined DuPont.
  He married Zella Zon Ford on June 12, 1924. Restarting his academic career in 1925, he joined the group of John R. Murlin at the University of Rochester for his Ph.D thesis. He was graduated in 1927 with his work, The Sulfur in Insulin.
  After several post-doctoral positions with John Jacob Abel at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, Max Bergmann at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Leather Research in Dresden, and others, he became professor at the University of Illinois.
  He next went to George Washington University Medical School in Washington, D.C. in 1932 and to Cornell Medical College in New York City in 1938, where he stayed until his emeritation in 1967. Following that retirement, he held a position at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
  
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  Vladimir Prelog
  Vladimir Prelog FRS (23 July 1906 – 7 January 1998) was a Croatian organic chemist and Nobel Prize winner in chemistry. Prelog lived and worked in Prague, Zagreb and Zürich during his lifetime.
  Prelog was born in Sarajevo, Condominium of Bosnia and Herzegovina, at that time within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to Croat parents who were working there. His father Milan was a history professor in gymnasium in Sarajevo and later at University of Zagreb. As an 8-year old boy, he stood near the place where assassination of Franz Ferdinand occurred. Prelog attended elementary school in Sarajevo, but in 1915, as a child, Prelog moved to Zagreb (Croatia) with his parents. In Zagreb he graduated from elementary school. At first he attended gymnasium in Zagreb, but soon afterwords, his father got job in Osijek, so he continued his education there. He was in Osijek gymnasium for two years, where he become interested in chemistry under influence of his professor Ivan Kuria. In 1922, as a 16-year old boy, he described a new solution for an analytic instrument in chemical lab for the prominent German scientific magazine Chemiker Zeitung. His description was published, which was his first scientific work. Prelog completed his high school education in Zagreb in 1924. Following his father's wishes, he moved to Prague where he received his diploma in chemical engineering from the Czech Technical University in 1928 and gaiend Sc.D in 1929. His teacher was Emil Votoček, while his assistant and mentor Rudolf Lukeš introduced him to the world of organic chemistry.
  
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  Walter Gilbert
  Walter Gilbert (born March 21, 1932) is an American physicist, biochemist, molecular biology pioneer, and Nobel laureate.
  Gilbert was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on March 21, 1932. Gilbert was educated at the Sidwell Friends School, and attended Harvard University for undergraduate and graduate studies, earning a baccalaureate in chemistry and physics in 1953 and a master's degree in physics in 1954. Gilbert's doctoral studies were performed at the University of Cambridge, where he earned his Ph.D in mathematics under the mentorship Nobel laureate Abdus Salam in 1957.
  Gilbert returned to Harvard in 1956 and was appointed assistant professor of physics in 1959; in 1964 Gilbert was promoted to associate professor of biophysics and promoted again in 1968 to professor of biochemistry. In 1969, Gilbert was awarded Harvard's Ledlie Prize. In 1972, Gilbert was named American Cancer Society Professor of Molecular Biology.
  He is a co-founder of the biotech start-up companies Biogen and Myriad Genetics, and was the first chairman on their respective boards of directors. He is also a member of the Board of Scientific Governors at The Scripps Research Institute. Gilbert is currently the chairman of the Harvard Society of Fellows.
  
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  Walter Kohn
  Walter Kohn (born March 9, 1923, in Vienna, Austria) is an Austrian-born American theoretical physicist. He was awarded, with John Pople, the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1998. The award recognized their contributions to the understandings of the electronic properties of materials. In particular, Kohn played the leading role in the development of density functional theory, which made it possible to incorporate quantum mechanical effects in the electronic density (rather than through its many-body wavefunction). This computational simplification led to many insights and became an essential tool for electronic materials, atomic and molecular structure.
  Kohn arrived in England as part of the famous Kindertransport rescue operation, immediately after the annexation of Austria by Hitler. He is from a Jewish family, both of his parents were later killed in the Holocaust. Because he was a German national, he was sent to Canada by the English in July 1940. As a 17-year-old, Kohn traveled as part of a British convoy moving through U-boat-infested waters to Quebec City in Canada; and from there, by train, to a camp in Trois-Rivières. He was at first held in detention in a camp near Sherbrooke, Quebec. This camp, as well as others, provided a small number of educational facilities that Kohn used to the fullest, and he finally succeeded in entering the University of Toronto. As a German national, the future Nobel laureate in chemistry was not allowed to enter the chemistry building, and so he opted for physics and mathematics. A short but fascinating autobiography may be found on the Nobelist webpage.
  
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  Walther Nernst
  Walther Hermann Nernst FRS (25 June 1864 – 18 November 1941) was a German physical chemist and physicist who is known for his theories behind the calculation of chemical affinity as embodied in the third law of thermodynamics, for which he won the 1920 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Nernst helped establish the modern field of physical chemistry and contributed to electrochemistry, thermodynamics, solid state chemistry and photochemistry. He is also known for developing the Nernst equation.
  Nernst was born in Briesen in West Prussia (now Wąbrzeźno, Poland) as son of Gustav Nernst, who was a country judge. Gustav died when Walther was only 24 years old. His mother was Polish and died when Nernst was young. Walther also had three older sisters and one younger brother. The third sister died due to cholera. Nernst went to elementary school at Graudentz. He studied physics and mathematics at the universities of Zürich, Berlin, Graz and Würzburg, where he graduated in 1887.
  It was said that Nernst was mechanically minded in that he was always thinking of ways to apply new discoveries to industry. Nernst's hobbies included the pastimes of hunting and fishing.
  
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  Wilhelm Ostwald
  Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald (Latvian: Vilhelms Ostvalds; 2 September 1853 – 4 April 1932) was a Baltic German chemist. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1909 for his work on catalysis, chemical equilibria and reaction velocities. Ostwald, Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff, and Svante Arrhenius are usually credited with being the modern founders of the field of physical chemistry.
  Ostwald was born ethnically Baltic German in Riga, to master-cooper Gottfried Wilhelm Ostwald (1824–1903) and Elisabeth Leuckel (1824–1903). He was the middle of two brothers, Eugen (1851–1932) and Gottfried (1855–1918). Ostwald graduated from the University of Tartu, Estonia, in 1875, received his Ph.D. there in 1878 under the guidance of Carl Schmidt, and taught at Co-Arc from 1875 to 1881 and at Riga Polytechnicum from 1881 to 1887.
  Wilhelm Ostwald is usually credited with inventing the Ostwald process (patent 1902), used in the manufacture of nitric acid, although the basic chemistry had been patented some 64 years earlier by Kuhlmann, when it was probably of only academic interest due to the lack of a significant source of ammonia. That may have still been the state of affairs in 1902, although things were due to change dramatically in the second half of the decade as a result of Haber and Bosch's work on their nitrogen fixing process (completed by 1911 or 1913). The date 1908 (six years after the patent) is often given for the invention of the Ostwald process, and it may be that these developments motivated him to do additional work to commercialize the process in that time-frame. Alternatively, six years might simply have been the bureaucratic interval between filing the patent and the time it was granted.
  
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• Willard Libby
  Willard Frank Libby (December 17, 1908 – September 8, 1980) was an American physical chemist noted for his role in the 1949 development of radiocarbon dating, a process which revolutionized archaeology.
  Libby was born in Grand Valley, Colorado. He received his B.S. in 1931 and Ph.D. in 1933 in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, where he then became a lecturer and later assistant professor. Libby spent the 1930s building sensitive geiger counters to measure weak natural and artificial radioactivity. In 1941 he joined Berkeley's chapter of Alpha Chi Sigma.
  Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, he spent most of 1941 at Princeton University. After the start of World War II, he worked on the Manhattan Project at Columbia University with Nobel laureate chemist Harold Urey. Libby was responsible for the gaseous diffusion separation and enrichment of the uranium-235 which was used in the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
  In 1945 he became a professor at the University of Chicago. In 1954, he was appointed to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. In 1959, he became Professor of Chemistry at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), a position he held until his retirement in 1976. He taught honors freshman chemistry from 1959 to 1963 (in keeping with a University tradition that senior faculty teach this class). He was Director of the University of California statewide Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics (IGPP) for many years including the lunar landing time. In 1966 he married his second wife Leona Woods Marshall, an original experimenter on the world's first nuclear reactor and a UCLA professor of environmental engineering. He also started the first Environmental Engineering program at UCLA in 1972.
  
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• William Giauque
  William Francis Giauque (May 12, 1895 – March 28, 1982) was an American chemist and Nobel laureate recognized in 1949 for his studies in the properties of matter at temperatures close to absolute zero. He spent virtually all of his educational and professional career at the University of California, Berkeley.
  William Francis Giauque was born in Niagara Falls, Ontario, on May 12, 1895.
  As his parents were U.S. citizens, they returned to the U.S. where he attended public schools primarily in Michigan. Following the death of his father in 1908, the family returned to Niagara Falls, where he studied at the Niagara Falls Collegiate Institute. After graduation, he looked for work in various power plants at Niagara Falls both for financial reasons and to pursue a career in electrical engineering. He was widely unsuccessful.
  Eventually, however, his application was accepted by the Hooker Electro-Chemical Company in Niagara Falls, New York, which led him to employment in their laboratory. He enjoyed the work, and decided to become a chemical engineer.
  
  wn.com/William_Giauque
• William Howard Stein
  William Howard Stein (June 25, 1911 – February 2, 1980) was an American biochemist who was born and died in New York City.
  Stein won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1972 with Christian Boehmer Anfinsen and Stanford Moore, for their work on ribonuclease and for their contribution to the understanding of the connection between chemical structure and catalytic activity of the ribonuclease molecule.
  In 1958 he and Stanford Moore developed the first automated amino acid analyzer, which facilitated the determination of protein sequences.
  
  
  
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  William Lipscomb
  William Nunn Lipscomb, Jr. (December 9, 1919 – April 14, 2011) was a Nobel Prize-winning American inorganic and organic chemist working in nuclear magnetic resonance, theoretical chemistry, boron chemistry, and biochemistry.
  Lipscomb was born in Cleveland, Ohio. His family moved to Lexington, Kentucky in 1920, and he lived there until he received his Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry at the University of Kentucky in 1941. He went on to earn his Doctor of Philosophy degree in Chemistry from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1946.
  From 1946 to 1959 he taught at the University of Minnesota. From 1959 to 1990 he was a professor of chemistry at Harvard University, where he was a professor emeritus since 1990.
  Lipscomb was married to the former Mary Adele Sargent from 1944 to 1983. They had three children, one of whom lived only a few hours. He married Jean Evans in 1983. They had one adopted daughter.
  Lipscomb resided in Cambridge, Massachusetts until his death in 2011 from pneumonia.
  
  wn.com/William_Lipscomb
• 
  William Ramsay
  Sir William Ramsay KCB FRSE FRS (1852–1916) was a Scottish chemist who discovered the noble gases and received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1904 "in recognition of his services in the discovery of the inert gaseous elements in air" (along with Lord Rayleigh who received the Nobel Prize in Physics that same year for the discovery of argon).
  Ramsay was born in Glasgow on 2 October 1852, the son of civil engineer William Ramsay and Catherine, née Robertson. He was a nephew of the geologist Sir Andrew Ramsay.
  He attended the Glasgow Academy and then continued his education at the University of Glasgow under Thomas Anderson and then went to study in Germany at the University of Tübingen with Wilhelm Rudolph Fittig where his doctoral thesis was entitled Investigations in the Toluic and Nitrotoluic Acids.
  Ramsay returned to Glasgow as Anderson's assistant at the Anderson College. He was appointed Professor of Chemistry at the University College of Bristol in 1879 and married Margaret Buchanan in 1881. In the same year he became the Principal of University College, Bristol, and somehow managed to combine that with active research both in organic chemistry and on gases.
  
  wn.com/William_Ramsay
• 
  Yuan T. Lee
  Yuan Tseh Lee (traditional Chinese: 李遠哲; simplified Chinese: 李远哲; pinyin: Lǐ Yuǎnzhé; Wade–Giles: Li³ Yüan³-che²; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Lí Oán-tiat; born November 19, 1936) is a chemist. He was the first Taiwanese Nobel Prize laureate, who, along with the Hungarian-Canadian John C. Polanyi and American Dudley R. Herschbach won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1986 "for their contributions to the dynamics of chemical elementary processes". Lee's particular Physical chemistry work was related to the use of advanced chemical kinetics techniques to investigate and manipulate the behavior of chemical reactions for relative large molecules using crossed molecular beams. From January 15, 1994 to October 19, 2006, Lee served as the President of the Academia Sinica of the Taiwan (ROC). In 2011, he was elected head of the International Council for Science.
  Lee was born in Hsinchu City in northern Taiwan (under Japanese rule) to Lee Tze-fan (李澤藩 Lǐ Zéfán), an accomplished Hsinchu-born artist, and Ts'ai P'ei (蔡配 Cài Péi), an elementary school teacher from Wuchi Township, Taichung County (now part of Taichung City). Lee played on the baseball and ping-pong teams of Hsinchu Elementary School (新竹國小), and later studied at the Hsinchu Senior High School (新竹高中), where he played tennis and trombone. Due to his achievements in high school, he entered National Taiwan University without taking the entrance examination and earned a B.Sc. in 1959. He earned an M.S. at National Tsing Hua University in 1961 and Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley in 1965. He was a member of the Chemistry International Board from 1977 to 1984.
  
  wn.com/Yuan_T._Lee
• Yves Chauvin
  Yves Chauvin (born October 10, 1930) is a French chemist and Nobel Prize laureate. He is honorary research director at the Institut français du pétrole and a member of the French Academy of Science. Chauvin received his degree from the Lyon School of Chemistry, Physics and Electronics in 1954.
  He was awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, along with Robert H. Grubbs and Richard R. Schrock, for his work from the early 1970s in the area of olefin metathesis. Chauvin was embarrassed to receive his award and initially indicated that he may not accept it. He did however receive his award from the King of Sweden and deliver his Nobel lecture.
  Metathesis involves organic (carbon-based) compounds. Nearly all organic molecules consist of chains, rings, or more complex frameworks of carbon atoms to which atoms of other elements can be attached. Single, double, or triple chemical bonds connect the atoms in these molecules. Double bonds are much stronger than single bonds, making it difficult for chemists to break double bonds to form new compounds. In metathesis, chemists break double bonds more easily by introducing a catalyst—that is, a substance that starts or speeds up a chemical reaction. Chemists began performing metathesis in the 1950s without knowing exactly how the reaction worked. This lack of understanding hindered the search for more efficient catalysts.
  
  wn.com/Yves_Chauvin

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