Otto Stern (17 February 1888 – 17 August 1969) was a German physicist and Nobel laureate in physics.

Stern was born into a Jewish family (father Oskar Stern and mother Eugenia née Rosenthal) in Sohrau (now Żory) in Upper Silesia, the German Empire's Kingdom of Prussia (now in Poland). He studied at Breslau, now Wrocław in Lower Silesia.

Stern completed his studies at the University of Breslau in 1912 with a doctor's degree in physical chemistry. He then followed Albert Einstein to Charles University in Prague and in later to ETH Zurich. Stern received his Habilitation at the University of Frankfurt in 1915 and in 1921, he became a professor at the University of Rostock, which he left in 1923 to work at the newly founded Institut für Physikalische Chemie at the University of Hamburg.

After resigning from his post at the University of Hamburg in 1933 because of the Nazis' Machtergreifung (seizure of power), he became professor of physics at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and later professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley.

Olaf Scholz (German pronunciation: [ˈoːlɐf ˈʃɔlts]; born (1958-06-14)14 June 1958 in Osnabrück) is a German politician of the Social Democratic Party of Germany and Mayor of Hamburg since 7 March 2011.

From May to October 2001 he was Minister of the Interior (Innensenator) of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and from 2002 to 2004 he was general secretary of the SPD. Scholz succeeded Franz Müntefering as Minister of Labour and Social Affairs, when the latter left office in 2007.

In 2010 Olaf Scholz participated in the annual Bilderberg Meeting in Sitges, Spain.

On 20 February 2011 the Social Democrats led by Scholz won the Hamburg state election, 2011 with 48.3% of the votes, resulting in 62 out of 121 seats in the Hamburg Parliament. Scholz resigned as a member of the seventeenth Bundestag on 11 March 2011 shortly after his election as First Mayor.

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.

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.

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.