[{"slug":"adolf-von-baeyer","name":"Adolf von Baeyer","year":1905,"category":"chemistry","motivation":"in recognition of his services in the advancement of organic chemistry and the chemical industry, through his work on organic dyes and hydroaromatic compounds","tagline":"He worked out how to build indigo in the lab, opening the way to the cheap synthetic blue that colours the world's jeans.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e6/Adolf_v_Baeyer_1905.jpg/330px-Adolf_v_Baeyer_1905.jpg","birthCountry":"Germany","birthYear":1835,"deathYear":1917,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["economy","fundamental-science","health"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["At the 1905 ceremony, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences' president said indigo now cost a third of its old price; Germany exported over 25 million marks' worth in 1904.","World output of plant-grown indigo fell from about 19,000 tons in 1897, the year synthetic indigo went on sale, to about 1,000 tons by 1914.","At least four chemists trained in his labs won chemistry Nobels: Emil Fischer (1902), Eduard Buchner (1907), Richard Willstätter (1915) and Heinrich Wieland (1927).","Lists of Jewish Nobel laureates count him as the first, through his mother, a great-granddaughter of Daniel Itzig, head of Berlin's Jewish community.","He was raised a Protestant, but the Nazis still counted his ancestry: in 1933 his son Hans was dismissed from his Heidelberg professorship as 'non-Aryan'."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"henri-moissan","name":"Henri Moissan","year":1906,"category":"chemistry","motivation":"in recognition of the great services rendered by him in his investigation and isolation of the element fluorine, and for the adoption in the service of science of the electric furnace called after him","tagline":"He freed fluorine, a fiercely reactive element, and built an electric furnace so hot that it opened up high-temperature chemistry.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0b/Henri_Moissan.jpg/330px-Henri_Moissan.jpg","birthCountry":"France","birthYear":1852,"deathYear":1907,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","technology","energy","environment"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He isolated fluorine in 1886, after 74 years of failed attempts by other chemists, some of whom were badly injured or killed by its toxic acid.","Industry still makes fluorine gas his way: by passing electricity through a mixture of potassium fluoride and hydrogen fluoride.","The Nobel committee's majority first favored Dmitri Mendeleev, but the Academy chose Moissan. Mendeleev died 18 days before him, in early 1907.","He was nominated 41 times from 1901 to 1906. He gave no Nobel lecture and died about two months after the prize ceremony.","Moissanite, a rare natural form of silicon carbide that he found in a meteorite from Arizona, is named after him; lab-made moissanite is sold as a diamond alternative."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"albert-a-michelson","name":"Albert A. Michelson","year":1907,"category":"physics","motivation":"for his optical precision instruments and the spectroscopic and metrological investigations carried out with their aid","tagline":"An immigrant boy from a gold-rush camp who learned to measure the world with light waves, from the metre to the size of a star.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9e/Albert_Abraham_Michelson2.jpg/330px-Albert_Abraham_Michelson2.jpg","birthCountry":"Poland","birthYear":1852,"deathYear":1931,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","technology","health","space"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["As a young Navy instructor, he built the rotating mirror for his first speed-of-light experiment for about ten dollars of his own money.","Passed over for a Naval Academy place, he took his case to President Grant, who had used up his ten special appointments. Michelson said his career began with an illegal act.","In 1907 he became the first American to win a science Nobel. The ceremony was cancelled because Sweden's King Oscar II had died two days earlier.","His 1926 speed-of-light result, 299,796 km per second, was within about 3.5 km per second of today's exact value of 299,792.458.","The LIGO detectors that first caught gravitational waves in 2015 are giant Michelson interferometers, with arms 4 km long; Michelson and Morley's 1887 arms were about 1.3 m."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"gabriel-lippmann","name":"Gabriel Lippmann","year":1908,"category":"physics","motivation":"for his method of reproducing colours photographically based on the phenomenon of interference","tagline":"He captured colour by trapping light waves in a photographic plate, and his electrometer recorded the first human electrocardiogram.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4b/Gabriel_Lippmann2.jpg","birthCountry":"Luxembourg","birthYear":1845,"deathYear":1921,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","technology","health","culture"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["The colour in his photographs comes from no dye or pigment. Microscopic layers of silver reflect the colours of the light that exposed them, for as long as the plate is intact.","A 2021 study estimated that his plates typically record 26 to 64 slices of the colour spectrum, against three for most photos: the earliest multispectral imaging method.","Willem Einthoven named the heartbeat's P, Q, R, S and T waves in 1895 while correcting traces made with a Lippmann capillary electrometer.","A Luxembourg street once nicknamed the Jews' lane was renamed for him in 1925. Under German occupation from 1940 to 1944 it was given a German name.","He was nominated for the Nobel Prize 23 times between 1901 and 1908, by Henri Poincaré and Henri Becquerel among others."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"ilya-mechnikov","name":"Ilya Mechnikov","year":1908,"category":"medicine","motivation":"in recognition of their work on immunity","tagline":"A zoologist who pushed thorns into starfish larvae and saw what others had missed: cells that swallow germs defend the body.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d0/Ilya_Mechnikov_nobel.jpg/330px-Ilya_Mechnikov_nobel.jpg","birthCountry":"Ukraine","birthYear":1845,"deathYear":1916,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He tested his idea that roaming cells guard the body by pushing tiny thorns into see-through starfish larvae. By the next morning, the cells had surrounded the thorns.","He was a zoologist, not a doctor. In Odessa his lack of a medical degree was held against him, and in 1888 he left Russia for the Pasteur Institute in Paris.","In 1892 he drank cholera germs to learn why some people fall ill and others don't. He stayed well, but a volunteer who repeated the test nearly died.","A 1904 public lecture in which he suggested that sour milk might slow ageing set off a yogurt craze in Europe and America.","He coined the word 'gerontology' for the scientific study of ageing."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"paul-ehrlich","name":"Paul Ehrlich","year":1908,"category":"medicine","motivation":"in recognition of their work on immunity","tagline":"He dreamed of 'magic bullets' that kill germs but spare the patient; his lab built one: Salvarsan, the first effective syphilis drug.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bf/Paul_Ehrlich_3.jpg/330px-Paul_Ehrlich_3.jpg","birthCountry":"Poland","birthYear":1854,"deathYear":1915,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He coined the terms 'chemotherapy' and 'magic bullet' for drugs that seek out a germ and leave the patient's own cells alone.","Salvarsan was compound 606 in his lab's series. It had been shelved as useless until his colleague Sahachiro Hata retested it in 1909.","Before Salvarsan went on general sale, his institute gave doctors about 65,000 doses free; by the end of 1910 more than 20,000 patients had been treated.","As a student and young doctor he used dyes to tell blood cells apart, and he named two kinds of immune cell: mast cells and eosinophils.","The Nazis stripped his name from a Frankfurt street because he was Jewish, and a 1935 appointee at his former institute had all his writings removed from its library."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"otto-wallach","name":"Otto Wallach","year":1910,"category":"chemistry","motivation":"in recognition of his services to organic chemistry and the chemical industry by his pioneer work in the field of alicyclic compounds","tagline":"He sorted out the tangled chemistry of plant scents, helping lay the scientific groundwork for today's perfume and flavor industries.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9c/Otto_Wallach_1910.jpg/330px-Otto_Wallach_1910.jpg","birthCountry":"Russia","birthYear":1847,"deathYear":1931,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","economy"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["His life's work began with a forgotten cupboard in Bonn: his mentor Kekulé pointed him to old bottles of essential oils and invited him to study them.","Chemists had named nearly a hundred 'different' terpenes after the plants they came from. Wallach showed they came down to about eight distinct compounds.","He never patented his discoveries. The 1910 Nobel presentation speech noted that he gave his findings to industry free of charge.","When he studied in Wöhler's Göttingen lab, the gas was shut off at 5 p.m., and work that ran late was finished by candlelight, with candles bought out of pocket.","World War I killed six of his assistants early in the fighting. In 1915 he gave up his Göttingen chair and the directorship of its chemical institute."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"paul-heyse","name":"Paul Heyse","year":1910,"category":"literature","motivation":"as a tribute to the consummate artistry, permeated with idealism, which he has demonstrated during his long productive career as a lyric poet, dramatist, novelist and writer of world-renowned short stories","tagline":"A master of the German novella who carried Italy's poets into German and, at 80, won the 1910 Nobel Prize in Literature.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b5/Portr%C3%A4t_des_Paul_Heyse_%281853%29_-_Adolf_Friedrich_Erdmann_von_Menzel_%28Museum_Georg_Sch%C3%A4fer%29.jpg/330px-Portr%C3%A4t_des_Paul_Heyse_%281853%29_-_Adolf_Friedrich_Erdmann_von_Menzel_%28Museum_Georg_Sch%C3%A4fer%29.jpg","birthCountry":"Germany","birthYear":1830,"deathYear":1914,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["culture"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He was 80 and too ill to travel when he won in 1910, so Germany's envoy in Stockholm spoke on his behalf at the Nobel banquet.","He was the first German writer of fiction and poetry to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Germans who won before him were a historian and a philosopher.","At 24 he was invited to Munich by King Maximilian II of Bavaria on a salary of 1,000 guilders a year, mainly to join the king's weekly evenings with scholars and poets.","When Bavaria's king cut off his friend Emanuel Geibel's pension over a poem in 1868, Heyse gave up his own royal salary in solidarity.","The composer Hugo Wolf set 46 of Heyse's German versions of Italian folk poems to music in his Italian Songbook (Italienisches Liederbuch), completed in 1896."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"alfred-fried","name":"Alfred Fried","year":1911,"category":"peace","motivation":"for his effort to expose and fight what he considers to be the main cause of war, namely, the anarchy in international relations","tagline":"A self-taught Viennese bookseller who argued that war would end only when nations built shared rules and institutions to replace anarchy.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Alfred_Hermann_Fried_nobel.jpg","birthCountry":"Austria","birthYear":1864,"deathYear":1921,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["peace","education"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He left school at 15 to work in a bookshop. Self-taught, he became what the Nobel Committee's chairman called probably the hardest-working pacifist writer of the previous 20 years.","In 1892 he and Bertha von Suttner founded the German Peace Society in Berlin. Its successor, the DFG-VK, still calls itself Germany's oldest peace organization.","The peace journal he founded in 1899, Die Friedens-Warte, survived both world wars and a move to Zürich in 1933. Its publisher issued a new volume as recently as 2023.","During the First World War, Austria accused him of treason for his pacifism. He spent the war in Switzerland and could not go home to Vienna until it ended.","Bertha von Suttner, the 1905 Peace Prize laureate and his longtime collaborator, was among those who nominated him for the prize in 1911."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"tobias-asser","name":"Tobias Asser","year":1911,"category":"peace","motivation":"for his role as co-founder of the Institut de droit international, initiator of the Conferences on International Private Law (Conférences de Droit international privé) at the Hague, and pioneer in the field of international legal relations","tagline":"He brought nations to The Hague to agree whose law applies when marriages, lawsuits and families cross borders.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ac/TMCasser.jpg","birthCountry":"the Netherlands","birthYear":1838,"deathYear":1913,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["peace","economy"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["Called the father of the Hague tradition of international law, he got 13 states to meet in The Hague in 1893, the start of an organisation that now has 95 members.","In 1902 he helped judge the first case ever heard by the Permanent Court of Arbitration, a US-Mexico dispute over an old Catholic fund for the Californias.","His great-grandfather wrote the 1796 petition for Dutch Jewish equality. His uncle became the first Jewish cabinet minister in the Netherlands in 1860.","The Nobel Committee's own adviser wrote that his field mattered less directly for peace than public international law. Asser still won, on his only nomination.","Long after his death, the Hague Conference he began adopted a 1961 treaty under which several million apostilles, certificates that let documents be used abroad, are issued yearly."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"robert-barany","name":"Robert Bárány","year":1914,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for his work on the physiology and pathology of the vestibular apparatus","tagline":"He turned a dizzy patient's complaint into the ear-water test that still shows doctors whether our balance organs work.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/52/Robert_B%C3%A1r%C3%A1ny_av_Lars_Emil_Finn.png/330px-Robert_B%C3%A1r%C3%A1ny_av_Lars_Emil_Finn.png","birthCountry":"Austria","birthYear":1876,"deathYear":1936,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["His breakthrough began when a patient said that ear-rinsing water that was too cold made him dizzy, and that very hot water did too.","He learned he had won the Nobel Prize while a prisoner of war in Russian Turkestan, and was later freed as an 'invalid' because of a knee left stiff by childhood illness.","One proposal to free him was to trade him for the Russian ballet star Vaslav Nijinsky. The swap never happened.","After the prize, his own Vienna faculty turned down a proposal to make him a professor. In 1917 he left for Uppsala, Sweden, and stayed for the rest of his life.","Once a laureate, he nominated Sigmund Freud for the Nobel Prize four years running, from 1917 to 1920."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"richard-willstatter","name":"Richard Willstätter","year":1915,"category":"chemistry","motivation":"for his researches on plant pigments, especially chlorophyll","tagline":"He revealed what chlorophyll, the green pigment behind photosynthesis, is made of, then quit in protest at antisemitism and fled the Nazis.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/26/Richard_Willst%C3%A4tter.jpg/330px-Richard_Willst%C3%A4tter.jpg","birthCountry":"Germany","birthYear":1872,"deathYear":1942,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["fundamental-science","health"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He compared chlorophyll from more than 200 kinds of plants and found the same two green pigments in all of them, in a ratio of about three to one.","He proved that magnesium is an essential part of chlorophyll, held at its core much as iron is held in the red pigment of our blood.","In 1915 he designed a three-layer gas-mask filter in about five weeks; some 30 million were in use by 1917.","Advised to get baptized to help his career, he refused. In 1924 he resigned his Munich chair in protest at antisemitism.","The day after Kristallnacht the Gestapo came to take him to Dachau. He fled to Switzerland in 1939, leaving his Nobel medal behind."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"fritz-haber","name":"Fritz Haber","year":1918,"category":"chemistry","motivation":"for the synthesis of ammonia from its elements","tagline":"He found a way to turn nitrogen in the air into fertilizer that now feeds about half of humanity, and he also pioneered poison-gas warfare.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/35/Portret_van_Professor_Fritz_Haber%2C_een_chemicus_uit_Duitsland_%28foto_1918-_1934%29%2C_SFA002023057.jpg/330px-Portret_van_Professor_Fritz_Haber%2C_een_chemicus_uit_Duitsland_%28foto_1918-_1934%29%2C_SFA002023057.jpg","birthCountry":"Poland","birthYear":1868,"deathYear":1934,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["food","economy","environment","peace","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["About half of all people alive today eat food grown with nitrogen made by the Haber-Bosch process.","In 1909 his tabletop apparatus made ammonia from the nitrogen in air; by 1913 BASF had built the first ammonia factory on his method.","The same chemistry supplied Germany's World War I explosives, and Haber personally oversaw the first large poison-gas attack, at Ypres in 1915.","Nazi law let him keep his post as a World War I veteran, but in 1933 he resigned rather than fire his Jewish staff.","Chaim Weizmann modeled the institute that became the Weizmann Institute of Science on Haber's Berlin institute."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"albert-einstein","name":"Albert Einstein","year":1921,"category":"physics","motivation":"for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect","tagline":"He showed that light comes in packets and that gravity is curved space and time, ideas now built into solar cells, lasers and GPS.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3e/Einstein_1921_by_F_Schmutzer_-_restoration.jpg/330px-Einstein_1921_by_F_Schmutzer_-_restoration.jpg","birthCountry":"Germany","birthYear":1879,"deathYear":1955,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["fundamental-science","technology","economy","environment","peace","human-rights"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["His Nobel Prize singled out his law of how light knocks electrons out of metal, not relativity. He was first nominated in 1910 and received the prize in 1922.","Clocks on GPS satellites run fast by about 38 millionths of a second a day, as relativity predicts, so they are set to tick slower before launch.","In 1933 prominent Americans set up a relief group for Hitler's victims at his request. It grew into the International Rescue Committee.","In 1933 the Nazis raided his homes, seized his bank account and property, and burned his book on relativity.","Israel offered him its presidency in 1952, and he declined. He left his papers and literary rights to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which he helped found."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"niels-bohr","name":"Niels Bohr","year":1922,"category":"physics","motivation":"for his services in the investigation of the structure of atoms and of the radiation emanating from them","tagline":"His 1913 model of the atom helped launch quantum physics; he sheltered refugee scientists and pleaded for an open world after the bomb.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6d/Niels_Bohr.jpg/330px-Niels_Bohr.jpg","birthCountry":"Denmark","birthYear":1885,"deathYear":1962,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["fundamental-science","technology","economy","energy","peace"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["In 1913 his atomic model let him calculate a key number in hydrogen's light spectrum from basic constants, matching experiment as closely as the data of the day allowed.","Between 1916 and 1961, 444 scientists from 35 countries came to Copenhagen to work with him for a month or longer.","After 1933 his institute became a refuge for physicists, mostly Jewish, forced out of Nazi Germany.","In 1939 he worked out that the rare isotope uranium-235 is what splits under slow neutrons, a key step toward the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.","Facing arrest in 1943, he fled to Sweden and urged its king to shelter Denmark's Jews; about 7,200 were soon ferried to safety."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"otto-meyerhof","name":"Otto Meyerhof","year":1922,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for his discovery of the fixed relationship between the consumption of oxygen and the metabolism of lactic acid in the muscle","tagline":"He showed how working muscles get energy from sugar and helped map how cells break it down, then twice fled the Nazis.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/05/Otto_Fritz_Meyerhof.jpg","birthCountry":"Germany","birthYear":1884,"deathYear":1951,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["fundamental-science","health"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He trained as a doctor and wrote his thesis on psychiatry before his friend Otto Warburg drew him into the chemistry of living cells.","Five years after World War I, he shared the prize with Britain's A.V. Hill; the presenter said great advances do not depend on dividing people into nations.","Kiel's faculty denied him a new chair of physiological chemistry, which Germany's national biography blames on antisemitism; even his Nobel Prize won him no promotion there.","Four scientists who worked in his laboratory in the 1930s later won Nobel Prizes: Fritz Lipmann, Severo Ochoa, George Wald and André Lwoff.","In 1938 he slipped out of Nazi Germany without telling colleagues, leaving his research records behind; in 1940 he fled again, across the Pyrenees."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"gustav-hertz","name":"Gustav Hertz","year":1925,"category":"physics","motivation":"for their discovery of the laws governing the impact of an electron upon an atom","tagline":"His electron-collision experiment with James Franck proved that atoms take in energy only in fixed steps, a pillar of quantum physics.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7a/Prof._Gustav_Herz_LCCN2014709678.jpg/330px-Prof._Gustav_Herz_LCCN2014709678.jpg","birthCountry":"Germany","birthYear":1887,"deathYear":1975,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","technology","economy","energy","peace"],"disputed":true,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["The Franck-Hertz experiment found that electrons hand energy to mercury atoms only in 4.9-electron-volt chunks, matching the energy of mercury's ultraviolet glow at 254 nm.","His uncle Heinrich Hertz gave his name to the unit of frequency. Under the Nazis, some physicists proposed in 1939 renaming the unit the 'helmholtz'.","He and his friend James Franck were awarded the 1925 physics prize, but received it a year late, in 1926.","In 1932 he separated the isotopes of neon by passing the gas through a chain of diffusion stages, an approach later scaled up to more than a thousand stages to enrich uranium.","A single Jewish-born grandfather, baptized at age seven in 1834, was enough for the Nazi ministry to move against his right to examine students in 1934."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"james-franck","name":"James Franck","year":1925,"category":"physics","motivation":"for their discovery of the laws governing the impact of an electron upon an atom","tagline":"He helped show that atoms take in energy in fixed packets, quit his post over Nazi racial laws and warned against a surprise atomic attack.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6c/James_Franck.jpg/330px-James_Franck.jpg","birthCountry":"Germany","birthYear":1882,"deathYear":1964,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["fundamental-science","technology","economy","peace"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["At 13 he went alone to Hamburg's physics laboratory to have his broken arm X-rayed; he later recalled it as the first diagnostic X-ray taken in the city.","He and Gustav Hertz at first misread their famous 4.9-volt result and never mentioned Bohr's atomic theory in their paper; Franck later called that oversight incomprehensible.","In April 1933 he became the first German academic to resign in protest against the new Nazi law purging Jews from the civil service, though his war service exempted him.","In 1940 George de Hevesy dissolved Franck's Nobel medal in acid in Copenhagen to hide it from the Nazis; the gold was recovered and recast after the war.","The 1945 Franck Report, from a committee he chaired, urged the US to demonstrate the atomic bomb on an uninhabited area instead of using it on Japan without warning."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"henri-bergson","name":"Henri Bergson","year":1927,"category":"literature","motivation":"in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented","tagline":"A philosopher of lived time and free will who packed lecture halls, then stood with persecuted Jews rather than accept Vichy's exemption.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9d/Henri_Bergson_02.jpg/330px-Henri_Bergson_02.jpg","birthCountry":"France","birthYear":1859,"deathYear":1941,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["culture","education","peace"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["His 1913 lectures at Columbia University in New York drew such crowds that they were said to have caused the first traffic jam on Broadway.","At his Collège de France lectures, an average of about 700 people competed for space in a room built for 375.","As a teenager he won first prize in mathematics in France's national Concours général, and his solution to a problem posed by Pascal was published.","When Einstein's 1921 physics prize was presented in 1922, the Nobel committee chairman told the audience that Bergson had disputed relativity.","In 1940 the Vichy regime offered to exempt him from its anti-Jewish laws. He refused and, old and ill, went in person to register as Jewish."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"karl-landsteiner","name":"Karl Landsteiner","year":1930,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for his discovery of human blood groups","tagline":"He discovered the human blood groups, the key to turning blood transfusion from a deadly gamble into routine, life-saving medicine.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/Karl_Landsteiner_nobel.jpg","birthCountry":"Austria","birthYear":1868,"deathYear":1943,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He found the blood groups in 1901 by mixing his own blood with blood from colleagues in his Vienna lab.","World Blood Donor Day is held every 14 June because that is Landsteiner's birthday.","He also co-discovered the Rh factor and, with Erwin Popper, showed that polio is caused by a virus.","In 1911 the University of Vienna made him a professor, but without a salary.","He was still doing experiments at 75 when he suffered a fatal heart attack in his laboratory in 1943."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"otto-warburg","name":"Otto Warburg","year":1931,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for his discovery of the nature and mode of action of the respiratory enzyme","tagline":"He found the iron enzyme that lets cells use oxygen and spotted cancer's hunger for sugar, the clue behind PET cancer scans.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c1/Otto_Warburg.jpg","birthCountry":"Germany","birthYear":1883,"deathYear":1970,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["In 1918, at his mother's request, the family friend Albert Einstein wrote urging him to leave the army and return to research. He did.","The Nobel archive lists 51 nominations for him. Fellow laureate Otto Meyerhof nominated him six times.","Hospital FDG-PET cancer scans work because tumors gulp sugar, the habit Warburg measured in thin slices of tumor in the 1920s.","Nazi law classed him as half-Jewish, yet apart from a three-week removal in 1941 he led his institute through the war. Historians still debate why.","The name 'Warburg effect' for cancer's sugar habit was coined by the biochemist Efraim Racker in 1972, two years after Warburg died."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"otto-loewi","name":"Otto Loewi","year":1936,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discoveries relating to chemical transmission of nerve impulses","tagline":"With two frog hearts he proved that nerves signal with chemicals, a basis for many medicines, before the Nazis drove him from Austria.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/99/Otto_Loewi_nobel.jpg","birthCountry":"Germany","birthYear":1873,"deathYear":1961,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["health","fundamental-science","economy"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["By his own account, the idea for his Nobel experiment came to him in his sleep. He could not read the notes he scribbled, but the idea returned the next night.","As Nazi Germany took over Austria in March 1938, he and two of his sons were arrested. He could leave only after being forced to send his Nobel money to a Nazi-controlled bank.","Arriving in New York in 1940, he saw that a doctor's certificate in his papers called him senile and unable to earn a living. The immigration officer ignored it and let him in.","He refused to be baptized to help his career, a step many Jewish officials in Austria took, and the Graz medical faculty resisted his appointment in 1909.","His famous experiment was hard to repeat. One later explanation: the Hungarian frogs he used have hearts with little of the enzyme that destroys the nerve's chemical signal."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"george-de-hevesy","name":"George de Hevesy","year":1943,"category":"chemistry","motivation":"for his work on the use of isotopes as tracers in the study of chemical processes","tagline":"He learned to track atoms by their radiation, pioneering the tracer method behind nuclear medicine scans and treatments.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b4/George_de_Hevesy.jpg/330px-George_de_Hevesy.jpg","birthCountry":"Hungary","birthYear":1885,"deathYear":1966,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["health","fundamental-science","technology"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["His method grew out of failure: after nearly two years trying to separate radium D from lead, he used the inseparable radioactive lead to track ordinary lead.","As German troops entered Copenhagen in 1940, he dissolved the gold Nobel medals of Max von Laue and James Franck in acid. After the war the gold went into new medals.","Hafnium, the element he found with Dirk Coster in 1923, is named after Hafnia, the Latin name for Copenhagen.","NobelPrize.org's archive lists 32 nominations for him, the first in 1924. His 1943 chemistry prize was announced only in November 1944.","Using water spiked with heavy water, his experiments found that an average water molecule stays in the human body for about 13.5 days."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"otto-stern","name":"Otto Stern","year":1943,"category":"physics","motivation":"for his contribution to the development of the molecular ray method and his discovery of the magnetic moment of the proton","tagline":"His beams of atoms showed quantum rules at work and seeded the magnetic resonance behind MRI and the atomic clocks behind GPS.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Otto_Stern.jpg","birthCountry":"Poland","birthYear":1888,"deathYear":1969,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["fundamental-science","health","technology"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["The Nobel archive lists 82 nominations for him, more than for Einstein or Planck. He won the 1943 physics prize, announced in November 1944.","Early in the Stern-Gerlach experiment, he later recalled, sulfur from his cheap cigars turned an invisible silver trace black, like developing a photo.","When Nazi authorities ordered Einstein's portrait out of his Hamburg office in 1933, he took it home; it later hung in his study in Berkeley.","His biographers count about 20 Nobel Prizes for work built on his molecular beam method, among them prizes for the maser, NMR and atomic clocks.","After the war he refused the German pension he was owed, a protest against Nazism."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"isidor-isaac-rabi","name":"Isidor Isaac Rabi","year":1944,"category":"physics","motivation":"for his resonance method for recording the magnetic properties of atomic nuclei","tagline":"He tuned radio waves to the spin of atomic nuclei, the idea behind MRI scanners, NMR chemistry and the atomic clocks that time GPS.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/ba/II_Rabi.jpg/330px-II_Rabi.jpg","birthCountry":"Poland","birthYear":1898,"deathYear":1988,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","health","technology","economy","peace"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["At home he was Izzy; when his mother enrolled him in school, the official wrote down Isidor, and the name stuck.","For his bar mitzvah, the young science fan gave a speech in Yiddish on how an electric light works.","After his 1919 chemistry degree he got no job offers, at a time when Jews were largely shut out of chemistry jobs, and spent about three years in dull work, including bookkeeping.","In 1945 he suggested his resonance method could run a clock. The second is now defined by cesium atoms, and every GPS satellite carries atomic clocks.","In 1949 he and Enrico Fermi urged the US not to build the hydrogen bomb, warning that such a weapon endangered humanity as a whole."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"joseph-erlanger","name":"Joseph Erlanger","year":1944,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discoveries relating to the highly differentiated functions of single nerve fibres","tagline":"He timed signals racing along nerves and found thick fibers fast and thin ones slow, a key to how we feel touch and pain.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Joseph_Erlanger_nobel.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1874,"deathYear":1965,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["When Western Electric refused to sell them a cathode-ray tube in 1921, he and Herbert Gasser built their own, using a laboratory distillation flask as the tube.","He was nominated for the Nobel Prize 17 times from 1935 to 1944. Later he nominated his St. Louis colleagues Carl and Gerty Cori, who won in 1947.","As a student he learned to box from the celebrated fighter Jim Corbett, and in later life he tuned in to televised boxing every Wednesday night.","When an antivivisectionist freed his laboratory dogs from their cages, all of them found their own way back to the lab by nightfall.","His father came from Buchau in Württemberg, the small German town that was also the ancestral home of Albert Einstein's family."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"ernst-b-chain","name":"Ernst B. Chain","year":1945,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for the discovery of penicillin and its curative effect in various infectious diseases","tagline":"A refugee chemist who fled Nazi Berlin, he helped purify penicillin and prove it could cure deadly infections.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ae/Ernst_Boris_Chain_1945.jpg","birthCountry":"Germany","birthYear":1906,"deathYear":1979,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["health","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He landed in England on 2 April 1933, weeks after Hitler took power, reportedly with £10; his mother and sister stayed in Berlin and were killed in the Holocaust.","Chain was first author of the August 1940 Lancet paper showing that concentrated penicillin saved mice from deadly bacterial infections.","Before penicillin was ever given to a patient, Chain and Edward Abraham described a bacterial enzyme that destroys it, an early warning of drug resistance.","As a young man he gave piano recitals and wrote music criticism for a Berlin newspaper, and seriously weighed a concert career before choosing chemistry.","In 1965 he gave a talk titled 'Why I am a Jew' at a World Jewish Congress conference, and he gave many lecture fees to a London synagogue and Jewish charities."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"wolfgang-pauli","name":"Wolfgang Pauli","year":1945,"category":"physics","motivation":"for the discovery of the Exclusion Principle, also called the Pauli Principle","tagline":"His exclusion principle helps explain why atoms have shells, chemistry works and matter holds its shape; he also predicted the neutrino.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/50/ETH-BIB-Pauli%2C_Wolfgang.tif/330px-ETH-BIB-Pauli%2C_Wolfgang.tif.jpg","birthCountry":"Austria","birthYear":1900,"deathYear":1958,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["fundamental-science","technology","economy"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["As a student he wrote a 237-page review of relativity theory, published in 1921. Einstein wrote that readers might not believe its author was only 21.","Einstein nominated him for the 1945 Nobel Prize and, at a celebration in Princeton, called Pauli his intellectual successor.","In 1930 he proposed the neutrino, a ghostly particle he feared could never be detected. It was found in 1956, two years before his death.","Switzerland refused him citizenship twice; in 1940 a police chief ruled him not assimilated enough. His German passport classed him as 75% Jewish.","In 1916, at about 16, he learned from his visiting grandmother that the family name had been Pascheles and that his father was born Jewish."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"hermann-j-muller","name":"Hermann J. Muller","year":1946,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for the discovery of the production of mutations by means of X-ray irradiation","tagline":"He proved that X-rays can change genes, giving science mutations on demand, then warned the world to protect its genes from radiation.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/11/HJ_Muller_1952.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1890,"deathYear":1967,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","food","economy","health","peace"],"disputed":true,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["His X-ray experiments made fruit flies mutate about 150 times more often than normal, giving scientists a way to create mutations on demand.","He went to Columbia on a scholarship and spent summers as a bank runner and hotel clerk; the clerk job paid $25 a month plus board for 14-hour days.","In December 1936 he called Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko a fraud at a Moscow meeting of about 3,000 people, then left the USSR by volunteering in Spain's civil war.","A 1950 letter from Muller encouraged US entomologists to sterilize screwworms with radiation, a key step toward the sterile-fly method that kept the pest out of the US for decades.","He was one of 11 signers of the 1955 Russell-Einstein Manifesto against nuclear war, alongside Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"gerty-cori","name":"Gerty Cori","year":1947,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discovery of the course of the catalytic conversion of glycogen","tagline":"She showed how the body stores and releases sugar, and with her husband traced a deadly childhood disease to one missing enzyme.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d6/Gerty_Theresa_Cori.jpg/330px-Gerty_Theresa_Cori.jpg","birthCountry":"Czech Republic","birthYear":1896,"deathYear":1957,"gender":"female","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science","womens-rights"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["In 1947 she became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize in science.","Carl Cori's family feared her Jewish background would hurt his career. She converted to Catholicism, yet antisemitism still helped drive the couple out of Europe in 1922.","At Washington University she started as a research associate, reportedly paid one-tenth of her husband's salary, though the two worked as equals in the lab.","In 1952 she and Carl Cori showed that von Gierke disease comes from one missing liver enzyme, among the first diseases traced to a specific enzyme defect.","Six scientists mentored by Gerty and Carl Cori went on to win Nobel Prizes of their own."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"tadeus-reichstein","name":"Tadeus Reichstein","year":1950,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discoveries relating to the hormones of the adrenal cortex, their structure and biological effects","tagline":"He helped decode the adrenal hormones behind cortisone and Addison's treatment, and found the first practical way to mass-produce vitamin C.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4d/Thadeus_Reichstein_ETH-Bib_Portr_10137.jpg/330px-Thadeus_Reichstein_ETH-Bib_Portr_10137.jpg","birthCountry":"Poland","birthYear":1897,"deathYear":1996,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["health","fundamental-science","food"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["At about eight he saw pogrom victims in the streets of Kiev; his father, fearing for the children, moved the family to Switzerland.","A drowned fruit fly helped: bacteria on its leg turned sorbitol into sorbose, the key step in his vitamin C process, which industry still builds on.","His team pulled 29 closely related steroids out of cattle adrenal glands, where they exist in tiny traces; only six had hormone activity, cortisone among them.","In the late 1930s a Polish-born Jew could hardly get a full professorship in Switzerland; only the University of Basel offered him a chair, in 1938.","In retirement he turned mostly to ferns, publishing more than 100 papers on them, and kept up his research into his nineties. He died at 99."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"felix-bloch","name":"Felix Bloch","year":1952,"category":"physics","motivation":"for their development of new methods for nuclear magnetic precision measurements and discoveries in connection therewith","tagline":"He found a way to pick up the faint magnetic signals of atomic nuclei, the physics behind NMR chemistry and hospital MRI scanners.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Felix_Bloch%2C_Stanford_University.jpg","birthCountry":"Switzerland","birthYear":1905,"deathYear":1983,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["health","fundamental-science","technology","economy"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["His 1928 doctoral thesis, written as Werner Heisenberg's first graduate student, laid the basis for the band theory of solids, which explains semiconductors.","In 1933 a Nazi law forced him out of his post at Leipzig. He believed Stanford found him through a list of scholars displaced by antisemitism and Nazism.","His first nuclear magnetic signals came from protons in ordinary water. Amplified by radio electronics, such signals could even be played through a loudspeaker.","He won Stanford University's first Nobel Prize, and in 1954 he became the first Director-General of CERN, Europe's particle physics laboratory.","In 2025, the year he would have turned 120, his family gave his Nobel medal to CERN, where it is displayed beside Wolfgang Pauli's."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"selman-a-waksman","name":"Selman A. Waksman","year":1952,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for his discovery of streptomycin, the first antibiotic effective against tuberculosis","tagline":"His systematic hunt through soil microbes produced streptomycin, the first drug that could cure tuberculosis.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/33/Selman_Waksman_NYWTS.jpg/330px-Selman_Waksman_NYWTS.jpg","birthCountry":"Ukraine","birthYear":1888,"deathYear":1973,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["Denied a Russian university place because he was Jewish, he emigrated in 1910, worked on a cousin's New Jersey farm and studied agriculture at Rutgers.","His lab tested about 10,000 soil microbes before finding streptomycin, the first drug that could cure tuberculosis.","He gave the word 'antibiotic' its modern meaning: a substance made by one microbe that stops or kills other microbes.","Britain's 1948 streptomycin trial is often described as the first randomized controlled trial: random numbers decided which patients got the scarce drug.","His student Albert Schatz sued him in 1950 and won legal recognition as streptomycin's co-discoverer; the 1952 Nobel went to Waksman alone."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"fritz-lipmann","name":"Fritz Lipmann","year":1953,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for his discovery of co-enzyme A and its importance for intermediary metabolism","tagline":"Pushed out of Europe by Nazism, he found coenzyme A, the molecular forklift cells use to turn food into energy and new parts.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a3/Portrait_of_Fritz_Albert_Lipmann_%281899-1986%29%2C_Biochemist_%282551001689%29.jpg/330px-Portrait_of_Fritz_Albert_Lipmann_%281899-1986%29%2C_Biochemist_%282551001689%29.jpg","birthCountry":"Russia","birthYear":1899,"deathYear":1986,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["fundamental-science","health"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["The “A” in coenzyme A stands for “activation of acetate”, the chemical step Lipmann was chasing when his team found the molecule in pigeon liver extracts.","His 1941 paper introduced the squiggle (~P) that biochemistry textbooks have long used to mark “energy-rich” phosphate bonds, such as those in ATP.","In Berlin around 1930, as uniformed Nazis began appearing on the streets, Lipmann was once beaten up. He and his future wife saw that they would have to leave Germany.","He often said his 1941 theory of how cells pass energy around deserved the Nobel more than coenzyme A, the discovery it actually honoured.","Peter Rona, whose three-month Berlin biochemistry course helped turn Lipmann toward research, taught three future Nobel laureates: Ernst Chain, Hans Krebs and Lipmann."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"hans-krebs","name":"Hans Krebs","year":1953,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for his discovery of the citric acid cycle","tagline":"Driven out of Nazi Germany, he mapped the chemical cycle that turns food into energy in almost every oxygen-breathing cell.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/ba/Hans_Adolf_Krebs.jpg/330px-Hans_Adolf_Krebs.jpg","birthCountry":"Germany","birthYear":1900,"deathYear":1981,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["fundamental-science","health","food"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["Nature turned down his 1937 paper announcing the citric acid cycle because of a backlog of letters, so he sent a longer version to the Dutch journal Enzymologia.","A July 1933 warning of his final dismissal from the University of Freiburg was signed by its rector, the philosopher Martin Heidegger.","When he left Germany in 1933 he took 16 wooden boxes of lab apparatus with him, and within a month he was running experiments again in Cambridge.","In 1934 Cambridge gave him a junior teaching post, making him the first German refugee scientist in England to get a regular university job.","In 2015 his Nobel medal sold for £225,000, and the money went to a new trust that supports refugee scientists and student researchers."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"max-born","name":"Max Born","year":1954,"category":"physics","motivation":"for his fundamental research in quantum mechanics, especially for his statistical interpretation of the wavefunction","tagline":"He showed that quantum physics speaks in probabilities, then fled Nazi Germany and spent his last years warning against nuclear war.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f7/Max_Born.jpg/330px-Max_Born.jpg","birthCountry":"Poland","birthYear":1882,"deathYear":1970,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["fundamental-science","technology","economy","peace"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["His Nobel-winning rule, that squaring a quantum wave gives the odds of each possible outcome, first appeared in a footnote he added to a 1926 paper.","The equation pq − qp = h/2πi, which he found in 1925 while building matrix mechanics, is carved on his gravestone in Göttingen.","In 1933 the Nazis put him on forced leave for his Jewish descent; in 1938 they took his citizenship, and Göttingen then cancelled his doctorate.","Heisenberg alone won the 1932 prize for quantum mechanics, which Born built with him and Pascual Jordan; Born's own Nobel came only in 1954.","The singer and actress Olivia Newton-John was his granddaughter."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"boris-pasternak","name":"Boris Pasternak","year":1958,"category":"literature","motivation":"for his important achievement both in contemporary lyrical poetry and in the field of the great Russian epic tradition","tagline":"A poet who stayed in Stalin's Russia, wrote Doctor Zhivago, and was forced by his own government to turn down the Nobel Prize.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/55/Boris_Pasternak_1958_photo.jpg/330px-Boris_Pasternak_1958_photo.jpg","birthCountry":"Russia","birthYear":1890,"deathYear":1960,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["culture","human-rights"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["A quota on Jewish pupils kept him out of a Moscow state school for a year. He later graduated with a gold medal, which let Jewish students avoid a 3% university quota.","He accepted the 1958 Nobel Prize by telegram. Four days later, under pressure from Soviet authorities, he sent a second telegram turning it down.","The CIA secretly printed the first Russian-language edition of Doctor Zhivago and handed copies to Soviet visitors at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair.","Bill Mauldin won the 1959 Pulitzer Prize for a cartoon imagining Pasternak in a Soviet labor camp, asking a fellow prisoner what his crime was.","His son Yevgeny finally collected the Nobel medal in Stockholm in December 1989, 31 years after the prize was awarded."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"igor-y-tamm","name":"Igor Y. Tamm","year":1958,"category":"physics","motivation":"for the discovery and the interpretation of the Cherenkov effect","tagline":"He explained the blue glow of particles outrunning light in water, a key to modern detectors, and co-proposed the tokamak for fusion.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Igor_Tamm.jpg","birthCountry":"Russia","birthYear":1895,"deathYear":1971,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","technology","energy","health","education","economy"],"disputed":true,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["With Ilya Frank he explained the blue glow given off when particles outrun light in water. Detectors built on that light caught the neutrino clues behind the 2015 physics Nobel.","In the early 1950s he and his student Andrei Sakharov proposed the tokamak, a doughnut-shaped magnetic bottle adopted worldwide as the most promising design for magnetic fusion.","A family history says his father, an engineer in Elisavetgrad, once walked alone into an anti-Jewish pogrom mob armed only with a cane and drove it off.","At the secret H-bomb center in 1951 he and two colleagues openly protested when a devout Jewish mathematician, ordained a rabbi at 15, was ordered out within 24 hours.","A paralysed diaphragm kept him on a breathing machine for his last three years, yet he kept doing physics, moving between one machine at his bed and one at his desk."],"verification":"flagged"},{"slug":"il-ja-m-frank","name":"Il´ja M. Frank","year":1958,"category":"physics","motivation":"for the discovery and the interpretation of the Cherenkov effect","tagline":"He helped explain the blue glow made when particles outrun light in water, turning a faint curiosity into a tool for physics and medicine.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8d/Ilya_Frank.jpg","birthCountry":"Russia","birthYear":1908,"deathYear":1990,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","technology","health","energy"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["With Igor Tamm he explained in 1937 why fast electrons make water glow blue: they outrun light, which in water travels at only about 75% of its speed in a vacuum.","On a 1930s cosmic-ray expedition to Mount Elbrus, his son writes, he and his future co-laureate Pavel Cherenkov climbed both of its summits in a single day.","He founded the neutron physics laboratory at Dubna's Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in 1957 and led it until 1988. It now bears his name.","In 1973 he signed an Academy letter condemning Andrei Sakharov. After Sakharov died he publicly asked forgiveness, one of only two signers reported to have apologized.","In Stockholm in 1958, he recalled, photographers took the three Soviet laureates to the zoo to shoot them in front of polar bears, as if bears were part of Russian life."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"joshua-lederberg","name":"Joshua Lederberg","year":1958,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for his discoveries concerning genetic recombination and the organization of the genetic material of bacteria","tagline":"He showed that bacteria swap genes, opening the way to genetic engineering and to understanding how germs share drug resistance.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0f/Joshua_Lederberg_crop.jpg/330px-Joshua_Lederberg_crop.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1925,"deathYear":2008,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science","technology","economy","space","peace"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He won a Nobel Prize at 33. The key experiment, showing that bacteria swap genes, took him about six weeks in 1946, on leave from medical school to work at Yale.","He coined the word plasmid in 1952. Plasmids later became the carriers used to put genes for human proteins, such as insulin, into bacteria.","He gave his Nobel gold medal to the University of Wisconsin, to thank it for supporting the research the prize honored.","Worried that spacecraft could carry germs between worlds, he pushed for sterilizing probes, and helped design instruments to look for life on Mars.","He advised nine US presidential administrations and co-chaired the 1992 report that put emerging infections on the public-health agenda."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"arthur-kornberg","name":"Arthur Kornberg","year":1959,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discovery of the mechanisms in the biological synthesis of ribonucleic acid and deoxyribonucleic acid","tagline":"He found DNA polymerase, the first known enzyme that copies DNA, and his lab's enzymes became tools of genetic engineering.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/97/Arthur_Kornberg_1969_B.jpg/330px-Arthur_Kornberg_1969_B.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1918,"deathYear":2007,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","health","economy"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["By his own account, Rochester's medical school took him in 1937 under a quota of two Jewish students. In 1999 the university named a research building after him.","His first research paper, in 1942, grew out of a mild jaundice he had himself. It got him moved from a Coast Guard ship to the National Institutes of Health.","The journal that published his DNA polymerase papers first rejected them. They appeared in 1958, a year before he won the Nobel Prize.","He and his son Roger both won Nobel Prizes: Arthur in 1959 for how cells copy DNA, Roger in 2006 for how cells read their genes.","In 1967 his team made infectious virus DNA in a test tube. President Johnson hailed it as creating life, a label Kornberg disliked."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"emilio-segre","name":"Emilio Segrè","year":1959,"category":"physics","motivation":"for their discovery of the antiproton","tagline":"A refugee from Fascist Italy's racial laws who helped find the proton's antimatter twin and an isotope used in millions of medical scans.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/41/Segre.jpg/330px-Segre.jpg","birthCountry":"Italy","birthYear":1905,"deathYear":1989,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["health","fundamental-science","peace"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He co-discovered technetium, the first element made artificially. A form of it that he found with Glenn Seaborg, technetium-99m, is used in about 80% of nuclear imaging scans.","Visiting Berkeley in 1938, he lost his Italian professorship to the racial laws. When his new boss learned he could not go home, he cut his pay from $300 to $116 a month.","His mother was seized in the Nazi roundup of Rome's Jews on 16 October 1943 and died at Auschwitz a week later. He learned of her capture from Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos.","His maternal grandfather, the architect Marco Treves, helped design the Florence synagogue, built around 1882.","He scattered a tiny sample of technetium, the element he co-discovered, on his father's grave in Rome. He noted that its radioactivity would last longer than any monument."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"donald-a-glaser","name":"Donald A. Glaser","year":1960,"category":"physics","motivation":"for the invention of the bubble chamber","tagline":"His bubble chamber let physicists see the paths of invisible particles, and he later co-founded Cetus, often called the first biotech firm.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/10/Donald_Glaser.jpg/330px-Donald_Glaser.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1926,"deathYear":2013,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","technology","health","economy"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["His first bubble chamber held just a few cubic centimeters of ether, about the size of his thumb. The invention won him the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physics at age 34.","He called the story that beer bubbles inspired him a myth. He did test hot beer near a radioactive source; the physics building reeked, and his teetotal chairman nearly fired him.","In first or second grade, his principal urged sending him to a school for slow learners. His mother had his IQ tested instead, and the school dropped the idea.","At the 1960 Nobel banquet he wore a white vest lent by 1951 laureate Edwin McMillan. Emilio Segrè had worn the same vest the year before.","In 1971 he co-founded Cetus, often called the first biotech company. PCR, the DNA-copying method, was invented there, though he said he had no part in inventing it."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"melvin-calvin","name":"Melvin Calvin","year":1961,"category":"chemistry","motivation":"for his research on the carbon dioxide assimilation in plants","tagline":"The son of a Jewish immigrant, he led the team that traced how plants turn air, water and sunlight into sugar.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/04/Melvin_Calvin.jpg/330px-Melvin_Calvin.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1911,"deathYear":1997,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","food","energy"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["His father said immigration authorities created the surname Calvin from his birthplace, Kalvaria, now in Lithuania.","At the Michigan College of Mining and Technology he was the school's first chemistry major.","In 1937 he became the first person without a Berkeley degree hired by Berkeley's chemistry department in more than 25 years.","His team fed algae radioactive carbon dioxide for mere seconds, in some runs less than half a second, then found where the carbon went as dark spots on film.","A heart attack struck him at 38 in 1949. He gave up cigarettes, shed 50 pounds and stayed at work for nearly 50 more years."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"robert-hofstadter","name":"Robert Hofstadter","year":1961,"category":"physics","motivation":"for his pioneering studies of electron scattering in atomic nuclei and for his thereby achieved discoveries concerning the structure of the nucleons","tagline":"He bounced electrons off atomic nuclei to show that protons have size and structure; his crystal detector became nuclear medicine's eye.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Robert_Hofstadter.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1915,"deathYear":1990,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","health","technology","space"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["To position his first 2.5-ton magnet precisely, he mounted it on a twin 40-mm anti-aircraft gun mount lent by the U.S. Navy.","His first measurement of the proton's radius, published in 1955, gave 0.74 trillionths of a millimetre. Today's best value, 0.84, lies within his margin of error.","He said his most important contribution was not his Nobel work but his 1948-50 finding that thallium-doped sodium iodide crystals detect and measure gamma rays superbly.","In 1954 he suggested Stanford build a far bigger electron accelerator. The idea led to SLAC's two-mile machine, which reached 20 billion electron volts in 1967.","His son, Douglas Hofstadter, won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction for the book Gödel, Escher, Bach."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"lev-landau","name":"Lev Landau","year":1962,"category":"physics","motivation":"for his pioneering theories for condensed matter, especially liquid helium","tagline":"He explained why liquid helium flows without friction, and his ideas and textbooks became the working language of condensed-matter physics.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0b/Landau.jpg/330px-Landau.jpg","birthCountry":"Azerbaijan","birthYear":1908,"deathYear":1968,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","education","technology","economy"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He entered Baku University at 14 and graduated from Leningrad University at 19.","Arrested in April 1938 during Stalin's Great Terror, he spent a year in an NKVD prison. The physicist Pyotr Kapitsa's appeals to Soviet leaders got him out.","Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli and Werner Heisenberg all nominated him for the Nobel Prize, which he won alone in 1962.","Only 43 people passed his famously hard 'theoretical minimum' exams between 1934 and 1961. Seven of his students became full members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.","A car crash in January 1962 left him unconscious for weeks and ended his research. Sweden's ambassador handed him the Nobel Prize in Moscow."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"max-f-perutz","name":"Max F. Perutz","year":1962,"category":"chemistry","motivation":"for their studies of the structures of globular proteins","tagline":"He spent 22 years on the first 3D picture of hemoglobin, then showed how the blood protein picks up and delivers oxygen.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/Max_Perutz.jpg","birthCountry":"Austria","birthYear":1914,"deathYear":2002,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["fundamental-science","health"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["Colleagues laughed in 1937 when he said he would solve hemoglobin's structure. The first 3D picture took 22 years and appeared in 1959.","Interned as an 'enemy alien' in 1940, he was shipped to a camp in Canada, where he set up a camp university taught by fellow internees.","In World War II he tested pykrete, a frozen mix of ice and wood pulp, for a secret plan to build an aircraft carrier out of ice.","Watson and Crick found DNA's double helix in the small research unit he led; in 1962 its scientists won two Nobel Prizes.","At about 80 he turned from hemoglobin to Huntington's disease, studying how long runs of glutamine make proteins clump together."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"eugene-wigner","name":"Eugene Wigner","year":1963,"category":"physics","motivation":"for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles","tagline":"Used the mathematics of symmetry to decode atoms and nuclei, then led the design of the first large nuclear reactors, for war and peace.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Wigner.jpg","birthCountry":"Hungary","birthYear":1902,"deathYear":1995,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["fundamental-science","energy","technology","peace"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He and John von Neumann went to the same Budapest high school a year apart and learned from the same math teacher, László Rátz, whom Wigner thanked in his Nobel banquet speech.","In July 1939 he and Leo Szilard visited Einstein on Long Island, where Einstein dictated to Wigner a uranium warning that grew into the letter to Roosevelt.","His team largely designed the giant Hanford plutonium reactors before any reactor had ever run; the formal design report followed in January 1943.","John Bardeen, later co-inventor of the transistor, was drawn into solid-state physics as Wigner's graduate student at Princeton.","In 1946 he handed over the first official shipment of a reactor-made radioisotope, carbon-14, bound for a St. Louis cancer hospital."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"konrad-bloch","name":"Konrad Bloch","year":1964,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discoveries concerning the mechanism and regulation of the cholesterol and fatty acid metabolism","tagline":"Forced out of Nazi Germany, he helped map how the body builds cholesterol, the chemistry that statin drugs later learned to block.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2d/Konrad_Bloch.JPG/330px-Konrad_Bloch.JPG","birthCountry":"Poland","birthYear":1912,"deathYear":2000,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["health","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["Working in Davos in the mid-1930s, he tested fat extracts from tuberculosis bacteria by injecting them into his own arms. He still had the scars in a 1993 interview.","In 1936 a Yale professor he had never met, and knew only through letters, gave him a job with no salary. That appointment letter alone won him a US visa.","He arrived in America with $100, taught night labs for dental students, and saved enough to bring his brother and then his parents out of Nazi Germany.","He spent a summer at a Bermuda research station trying to show that shark livers make squalene, a cholesterol precursor. It failed; his lab later proved it in rats.","In 1968 the Munich technical university that had barred him from graduate study in 1934 because he was Jewish gave him an honorary doctorate."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"andre-lwoff","name":"André Lwoff","year":1965,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discoveries concerning genetic control of enzyme and virus synthesis","tagline":"He showed that a virus can hide silently inside a cell's genes until a signal wakes it, a key to how genes are switched on and off.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fd/Andr%C3%A9_Lwoff_nobel.jpg","birthCountry":"France","birthYear":1902,"deathYear":1994,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","health","economy"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["With two colleagues he found that ultraviolet light wakes a virus hidden inside bacteria: about 45 minutes later nearly all the cells burst, each releasing about 100 new viruses.","He coined the word 'prophage', and his lab's naming committee gave biology other words still in daily use, including virion and capsid.","In his Nobel lecture he admitted he disliked mathematics and statistics, so he followed a single bacterium through 19 divisions under the microscope instead.","His mother, a sculptor, was a cousin of the Russian painter Valentin Serov, whose 1895 portrait of her is now held by the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.","During the German occupation his attic laboratory at the Pasteur Institute was a hub of the Resistance, and he was awarded the Resistance Medal."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"francois-jacob","name":"François Jacob","year":1965,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discoveries concerning genetic control of enzyme and virus synthesis","tagline":"He showed how cells switch their genes on and off, and helped find messenger RNA, the molecule behind today's mRNA vaccines.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/Fran%C3%A7ois_Jacob_nobel.jpg","birthCountry":"France","birthYear":1920,"deathYear":2013,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","health","economy"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["With Élie Wollman he mapped bacterial genes by pulling mating bacteria apart in a kitchen blender at set times, which showed that the E. coli chromosome is a circle.","In 1960 he and Sydney Brenner could not detect messenger RNA until, days before leaving Caltech, Brenner leapt up on a beach shouting that the answer was magnesium.","In August 1944 a German air attack in Normandy riddled him with fragments as he tended a wounded officer. The wounds ended his plan to become a surgeon.","In July 1958, bored by a film at the cinema, he suddenly saw that his two research systems, a virus dormant in bacteria and the lactose genes, were switched off the same way.","Before science he spent four years as a Free French army doctor. From 2007 to 2011 he led the Order of Liberation, which honors those who fought to free France."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"julian-schwinger","name":"Julian Schwinger","year":1965,"category":"physics","motivation":"for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles","tagline":"He tamed the infinities in the quantum theory of light and matter, chose radar over the bomb, and trained four future Nobel laureates.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/Schwinger.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1918,"deathYear":1994,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","technology","education"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["In 1941 no leading US university competed to hire him; his National Academy memoir says a long tradition of antisemitism may have been a factor.","In the summer of 1943 he tried out the atomic bomb project in Chicago, decided he did not want to help build the bomb, and spent the war on radar.","A Columbia chemistry professor failed him. After his celebrated 1948 lecture, Rabi told that professor he had given its author an F.","About 70 students earned doctorates under him; four later won Nobel Prizes: Roy Glauber, Ben Mottelson, Sheldon Glashow and Walter Kohn.","His gravestone in Cambridge, Massachusetts, carries a single formula, α/2π: his 1947 result for the electron's extra magnetism."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"richard-p-feynman","name":"Richard P. Feynman","year":1965,"category":"physics","motivation":"for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles","tagline":"His diagrams made the quantum physics of light and matter calculable; he also worked on the atomic bomb and showed why Challenger failed.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1a/RichardFeynman-PaineMansionWoods1984_copyrightTamikoThiel_bw.jpg/330px-RichardFeynman-PaineMansionWoods1984_copyrightTamikoThiel_bw.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1918,"deathYear":1988,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","education","technology","peace"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["In 1939 Princeton's physics chief wrote to MIT asking whether Feynman was Jewish, explaining that the department kept its share of Jewish students small.","Between 1949 and 1954, 114 authors used his diagrams in the Physical Review, most of them trained in the method by Freeman Dyson or by postdocs Dyson had taught.","Investigating the 1986 Challenger disaster, he dipped a piece of O-ring rubber in ice water at a hearing to show that it stiffened in the cold.","In 1981 he proposed building computers out of quantum parts to simulate nature, an idea physicist John Preskill credits with starting quantum computing.","In 1967 he refused to appear in a book on Jewish Nobel winners, warning that claims of inherited Jewish talent echoed racial theories used by Hitler."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"nelly-sachs","name":"Nelly Sachs","year":1966,"category":"literature","motivation":"for her outstanding lyrical and dramatic writing, which interprets Israel's destiny with touching strength","tagline":"A Berlin poet who escaped the Nazis in 1940 and, in Swedish exile, wrote poems mourning the Jews murdered in the Holocaust.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/Nelly_Sachs_1966.jpg","birthCountry":"Germany","birthYear":1891,"deathYear":1970,"gender":"female","refugee":true,"domains":["culture","peace"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["She received the Nobel Prize on her 75th birthday. Back in Berlin, her father used to remark every 10 December that Stockholm was holding its Nobel ceremony.","She fled Nazi Germany in May 1940 on one of the last flights from Berlin to Stockholm, after the Swedish Nobel laureate Selma Lagerlöf backed her plea for refuge.","She was nearly 50 before her career as a poet really began. Her first poetry collection appeared in 1947, seven years after she reached Sweden as a refugee.","She was the first woman to win the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (1965) and the first German-speaking woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.","In 1971 Sweden's Royal Library opened a room recreating her tiny Stockholm flat, where she had written at night in the kitchen while her sick mother slept."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"shmuel-agnon","name":"Shmuel Agnon","year":1966,"category":"literature","motivation":"for his profoundly characteristic narrative art with motifs from the life of the Jewish people","tagline":"He wrote modern Hebrew fiction in the language of ancient Jewish texts, preserving a lost Jewish world and winning Hebrew its first Nobel.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f9/%D7%A4%D7%95%D7%A8%D7%98%D7%A8%D7%98_%D7%A9%22%D7%99_%D7%A2%D7%92%D7%A0%D7%95%D7%9F_%28cropped%29.jpg/330px-%D7%A4%D7%95%D7%A8%D7%98%D7%A8%D7%98_%D7%A9%22%D7%99_%D7%A2%D7%92%D7%A0%D7%95%D7%9F_%28cropped%29.jpg","birthCountry":"Ukraine","birthYear":1888,"deathYear":1970,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["culture","education"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He was the first writer in Hebrew to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his 1966 award was the first Nobel Prize for the young State of Israel.","His pen name comes from Agunot (abandoned wives), a story he published in 1908 soon after reaching Ottoman Palestine. In 1924 he made Agnon his legal surname.","A 1924 fire at his home in Germany destroyed about 4,000 Hebrew books and his manuscripts, including a novel of some 700 pages. In 1929 rioters looted his Jerusalem home.","The Nobel committee chairman, Anders Österling, judged his novel A Guest for the Night from a 1964 German translation, not from the Hebrew original.","His hometown, Buczacz, was about half Jewish. When Soviet troops retook it in July 1944, fewer than 100 Jews were left alive there. He recreated the town in stories for decades."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"george-wald","name":"George Wald","year":1967,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discoveries concerning the primary physiological and chemical visual processes in the eye","tagline":"He found vitamin A at the heart of the eye's light sensor and helped show how light straightens it, the first step of seeing.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/81/George_Wald_1987.jpg/330px-George_Wald_1987.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1906,"deathYear":1997,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","health","education","peace"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He discovered retinal, the light-catching core of the eye's pigment, in 300 frogs that arrived while his Heidelberg lab was on holiday. An assistant was about to set them free.","During World War II he and Donald Griffin showed that people can see very intense infrared light. Near 1,000 nanometers, a red glow appears just as the skin feels warm.","In 1966 Time magazine named him one of the ten best teachers in the United States, for an introductory biology course he taught until 1977.","His 1969 antiwar speech at MIT was translated into more than 40 languages and was even released as a record album.","He was on a 1972 White House list of McGovern supporters given to the IRS, one of Nixon's so-called enemies lists. His family said he was proud of it."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"hans-bethe","name":"Hans Bethe","year":1967,"category":"physics","motivation":"for his contributions to the theory of nuclear reactions, especially his discoveries concerning the energy production in stars","tagline":"Explained how the Sun and stars shine, helped build the atomic bomb, then spent six decades working to rein in nuclear weapons.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5f/Hans_Bethe.jpg/330px-Hans_Bethe.jpg","birthCountry":"France","birthYear":1906,"deathYear":2005,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["fundamental-science","peace","health","energy"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["In April 1933 Nazi racial law cost him his university job because his mother was of Jewish origin. By 1935 he was at Cornell, where he stayed for 70 years.","After a 1938 conference on the stars, he worked out within about two weeks the carbon cycle that powers big stars. The Nobel Prize for it came 29 years later.","In 2020 a detector in Italy caught neutrinos from the carbon cycle he described, showing it makes about 1% of the Sun's energy. In massive stars it is the main source.","He led the Los Alamos theory division that calculated how the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs would perform, then spent six decades pressing to limit nuclear weapons.","He published significant physics papers in every decade from the 1920s into the 2000s, and well into his nineties he was still studying exploding stars."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"marshall-w-nirenberg","name":"Marshall W. Nirenberg","year":1968,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their interpretation of the genetic code and its function in protein synthesis","tagline":"With a colleague, he read the first word of the genetic code, showing how cells turn the letters of their genes into proteins.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/60/Marshall_Nirenberg.jpg/330px-Marshall_Nirenberg.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1927,"deathYear":2010,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","health"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["In the early hours of Saturday, 27 May 1961, his partner Heinrich Matthaei ran the test that read the first word of the genetic code: UUU means phenylalanine.","He came to the code as an outsider: a biochemist whose only genetics schooling was evening classes. At least one colleague thought the project would wreck his career.","He was the first scientist from NIH's own labs to win a Nobel Prize. Many NIH colleagues set aside their work to help his lab race a larger team in New York.","In 1967 he predicted that cells would be programmed with man-made genetic messages within 25 years, and argued that an informed society must decide how to use that power.","At a 1961 congress in Moscow his first talk drew about 30 people. Francis Crick arranged for him to give it again, this time to about a thousand."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"rene-cassin","name":"René Cassin","year":1968,"category":"peace","motivation":"for his struggle to ensure the rights of man as stipulated in the UN Declaration","tagline":"A wounded WWI veteran, sentenced to death by Vichy, who helped write the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for every person.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/Ren%C3%A9_Cassin_nobel.jpg","birthCountry":"France","birthYear":1887,"deathYear":1976,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["human-rights","peace","education"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["Machine-gun fire nearly killed him in 1914. He then spent two decades fighting for disabled veterans, war widows and 800,000 French war orphans.","After he joined de Gaulle in London in 1940, the Vichy regime stripped him of his French citizenship and sentenced him to death in absentia.","He presided over the European Court of Human Rights from 1965 to 1968, while his own country, France, had still not ratified the treaty behind it.","The UN human rights office calls the Declaration he helped draft the most translated document in the world. Guinness counted 370 languages and dialects back in 2009.","He put most of his Nobel Prize money into founding the International Institute of Human Rights in Strasbourg, which still teaches human rights law."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"murray-gellmann","name":"Murray Gell-Mann","year":1969,"category":"physics","motivation":"for his contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interactions","tagline":"He brought order to a zoo of subatomic particles and proposed quarks, the building blocks of nearly all the matter in our bodies.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2c/Murray_Gell-Mann_-_World_Economic_Forum_Annual_Meeting_2012.jpg/330px-Murray_Gell-Mann_-_World_Economic_Forum_Annual_Meeting_2012.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1929,"deathYear":2019,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","environment","education"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["His family had no money, so he studied on scholarships: a private school took him into sixth grade at about age 8, and he started at Yale at 15.","He named the quark after a line in James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake. The 1964 paper that proposed quarks was only two pages long.","In 1962 he predicted a missing particle, the omega-minus. A Brookhaven team found it in 1964, backing his scheme for sorting particles into families.","He won the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics alone, at age 40. His father had died a few weeks before the announcement.","He gave his Nobel lecture but never wrote it up, so the official Nobel Lectures volume has only its title and a note that no manuscript was submitted."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"salvador-e-luria","name":"Salvador E. Luria","year":1969,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discoveries concerning the replication mechanism and the genetic structure of viruses","tagline":"A refugee from Fascist Italy, he helped prove that bacteria mutate at random, a key to understanding why germs outwit our drugs.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3d/Salvador_E._Luria_ca.1969.jpg/330px-Salvador_E._Luria_ca.1969.jpg","birthCountry":"Italy","birthYear":1912,"deathYear":1991,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["fundamental-science","health","technology","economy","education"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["His key idea came early in 1943, as he watched a colleague hit a slot-machine jackpot at a faculty dance. It led to proof that bacteria mutate at random.","As German troops neared Paris in June 1940, he fled south by bicycle and freight train, then sailed from Lisbon to New York.","His first graduate student was James Watson, who later worked out the double-helix structure of DNA with Francis Crick.","His Nobel Prize was announced the day after he helped organize Boston's Vietnam War Moratorium in October 1969. He pledged part of the prize money to the peace movement.","His autobiography is titled A Slot Machine, a Broken Test Tube, after the two chance moments behind his best-known discoveries."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"julius-axelrod","name":"Julius Axelrod","year":1970,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discoveries concerning the humoral transmitters in the nerve terminals and the mechanism for their storage, release and inactivation","tagline":"He showed how nerve cells recycle their chemical messengers, the key to modern antidepressants, and helped bring paracetamol into medicine.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3c/Julius_Axelrod_3.jpg/330px-Julius_Axelrod_3.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1912,"deathYear":2004,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["Every medical school he applied to turned him down. In 1970 he said it had been hard for Jews to get in, and that a name like Bigelow would probably have helped.","He spent 11 years testing vitamins in food for New York City, and earned his PhD only at 42, after he had already discovered liver enzymes that break down many drugs.","His first paper, written with Bernard Brodie in 1948, pointed to the painkiller now sold as paracetamol and Tylenol. Neither man thought to patent it.","When the head of the NIH asked what he would like after winning the Nobel Prize, he reportedly answered: a parking space.","He lost the sight of his left eye in a lab accident, which kept him out of the World War II draft."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"paul-a-samuelson","name":"Paul A. Samuelson","year":1970,"category":"economics","motivation":"for the scientific work through which he has developed static and dynamic economic theory and actively contributed to raising the level of analysis in economic science","tagline":"He rebuilt economics on mathematics, taught it to generations of students, and helped spark the low-cost index fund.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/Paul_Samuelson.gif","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1915,"deathYear":2009,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["economy","education","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["The Nobel Memorial Prize in economics was only in its second year in 1970 when he became the first American to receive it.","His 1948 textbook Economics became the best-selling economics textbook ever, with about 4 million copies sold in some 40 languages.","Harvard did nothing to keep him in 1940. His MIT colleague Robert Solow later said being smart, Jewish or Keynesian could cost you a job there.","His 1974 plea for someone to start an index fund helped push Jack Bogle to launch the first index mutual fund in 1976.","At the Nobel banquet he joked that winning was easy: have great teachers, colleagues and students, read the great masters, and, finally, be lucky."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"sir-bernard-katz","name":"Sir Bernard Katz","year":1970,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discoveries concerning the humoral transmitters in the nerve terminals and the mechanism for their storage, release and inactivation","tagline":"A stateless Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who found that nerves pass their messages in tiny packets of chemical.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e7/37._Tagung_1987_Mediziner_Sir_Bernard_Katz_-_W134Nr.125421a1_-_Willy_Pragher_%28cropped%29.jpg/330px-37._Tagung_1987_Mediziner_Sir_Bernard_Katz_-_W134Nr.125421a1_-_Willy_Pragher_%28cropped%29.jpg","birthCountry":"Germany","birthYear":1911,"deathYear":2003,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["fundamental-science","health"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["Stateless from age six until 30, he reached England in 1935 with a League of Nations refugee pass, a temporary visa and £4.","In 1933 his research won a Leipzig prize entered under a pen name. Once he was known to be the Jewish winner, the prize money was publicly withheld and paid privately.","In 1938 a German-language physiology review refused to print his article without an 'Aryan' co-author. He withdrew it, and Oxford University Press published it as a book.","He and a colleague noticed tiny random electrical blips in resting muscle. Instead of dismissing them as noise, he showed each was one packet of nerve chemical.","During the Second World War the former refugee commanded an Australian air force radar station on Goodenough Island, off New Guinea."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"dennis-gabor","name":"Dennis Gabor","year":1971,"category":"physics","motivation":"for his invention and development of the holographic method","tagline":"A refugee engineer who invented holography, a way to record the whole of a light wave, now used to test machines and guard money.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/67/Dennis_Gabor_1971.jpg/330px-Dennis_Gabor_1971.jpg","birthCountry":"Hungary","birthYear":1900,"deathYear":1979,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["technology","fundamental-science","economy"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["By his own account, he conceived holography at Easter 1947 while sitting on a bench at his local tennis club. His goal was a sharper electron microscope.","In World War II Britain classed him as an enemy alien. He worked in a hut outside his company's security fence, shut out of its secret radar work.","He named the hologram from the Greek 'holos', meaning whole, because it records the whole light wave, not just its brightness.","By his own account, he thought of a pulsed laser in 1950 and offered it as a PhD project. His best student declined, judging it too risky.","By the late 1950s his idea had been written off as a 'white elephant'. Researchers in America and the Soviet Union revived it, and it won him an unshared Nobel Prize."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"simon-kuznets","name":"Simon Kuznets","year":1971,"category":"economics","motivation":"for his empirically founded interpretation of economic growth which has led to new and deepened insight into the economic and social structure and process of development","tagline":"He taught nations to measure their own economies, building the income figures behind GDP, and warned what those numbers cannot show.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6c/Simon_Kuznets_1971b.jpg/330px-Simon_Kuznets_1971b.jpg","birthCountry":"Belarus","birthYear":1901,"deathYear":1985,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["economy","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["His 1934 report gave the US its first official national income figures and showed that income paid to Americans fell 40 percent from 1929 to 1932.","In that same report he warned that national income is a poor guide to a nation's welfare, a caution often lost in today's focus on GDP.","In 1942 he showed that the military's new production targets could not be met in time; his analysis became the basis for US wartime production goals.","He reached the United States from Soviet Ukraine in 1922 and within four years had earned bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees at Columbia.","A secular Jew and committed Zionist, he chaired a project to build economic research in Israel and pioneered statistical studies of Jewish economic life."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"christian-anfinsen","name":"Christian Anfinsen","year":1972,"category":"chemistry","motivation":"for his work on ribonuclease, especially concerning the connection between the amino acid sequence and the biologically active conformation","tagline":"He showed that a protein's chain of amino acids alone decides its shape, the rule behind today's AI protein-structure prediction.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2a/Christian_B._Anfinsen%2C_NIH_portrait%2C_1969.jpg/330px-Christian_B._Anfinsen%2C_NIH_portrait%2C_1969.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1916,"deathYear":1995,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","health","economy","human-rights"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["The enzyme behind his Nobel Prize came from Armour, a Chicago meatpacker with a big supply of cow ribonuclease, probably a by-product of making insulin.","Unraveled, the ribonuclease chain could pair its 8 sulfur-bearing links in 105 ways. Left to refold, it found the one correct pairing on its own.","He gave his 1972 Nobel banquet thanks in what he called a mix of Scandinavian languages, fitting for the son of Norwegian immigrants.","In 1979 he converted to Orthodox Judaism. He chose the Hebrew name Chaim, which his widow said was inspired by Chaim Weizmann.","In 1984 he was one of 55 Western scientists who offered to trade places with Yelena Bonner, Andrei Sakharov's wife, so she could go West for medical care."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"gerald-m-edelman","name":"Gerald M. Edelman","year":1972,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discoveries concerning the chemical structure of antibodies","tagline":"He worked out the chemical structure of antibodies, the immune system's Y-shaped defenders, laying groundwork for antibody medicines.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/08/Gerald_Edelman_%28cropped%29.jpg/330px-Gerald_Edelman_%28cropped%29.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1929,"deathYear":2014,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science","economy"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["As a bored army doctor in Paris, he read an immunology book in a library and decided antibodies, not the molecules they attack, were the real puzzle.","In 1969 his team finished the full sequence of an antibody, about 1,300 amino acids long, the longest protein sequence worked out at that time.","The antibody they decoded, known as Eu, came from the blood of a myeloma patient, Mr. Eubanks. Reference charts still number antibody positions by the 'Eu' system.","He won the Nobel Prize at 43, then left immunology to study embryos and, finally, how the brain gives rise to the mind.","As a boy he studied violin seriously with Albert Meiff, who had trained alongside Jascha Heifetz, before deciding he did not want to perform."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"kenneth-j-arrow","name":"Kenneth J. Arrow","year":1972,"category":"economics","motivation":"for their pioneering contributions to general economic equilibrium theory and welfare theory","tagline":"He proved when markets can balance and why no voting system is perfectly fair, then turned economics against malaria.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/Kenneth_Arrow%2C_Stanford_University.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1921,"deathYear":2017,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["economy","health","mathematics","environment"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["His famous impossibility theorem grew out of a coffee-break question at the RAND Corporation in the summer of 1948; the thesis it became launched modern social choice theory.","At 51 he was the youngest person to win the economics prize, a record that stood until Esther Duflo won at 46 in 2019.","He switched from mathematics to economics because his mentor, Harold Hotelling, could find him a fellowship only there. He later joked that he had been bought.","An international ballot of economists, held about two decades before his death, voted him the greatest economist of the 20th century.","In retirement he chaired a panel whose plan to subsidize the best malaria drugs at the factory gate became a Global Fund program in Africa and Asia."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"leon-n-cooper","name":"Leon N. Cooper","year":1972,"category":"physics","motivation":"for their jointly developed theory of superconductivity, usually called the BCS-theory","tagline":"He showed how electrons pair up, the key to current flowing with zero resistance, then turned to how the brain learns.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c0/Nobel_Laureate_Leon_Cooper_in_2007.jpg/330px-Nobel_Laureate_Leon_Cooper_in_2007.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1930,"deathYear":2024,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","technology"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He was 26 when he published the idea of the Cooper pair in 1956; the Nobel Foundation notes the prize-winning theory was done while he was still in his 20s.","Bohr, Heisenberg and Feynman had all tried to explain superconductivity. Feynman warned that anyone who tackled it would find they were not clever enough.","A missing piece of the theory came to him during a concert at the University of Illinois. Whether it worked hinged on a single plus or minus sign.","The Big Bang Theory's Sheldon Cooper has often been reported to be named partly after him.","After the Nobel Prize he turned to the brain: his 1982 BCM theory described how connections between neurons strengthen and weaken as we learn."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"william-h-stein","name":"William H. Stein","year":1972,"category":"chemistry","motivation":"for their contribution to the understanding of the connection between chemical structure and catalytic activity of the active centre of the ribonuclease molecule","tagline":"He helped build the tools that measure proteins' building blocks, then used them to spell out the first complete sequence of an enzyme.","thumb":null,"birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1911,"deathYear":1980,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","health","technology"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He nearly quit science after a poor first year of graduate chemistry at Harvard, until someone suggested he try biochemistry instead.","In 1949 a full amino acid analysis of one protein took him and Moore about two weeks. The automatic analyzer they built by 1958 did it overnight.","His partnership with Stanford Moore lasted about 40 years. Moore wrote that Stein could improve anything Moore drafted.","In 1933 his father was treasurer of a committee that raised money to place scholars ousted from German universities in American jobs.","In 1969 Guillain-Barré syndrome left him quadriplegic. He shared the Nobel Prize three years later and kept advising his lab until his death in 1980."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"brian-d-josephson","name":"Brian D. Josephson","year":1973,"category":"physics","motivation":"for his theoretical predictions of the properties of a supercurrent through a tunnel barrier, in particular those phenomena which are generally known as the Josephson effects","tagline":"At 22 he predicted how electron pairs tunnel between superconductors, giving the world an exact volt and ultra-sensitive magnetic sensors.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/ff/Brian_Josephson%2C_March_2004.jpg/330px-Brian_Josephson%2C_March_2004.jpg","birthCountry":"United Kingdom","birthYear":1940,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","technology","health"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He made his Nobel-winning prediction in 1962 as a 22-year-old PhD student. His lecturer Philip Anderson later wrote that the whole achievement was Josephson's own.","A Bell Labs patent lawyer judged his 1962 paper so complete that no one else would manage to patent any substantial part of the Josephson effect.","Still a student, he debated John Bardeen, already a Nobel laureate, over the effect at a 1962 conference in London. Experiments at Bell Labs backed Josephson the next year.","Since a 1990 international agreement, the world's voltage standards have rested on his effect, which turns a microwave frequency into an exactly known voltage.","The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics honoured quantum experiments on the Josephson junction, the device named after him, which is now used to build experimental quantum computers."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"henry-kissinger","name":"Henry Kissinger","year":1973,"category":"peace","motivation":"for jointly having negotiated a cease fire in Vietnam in 1973","tagline":"A teenage refugee from Nazi Germany, he negotiated the 1973 Vietnam ceasefire and reshaped Cold War diplomacy, at a heavy human cost.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/97/Henry_A._Kissinger%2C_U.S._Secretary_of_State%2C_1973-1977.jpg/330px-Henry_A._Kissinger%2C_U.S._Secretary_of_State%2C_1973-1977.jpg","birthCountry":"Germany","birthYear":1923,"deathYear":2023,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["peace","human-rights"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He reached New York as a 15-year-old refugee from Nazi Germany and worked full time in a shaving-brush factory while finishing high school at night.","About 15 of his relatives, including his parents' brothers and sisters and a grandmother, never made it out of Germany; most of them perished.","He was the first Jewish US secretary of state, and the first person to serve as secretary of state and national security adviser at the same time.","His prize is one of the most disputed ever: his co-laureate Le Duc Tho refused it, and two Nobel committee members resigned in protest.","After Saigon fell in 1975 he tried to give the prize back, saying the peace had been overturned by force. The committee refused."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"wassily-leontief","name":"Wassily Leontief","year":1973,"category":"economics","motivation":"for the development of the input-output method and for its application to important economic problems","tagline":"He mapped how every industry feeds every other, giving nations a tool to plan, measure their economies and trace pollution.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/36/Wassily_Leontief_1973.jpg/330px-Wassily_Leontief_1973.jpg","birthCountry":"Russia","birthYear":1906,"deathYear":1999,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["economy","environment","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["Long recorded as born in St. Petersburg in 1906, he was actually born in Munich in 1905. He corrected the year only after a 1990 visit to Leningrad.","As a teenage student he was held in a solitary cell by the Soviet secret police for putting up posters calling for freedom. In the cell he kept studying economics.","By his own account, Soviet officials let him emigrate in 1925 because doctors thought a jaw tumor was a fatal sarcoma. Doctors in Germany found it was not.","The 1973 Nobel announcement called him the sole creator of input-output analysis, a method now part of the UN's international guidelines for national accounts.","A 2010 survey of the ideas behind Google's PageRank points to strong mathematical similarities with his input-output model of 1941."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"aage-n-bohr","name":"Aage N. Bohr","year":1975,"category":"physics","motivation":"for the discovery of the connection between collective motion and particle motion in atomic nuclei and the development of the theory of the structure of the atomic nucleus based on this connection","tagline":"After fleeing occupied Denmark, he showed that atomic nuclei can stretch out of round and spin, uniting rival pictures of the nucleus.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/ce/Aage_Bohr.jpg/330px-Aage_Bohr.jpg","birthCountry":"Denmark","birthYear":1922,"deathYear":2009,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["fundamental-science","peace"],"disputed":true,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He and his father, Niels Bohr, both won the Nobel Prize in Physics, 53 years apart. They are one of only four father-and-son pairs to win the physics prize.","As a boy he knew the founders of quantum physics as 'Uncle Heisenberg' and 'Uncle Pauli'; they came to work with his father at the institute where the family lived.","At Los Alamos in the war he used the cover name James Baker; his father was Nicholas Baker.","In 1943 the German occupiers interned his great-aunt Hanna Adler, 84, founder of the school he attended; 400 former pupils petitioned for her release.","His doctoral thesis, on the rotation of atomic nuclei, came in 1954, after the 1950-53 papers that later won him the Nobel Prize."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"ben-r-mottelson","name":"Ben R. Mottelson","year":1975,"category":"physics","motivation":"for the discovery of the connection between collective motion and particle motion in atomic nuclei and the development of the theory of the structure of the atomic nucleus based on this connection","tagline":"Showed how the protons and neutrons in an atomic nucleus move both on their own and together, reshaping nuclear physics.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Mottelson%2CBen_1963_Kopenhagen.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1926,"deathYear":2022,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","education"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He went to Copenhagen in 1950 on a one-year fellowship and stayed for the rest of his life, becoming a Danish citizen in 1971.","He was in China when his Nobel Prize was announced, a stroke of luck for a man who avoided public attention.","His Harvard PhD adviser, Julian Schwinger, won the Nobel Prize in Physics ten years before he did.","At 73 he published a paper on spinning clouds of ultracold atoms that spurred a new field of research.","When he died in 2022, aged 95, he was Denmark's last living Nobel laureate."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"david-baltimore","name":"David Baltimore","year":1975,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discoveries concerning the interaction between tumour viruses and the genetic material of the cell","tagline":"He found the enzyme that lets viruses write RNA back into DNA, a key to understanding and treating HIV.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a3/Dr._David_Baltimore2_crop2.jpg/330px-Dr._David_Baltimore2_crop2.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1938,"deathYear":2025,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science","economy"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He was 37 when he shared the 1975 Nobel Prize for finding reverse transcriptase, the enzyme that copies RNA into DNA.","As a high-school student at a summer science camp in Maine, he met Howard Temin, a camp counselor who would later share his Nobel Prize.","When the US invaded Cambodia in 1970, in the middle of his reverse transcriptase experiments, he put his samples in the freezer and went to protest the war.","In 1986, when the US had no national AIDS plan, he co-chaired a national committee that urged the government to spend $1 billion on AIDS research.","His 1971 scheme for sorting viruses by how they make messenger RNA grew into the Baltimore classification, which today sorts viruses into seven groups."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"howard-m-temin","name":"Howard M. Temin","year":1975,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discoveries concerning the interaction between tumour viruses and the genetic material of the cell","tagline":"He proved some viruses copy their RNA genes into DNA, an idea once called heresy that later guided the first HIV drugs.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/58/Howard_Martin_Temin_1975.jpg/330px-Howard_Martin_Temin_1975.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1934,"deathYear":1994,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science","economy"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["His Nobel banquet in Stockholm, where he spoke for all three medicine laureates, fell on 10 December 1975, his 41st birthday.","For his bar mitzvah, his family gave the money set aside for the party to a camp for displaced persons.","He proposed in 1964 that some viruses copy RNA into DNA. For six years the idea was largely ignored, until his lab found the enzyme that does it.","At the Nobel banquet, in a hall full of smokers, he said the laureates were outraged that more people had not quit. He never smoked, yet died of lung cancer at 59.","About 8 percent of human DNA is left over from retrovirus infections of our distant ancestors, written into their genes by the kind of enzyme he co-discovered."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"leonid-vitaliyevich-kantorovich","name":"Leonid Vitaliyevich Kantorovich","year":1975,"category":"economics","motivation":"for their contributions to the theory of optimum allocation of resources","tagline":"He invented linear programming, the math of getting the most from scarce resources, and fought Soviet dogma to see it used.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f4/Leonid_Kantorovich_1975.jpg/330px-Leonid_Kantorovich_1975.jpg","birthCountry":"Russia","birthYear":1912,"deathYear":1986,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["economy","mathematics","technology","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He entered Leningrad University at 14. At 20 he looked so young that students at his first lecture told him to sit down and wait for the professor.","Linear programming began with a 1938 question from a plywood trust: how to split time on eight lathes among five kinds of plywood to get the most output.","In 1959 he told the Academy that linear programming was planning crop rotations in Iowa, not in Soviet regions that could have used it a decade earlier.","In the 1960s his group's modelling led to a new Soviet taxi fare: a fixed charge for taking a cab plus a lower price per kilometer.","His 1942 note on moving masses is a classic of optimal transport; in 2017 a distance built on that theory helped AI image generators train more reliably."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"baruch-s-blumberg","name":"Baruch S. Blumberg","year":1976,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discoveries concerning new mechanisms for the origin and dissemination of infectious diseases","tagline":"He discovered the hepatitis B virus and co-invented its vaccine, the first vaccine that protects people against a cancer.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8a/Baruch_Samuel_Blumberg_by_Tom_Trower_%28NASA%29_%28cropped%29.jpg/330px-Baruch_Samuel_Blumberg_by_Tom_Trower_%28NASA%29_%28cropped%29.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1925,"deathYear":2011,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He found hepatitis B by accident while studying inherited blood proteins: the first clue was a New York patient's blood reacting with an Aboriginal Australian's.","After his team began screening donated blood in 1969, hepatitis after transfusion at a Philadelphia hospital fell from 18% of patients to 6%.","With Irving Millman he devised a vaccine made from harmless virus coat particles. The hepatitis B vaccine became the first vaccine shown to prevent a human cancer.","On a 1977 trip to China he handed scientists a copy of his vaccine patent and connected them with Merck, which later helped China make its own vaccine.","In his seventies he became the founding director of NASA's Astrobiology Institute, which studies how life began and whether it exists beyond Earth."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"burton-richter","name":"Burton Richter","year":1976,"category":"physics","motivation":"for their pioneering work in the discovery of a heavy elementary particle of a new kind","tagline":"He built the collider that caught the psi particle, proof of a fourth quark, and let its X-rays out to serve biology and materials science.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/41/Burton_Richter_NSF_crop.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1931,"deathYear":2018,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","technology","energy"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["His team found the psi particle around 10 November 1974. It appeared at just one of more than a thousand collision energies the machine could be tuned to.","A Ting team member recalls that in November 1974 Ting told Richter he had interesting physics to tell him. Richter replied with the same words.","Congress would not fund his collider, SPEAR. After years of rejections he cut costs, paid for it from the lab's running budget, and his team built it in about 21 months.","Two Stanford colleagues asked him to add a port to let SPEAR's X-rays out. He did, creating the first modern synchrotron light source, a prototype for many others.","His public high school in Far Rockaway, Queens, counts three Nobel laureates among its former students: Richard Feynman, Baruch Blumberg and Richter himself."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"milton-friedman","name":"Milton Friedman","year":1976,"category":"economics","motivation":"for his achievements in the fields of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy","tagline":"He traced the Great Depression to the Fed's mistakes, reshaped how central banks fight inflation and panics, and helped end the US draft.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/67/Portrait_Of_Milton_Friedman_%28cropped%29.jpg/330px-Portrait_Of_Milton_Friedman_%28cropped%29.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1912,"deathYear":2006,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["economy","fundamental-science","human-rights"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["As a boy he kept kosher so strictly that he ran away from a Boy Scout outing rather than eat non-kosher hot dogs. He later rejected religion altogether.","Working at the US Treasury during World War II, he helped create the system of withholding income tax from paychecks.","Police bodyguards shadowed him all week in Stockholm in 1976, and a protester shouting about Chile interrupted his prize ceremony.","In 2002 Fed governor Ben Bernanke publicly apologized to him and Anna Schwartz, conceding that their book was right to blame the Fed for the Great Depression.","He said that ending the military draft was almost the only issue on which he ever personally lobbied Congress."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"saul-bellow","name":"Saul Bellow","year":1976,"category":"literature","motivation":"for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work","tagline":"A Chicago immigrant's son whose comic, searching novels put Jewish American lives at the center of American literature.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4e/Saul_Bellow_%28Herzog_portrait%29.jpg/330px-Saul_Bellow_%28Herzog_portrait%29.jpg","birthCountry":"Canada","birthYear":1915,"deathYear":2005,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["culture","education"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He is still the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times: for Augie March (1954), Herzog (1965) and Mr. Sammler's Planet (1971).","His family was smuggled from Canada into the United States in 1924 and lived in Chicago without legal status. He did not become a U.S. citizen until the early 1940s.","His first novel, Dangling Man (1944), sold only about 1,500 copies. Twenty years later Herzog pushed John le Carré off the top of the New York Times best-seller list.","His 1953 translation of Gimpel the Fool, made with uncredited help from Eliezer Greenberg, largely introduced Isaac Bashevis Singer, a future Nobel laureate, to American readers.","In 1913 his father was arrested in St. Petersburg for living there without proper papers, under laws restricting where Jews could live. The family fled to Canada."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"ilya-prigogine","name":"Ilya Prigogine","year":1977,"category":"chemistry","motivation":"for his contributions to non-equilibrium thermodynamics, particularly the theory of dissipative structures","tagline":"He showed how a steady flow of energy can build order out of disorder, helping explain the rhythms and patterns of life.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7b/Ilya_Prigogine_1977c.jpg/330px-Ilya_Prigogine_1977c.jpg","birthCountry":"Russia","birthYear":1917,"deathYear":2003,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["fundamental-science","education","transportation"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["His mother said he could read music before he could read words, and he stayed a devoted pianist all his life.","He set out to study law, but a hunt for a book on criminal psychology turned up one on brain chemistry, and he switched to science.","Under Nazi occupation he was arrested as a Jew and later released, and he kept teaching in his university's secret courses after it shut in protest.","The Nobel presenter said his elegant, lucid writing had earned him the nickname 'the poet of thermodynamics'.","He reached Belgium as a boy in 1929 but became a Belgian citizen only in 1949; in 1989 the king made him a viscount."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"rosalyn-yalow","name":"Rosalyn Yalow","year":1977,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for the development of radioimmunoassays of peptide hormones","tagline":"A nuclear physicist who learned to measure tiny traces of hormones in blood, changing how doctors diagnose diabetes and thyroid disease.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3d/Rosalyn_Yalow.jpg/330px-Rosalyn_Yalow.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1921,"deathYear":2011,"gender":"female","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science","womens-rights"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["She was a nuclear physicist with no medical degree, yet she won half of the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, only the second woman ever to win it.","Her test could detect less than a trillionth of a gram of the hormone ACTH in a milliliter of blood. Older methods could need as much as 250 milliliters of blood.","She and her partner Solomon Berson chose not to patent their test, and they often gave visiting scientists some of their antibodies to take home.","Graduate physics programs turned her down, partly because she was a woman and Jewish. At Illinois in 1941 she was the only woman among the 400 members of its engineering faculty.","Science rejected the 1956 paper that led to her Nobel Prize, and a second journal took it only after changes. She showed that journal's rejection letter in her Nobel lecture."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"arno-penzias","name":"Arno Penzias","year":1978,"category":"physics","motivation":"for their discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation","tagline":"A child refugee from Nazi Germany, he found the faint afterglow of the Big Bang, key evidence that our universe had a beginning.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/32._Tagung_1982_Physiker%3B_Beim_Studentenabend_Arno_A._Penzias_-_W134Nr.119142_-_Willy_Pragher_%28cropped%29.jpg","birthCountry":"Germany","birthYear":1933,"deathYear":2024,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["fundamental-science","space","human-rights"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He was born in Munich on 26 April 1933, the same day the Gestapo was founded, a coincidence he liked to point out.","At six he and his five-year-old brother left Germany without their parents on a Kindertransport train to England, each with a suitcase and a bag of candy.","The hiss in his antenna was the Big Bang's leftover glow. Before working that out, he and Robert Wilson had to chase two pigeons from the horn and scrub away their mess.","Part of the static on an old analog TV tuned between channels comes from the same cosmic background radiation he discovered.","Right after his Nobel ceremony in Stockholm he flew to Moscow to lecture to refusenik scientists barred from leaving the USSR, and later helped several of them emigrate."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"daniel-nathans","name":"Daniel Nathans","year":1978,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for the discovery of restriction enzymes and their application to problems of molecular genetics","tagline":"He showed that bacterial enzymes could cut DNA into exact, mappable pieces, the first step behind gene cloning, testing and sequencing.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/92/37._Tagung_1987_Mediziner_Daniel_Nathans_l%C3%A4chelnd_-_W134Nr.125411c_-_Willy_Pragher_%28cropped%29.jpg/330px-37._Tagung_1987_Mediziner_Daniel_Nathans_l%C3%A4chelnd_-_W134Nr.125411c_-_Willy_Pragher_%28cropped%29.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1928,"deathYear":1999,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","economy","technology","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["Nathans never earned a PhD. He quit a doctoral program at the Rockefeller Institute because he did not want to sit through more lectures, and did research anyway.","He learned of Hamilton Smith's DNA-cutting enzyme from a letter that reached him in 1969, while he was on sabbatical at the Weizmann Institute in Israel.","Told he had won the Nobel Prize, he wanted independent confirmation first, then put off celebrations until he had taught his scheduled lab session for medical students.","A 1971 seminar by Nathans led Richard Roberts to drop his research plans and study restriction enzymes. Roberts later shared the 1993 Nobel Prize for split genes.","The youngest child of Russian Jewish immigrants, he grew up in the Depression in a leaky, poorly heated house; he later learned his parents sometimes went without food."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"herbert-simon","name":"Herbert Simon","year":1978,"category":"economics","motivation":"for his pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organizations","tagline":"Showed that people and firms settle for 'good enough', then taught computers to reason, helping to found artificial intelligence.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4d/Herbert_Simon%2C_RIT_NandE_Vol13Num11_1981_Mar19_Complete.jpg/330px-Herbert_Simon%2C_RIT_NandE_Vol13Num11_1981_Mar19_Complete.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1916,"deathYear":2001,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["economy","technology","fundamental-science","education"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He introduced the term 'satisficing', a blend of 'satisfy' and 'suffice', for taking the first option that is good enough instead of searching for the perfect one.","In January 1956 his wife and three children each played one part of the Logic Theorist, often called the first AI program, following instruction cards to test it by hand.","His Logic Theorist program proved 38 of the first 52 theorems in a chapter of Principia Mathematica, one of them more elegantly than the book's own authors.","Trained as a political scientist, he won computing's Turing Award in 1975 and the Nobel Prize in economics in 1978.","In 1948 he helped set up the US agency that ran Marshall Plan aid to rebuild Europe after World War II."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"isaac-bashevis-singer","name":"Isaac Bashevis Singer","year":1978,"category":"literature","motivation":"for his impassioned narrative art which, with roots in a Polish-Jewish cultural tradition, brings universal human conditions to life","tagline":"He kept writing in Yiddish after the Holocaust destroyed its heartland, and carried the lost world of Polish Jews to readers everywhere.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e2/Dan_Hadani_collection_%28990044399930205171%29_%28cropped%29.jpg/330px-Dan_Hadani_collection_%28990044399930205171%29_%28cropped%29.jpg","birthCountry":"Poland","birthYear":1904,"deathYear":1991,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["culture"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He is the only writer in Yiddish ever to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.","He began writing for children in his sixties. Three of his books were named Newbery Honor Books in three straight years, 1967 to 1969.","Nobody is sure when he was born. The official date is 14 July 1904, but his estate says 1903 and one critic says 1902; he lied about his age young to avoid the draft.","At the Forverts he also wrote personal advice columns in Yiddish, under the pen name D. Segal.","At his Nobel lecture in Stockholm he startled the audience by breaking into Yiddish, and called the prize a recognition of a language with no land and no government."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"menachem-begin","name":"Menachem Begin","year":1978,"category":"peace","motivation":"for jointly having negotiated peace between Egypt and Israel in 1978","tagline":"A former Soviet prisoner and underground commander who, as Israel's prime minister, made Israel's first peace with an Arab state.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/13/Menachem_Begin%2C_Andrews_AFB%2C_1978.JPG/330px-Menachem_Begin%2C_Andrews_AFB%2C_1978.JPG","birthCountry":"Belarus","birthYear":1913,"deathYear":1992,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["peace"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["His first act as Israel's prime minister in 1977 was to give refuge to 66 Vietnamese boat people, recalling Jewish refugees the world turned away before World War II.","Soviet secret police arrested him in 1940 and sentenced him to eight years in a labor camp in Russia's far north. The Nazis murdered his parents and his brother.","As Irgun commander he had a £10,000 British price on his head, yet he lived openly in Tel Aviv under false names, at one point posing as a rabbi.","The 1978 Peace Prize ceremony was moved to Oslo's medieval Akershus fortress because of violent protests against him.","The treaty he signed with Egypt in 1979 was the first between Israel and an Arab country, and the two nations have not fought a war since."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"herbert-c-brown","name":"Herbert C. Brown","year":1979,"category":"chemistry","motivation":"for their development of the use of boron- and phosphorus-containing compounds, respectively, into important reagents in organic synthesis","tagline":"A Depression-era student from a struggling immigrant family, he made boron into a standard tool chemists use to build medicines.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d7/Brown%2C_Herbert_C._%281912-2004%29.png","birthCountry":"United Kingdom","birthYear":1912,"deathYear":2004,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","health","technology","food"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["His initials, H, C and B, are the symbols for hydrogen, carbon and boron, the elements in the reaction that made his name. He joked that his parents were far-seeing.","His boron career began with a graduation gift from his girlfriend Sarah: a book on boron hydrides, likely picked because at $2.06 it was the cheapest chemistry book in the store.","His key discovery began with an oddity: one test compound used 2.37 units of a reagent, a near twin used 2.00. The reason was hydroboration.","Two chemists who trained in his Purdue lab, Akira Suzuki and Ei-ichi Negishi, were two of the three winners of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.","In 1935 Sarah wrote in his junior college yearbook that he would be a Nobel laureate. He won the prize 44 years later."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"sheldon-glashow","name":"Sheldon Glashow","year":1979,"category":"physics","motivation":"for their contributions to the theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles, including, inter alia, the prediction of the weak neutral current","tagline":"A plumber's son, child of Jewish immigrants, who helped show that the force behind light and a force that helps the Sun shine are one.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Sheldon_Glashow_at_Harvard.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1932,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","education"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He and co-laureate Steven Weinberg were in the same classes at the Bronx High School of Science and at Cornell, and egged each other on in physics during subway rides.","He planned a fellowship in Moscow, but his Soviet visa never came. While he waited in Copenhagen, he found the SU(2)×U(1) pattern behind the electroweak theory.","In 1964 he and James Bjorken proposed a fourth quark and named it 'charm', a decade before particles containing it were discovered.","A particle reaction he predicted in 1960 was finally reported in 2021, by a neutrino detector buried deep in the Antarctic ice sheet.","As a teenager he ran a basement chemistry lab that his father and brother set up, making selenium compounds. He later said he never again did research so dangerous."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"steven-weinberg","name":"Steven Weinberg","year":1979,"category":"physics","motivation":"for their contributions to the theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles, including, inter alia, the prediction of the weak neutral current","tagline":"A stenographer's son who showed that the force carrying light and the force that helps the Sun burn are one.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b3/Steven_Weinberg_2010.jpg/330px-Steven_Weinberg_2010.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1933,"deathYear":2021,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","education"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He and co-laureate Sheldon Glashow were classmates at the Bronx High School of Science and at Cornell, and pushed each other to learn physics on the New York subway.","He recalled that the key idea of his prize-winning theory came to him in the fall of 1967, probably while he was driving to his office at MIT.","His 1967 paper, about two and a half pages long, was barely cited for years. By 1976 it was the most cited paper in high-energy physics, a record it held for over 30 years.","A slip in reading dates led him to cite Peter Higgs first in 1967, which helped the name 'Higgs boson' stick. The earliest of the papers he cited was by Brout and Englert.","At 82 he told University of Texas faculty he would bar guns from his classroom despite a new campus-carry law, citing free speech."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"baruj-benacerraf","name":"Baruj Benacerraf","year":1980,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discoveries concerning genetically determined structures on the cell surface that regulate immunological reactions","tagline":"He showed that our genes help decide which invaders our immune system can respond to, a key to transplants, vaccines and autoimmune disease.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/00/Baruj_Benacerraf_1969.jpg/330px-Baruj_Benacerraf_1969.jpg","birthCountry":"Venezuela","birthYear":1920,"deathYear":2011,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["When a medical student asked him how to pronounce his first name, Baruj, he reportedly replied: you don't.","The medical schools that turned him down in 1942 reportedly included Harvard. In 1970 Harvard Medical School made him chairman of pathology.","He gave his Nobel Prize money to launch Dana-Farber Cancer Institute's first big fund drive, which raised more than $60 million, nearly twice its goal.","He learned English by watching double features at the movies, and in the 1950s ran a family bank in New York on Tuesdays and Thursdays while doing research the rest of the week.","In his 1963 breeding test, 82% of the offspring of two responder guinea pigs could react to a test molecule, but none of 26 offspring of two nonresponders could."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"lawrence-r-klein","name":"Lawrence R. Klein","year":1980,"category":"economics","motivation":"for the creation of econometric models and the application to the analysis of economic fluctuations and economic policies","tagline":"He turned economic theory into working models of whole economies, so leaders could forecast downturns and test policies before using them.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e8/Lawrence_Robert_Klein.jpg/330px-Lawrence_Robert_Klein.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1920,"deathYear":2013,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["economy","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["After World War II, when many experts expected a slide back into depression, his model predicted growth instead, and the postwar boom followed.","By 1980 his Project LINK tied together economic models of 17 industrial countries, 8 socialist countries and 4 developing regions to trace how shocks spread worldwide.","In 1954 he told a congressional committee he had briefly been a Communist in the 1940s; Michigan backed away from promoting him, and he spent four years at Oxford.","He sold economic forecasts to pay for Penn students and research, and when the business was sold he put his $1 million share into Project LINK.","He coordinated Jimmy Carter's economic task force in the 1976 campaign but never took a permanent government job."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"paul-berg","name":"Paul Berg","year":1980,"category":"chemistry","motivation":"for his fundamental studies of the biochemistry of nucleic acids, with particular regard to recombinant-DNA","tagline":"In 1972 he joined DNA from two species into one molecule, starting the genetic engineering behind many modern medicines.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/88/Paul_Berg_in_1980.jpg/330px-Paul_Berg_in_1980.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1926,"deathYear":2023,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","economy","technology","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["Berg never patented his discoveries and said he gave away everything his lab made. Stanford, he estimated, earned over $100 million from recombinant DNA patents filed by others.","In 1974 Berg led a group of scientists who asked colleagues to pause some experiments with the new technique. The voluntary pause was unprecedented and was observed worldwide.","Three Nobel laureates, Arthur Kornberg, Jerome Karle and Berg, went to Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, where a stockroom supervisor ran the science clubs.","His immigrant parents had little formal schooling and spoke Yiddish at home. Berg spoke mostly Yiddish until he started school.","Warned in 1971 that putting his virus-bacteria hybrid into E. coli, a common gut microbe, might spread cancer-linked genes, Berg dropped that step and pushed for safety rules."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"walter-gilbert","name":"Walter Gilbert","year":1980,"category":"chemistry","motivation":"for their contributions concerning the determination of base sequences in nucleic acids","tagline":"He found a chemical way to read DNA letter by letter, turning genes into text that doctors and scientists could study.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/72/Walter_Gilbert_HD2008_portrait.JPG/330px-Walter_Gilbert_HD2008_portrait.JPG","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1932,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","health","technology","economy"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["Gilbert trained as a theoretical physicist under Abdus Salam. A summer helping James Watson hunt for messenger RNA in 1960 pulled him into biology.","His method let a lab read hundreds of DNA letters in an afternoon. Before, working out a single letter might take a month.","He and Allan Maxam gave their sequencing recipe to other labs for free, even while they spent nine more months refining it.","In 1978 he coined the words \"intron\" and \"exon\" for the parts of a gene that are cut out and the parts that are kept.","His grandfather Joseph Cohen edited a Yiddish anarchist newspaper in New York, and his father-in-law was the journalist I.F. Stone."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"arthur-l-schawlow","name":"Arthur L. Schawlow","year":1981,"category":"physics","motivation":"for their contribution to the development of laser spectroscopy","tagline":"He co-wrote the 1958 blueprint for the laser, then used laser light to measure atoms with new precision.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/62/Artur_Schawlow%2C_Stanford_University.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1921,"deathYear":1999,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["technology","communication","health","economy","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["At the 1981 Nobel ceremony he gave the King of Sweden a measuring stick: a 'ruler for a ruler'.","Hunting for an edible laser, he and Theodor Hänsch tried all 12 flavours of Knox gelatin. None worked until they added a laser dye.","In 1975 he and Hänsch proposed cooling atoms with laser light. He left it out of his Nobel lecture; laser cooling went on to earn the 1997 Nobel Prize.","He did not learn that his father was Jewish until he was 17.","His Depression-era scholarship covered physics but not engineering, so the would-be radio engineer became a physicist."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"elias-canetti","name":"Elias Canetti","year":1981,"category":"literature","motivation":"for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power","tagline":"A Sephardic Jewish refugee from Nazi Vienna who spent decades studying how crowds form and how power rests on the threat of death.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fd/Elias_Canetti_2.jpg/330px-Elias_Canetti_2.jpg","birthCountry":"Bulgaria","birthYear":1905,"deathYear":1994,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["culture"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["His mother tongue was Ladino, the Spanish of Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. He learned German, the language of all his books, only in 1913, taught by his mother.","He earned a doctorate in chemistry in Vienna in 1929 but never worked as a chemist, devoting himself to writing instead.","He sketched his first plan for a book about crowds in 1925. Crowds and Power finally appeared 35 years later, in 1960.","Only the Nobel Prize in 1981, won at 76, freed him from money worries for the first time in his life.","His diaries and letters, held by Zurich's Central Library, stayed closed for 30 years after his death, until August 2024, and still need his heirs' permission to read."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"roald-hoffmann","name":"Roald Hoffmann","year":1981,"category":"chemistry","motivation":"for their theories, developed independently, concerning the course of chemical reactions","tagline":"A child who hid from the Nazis in an attic grew up to show chemists how to predict which way a reaction will go.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c9/Roald_Hoffmann.jpg/330px-Roald_Hoffmann.jpg","birthCountry":"Ukraine","birthYear":1937,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["fundamental-science","education","culture"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He was born Roald Safran and named after the polar explorer Roald Amundsen. Leaving Poland, his family bought the papers of a dead German named Hoffmann.","From 1943 to 1944 he and his mother hid for about 15 months in a village schoolhouse attic, protected by a Ukrainian teacher. His father was killed by the Nazis in 1943.","Of the roughly 4,000 Jews of his hometown, he says, perhaps 200 survived the war, and only five of them were children.","He arrived in New York at 11, and English was his sixth language. Nine years later he graduated from Columbia summa cum laude in chemistry.","He heard he had won the Nobel Prize on the radio while fixing his bicycle in his garage. Even after the prize he kept teaching first-year chemistry at Cornell."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"aaron-klug","name":"Aaron Klug","year":1982,"category":"chemistry","motivation":"for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic acid-protein complexes","tagline":"He taught electron microscopes to see in 3D, revealing how viruses and chromosomes are built, and found the DNA-gripping zinc finger.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a5/Aaron_Klug_1979.jpg/330px-Aaron_Klug_1979.jpg","birthCountry":"Lithuania","birthYear":1926,"deathYear":2018,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","health","technology"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["The South African government told US officials he was a communist, so he was refused a US visa. He stayed in Britain, and at a London lab he met Rosalind Franklin.","He was the sole winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, for turning flat electron-microscope pictures into 3D maps of life's molecular machines.","In 1985 his lab discovered zinc fingers, small DNA-gripping protein modules. About 3% of human genes contain the zinc-finger design.","He grew up in a Yiddish-speaking family and was reading the newspaper by the age of three and a half.","At 15 he won a scholarship to study medicine in Johannesburg, in the same class as another future Nobel laureate, Sydney Brenner."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"john-r-vane","name":"John R. Vane","year":1982,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discoveries concerning prostaglandins and related biologically active substances","tagline":"He found how aspirin works and co-discovered prostacyclin, explaining aspirin's heart benefits and helping start a new class of heart drugs.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e3/John_Robert_Vane.jpg/330px-John_Robert_Vane.jpg","birthCountry":"United Kingdom","birthYear":1927,"deathYear":2004,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["The idea for how aspirin works came to him over a weekend. On Monday he told two colleagues he thought he knew, and by that evening one lab test had convinced him.","His first real lab was a garden shed his father built after a chemistry-set explosion at the kitchen stove turned the fresh blue paint a dirty green.","Asked his plans after a chemistry degree, he said he wanted to do anything else, then went to the library to find out what pharmacology was.","A snake-venom extract brought to his lab by Brazilian colleague Sérgio Ferreira helped persuade Squibb to seek a synthetic ACE inhibitor: captopril, approved in 1981.","In 1973 he left academia to run research at Wellcome, though a few friends felt good science belonged only in universities. His team there discovered prostacyclin."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"cesar-milstein","name":"César Milstein","year":1984,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for theories concerning the specificity in development and control of the immune system and the discovery of the principle for production of monoclonal antibodies","tagline":"With Georges Köhler, he found how to make unlimited pure antibodies on demand, the basis of antibody medicines and pregnancy tests.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ae/Milstein_lnp_restauraci%C3%B3n.jpg","birthCountry":"Argentina","birthYear":1927,"deathYear":2002,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","economy","technology","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["Milstein turned to antibodies only in 1963, at Fred Sanger's suggestion; twelve years later he and Georges Köhler made the first monoclonal antibodies against a chosen target.","The hybridoma method was never patented. Antibody-based medicines, including related fusion proteins, sold about $217 billion worldwide in 2021 alone.","In 1962 Argentina's health minister purged Milstein's institute and, Milstein recalled, told its scientists to leave because intellectuals were all communists and Jews.","More than 200 antibody medicines are now on the market, for conditions from breast cancer and lymphoma to arthritis, migraine and multiple sclerosis.","On their honeymoon, he and his wife Celia hitchhiked around Europe for a year, including a couple of months working on kibbutzim in Israel."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"franco-modigliani","name":"Franco Modigliani","year":1985,"category":"economics","motivation":"for his pioneering analyses of saving and of financial markets","tagline":"Driven from Italy by Mussolini's racial laws, he explained how families save over a lifetime and what really sets a company's value.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/53/Franco_Modigliani.jpg/330px-Franco_Modigliani.jpg","birthCountry":"Italy","birthYear":1918,"deathYear":2003,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["economy","fundamental-science","education"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["As a teenage law student he won a national economics contest and received the award from Mussolini's own hand. Soon after, Mussolini's racial laws drove him out of Italy.","He reached New York in August 1939, days before World War II began, and studied economics at night while selling books by day to support his family.","On the day he won the Nobel Prize, he celebrated by playing tennis doubles with his friend and fellow laureate Paul Samuelson.","Days before he died at 85, he, Samuelson and Robert Solow published a letter rebuking the ADL for honoring Silvio Berlusconi, who had played down Mussolini's crimes.","From 1970 to 1995, Federal Reserve staff forecast the US economy with a model whose building he co-led, and his life-cycle theory of saving was built into its long-run structure."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"herbert-a-hauptman","name":"Herbert A. Hauptman","year":1985,"category":"chemistry","motivation":"for their outstanding achievements in the development of direct methods for the determination of crystal structures","tagline":"A mathematician who, with Jerome Karle, cracked crystallography's phase problem so chemists could read molecular shapes from X-ray data.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e1/Herbert_Hauptman_-_UB_2009.jpg/330px-Herbert_Hauptman_-_UB_2009.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1917,"deathYear":2011,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","mathematics","health"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["Every one of his degrees was in mathematics, yet in 1985 he became the first mathematician to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.","He and Jerome Karle published their method in 1953, but crystallographers largely ignored it for about ten years because the math was unfamiliar.","A colleague recalled that mapping a 15-atom antibiotic once took two years; with direct methods a 50-atom molecule took two days.","In 1970 he left the Naval Research Laboratory rather than move his work toward laser-guided missiles.","He made stained-glass models of complex geometric shapes; a permanent collection is kept at the Buffalo institute that bears his name."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"jerome-karle","name":"Jerome Karle","year":1985,"category":"chemistry","motivation":"for their outstanding achievements in the development of direct methods for the determination of crystal structures","tagline":"He helped write the math that lets X-rays reveal a molecule's shape directly, turning years of crystal puzzle-solving into routine work.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/91/Jerome_Karle%2C_2009.jpg/330px-Jerome_Karle%2C_2009.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1918,"deathYear":2013,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","health","technology"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He learned he had won the Nobel Prize in mid-air: the pilot of his transatlantic flight announced it to the cabin and invited him up to first class.","When he and Herbert Hauptman announced their method in the early 1950s, many crystallographers refused to believe it, and a hostile review dismissed it as foolishness.","His wife, Isabella Karle, turned the theory into a working recipe. He felt strongly that she should have shared the Nobel Prize.","Before crystallography, he devised a test for fluoride in drinking water that became a standard method just as fluoridation was getting under way.","He started City College at 15 and graduated in 1937 in the same class as Hauptman, the man he would share the Nobel Prize with."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"joseph-l-goldstein","name":"Joseph L. Goldstein","year":1985,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discoveries concerning the regulation of cholesterol metabolism","tagline":"With Michael Brown he found the LDL receptor, the cell's doorway for cholesterol, explaining inherited heart attacks and how statins work.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3e/Joe_Goldstein.JPG/330px-Joe_Goldstein.JPG","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1940,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["Goldstein and Michael Brown met as medical interns in Boston in 1966 and became bridge partners at the NIH. They have worked together since 1972.","By their own count in 2012, their 40-year partnership was the longest scientific collaboration in Nobel history.","At the 1985 Nobel banquet he joked that their true 'collaborative age' was 45 times 44, or 1,980 years, surely old enough for the prize.","In Seattle he and colleagues found that the common form of familial hypercholesterolemia affects about 1 in 500 people, and 1 in 25 heart attack survivors.","A former postdoc in their lab, Thomas Südhof, cloned the LDL receptor gene there and went on to win a Nobel Prize of his own in 2013."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"michael-s-brown","name":"Michael S. Brown","year":1985,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discoveries concerning the regulation of cholesterol metabolism","tagline":"With Joseph Goldstein he found the LDL receptor, showing how cells pull cholesterol from the blood and how statins protect hearts.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9c/Mike_Brown_2003.jpg/330px-Mike_Brown_2003.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1941,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He traces his interest in science to age 13, when he got an amateur radio license and built transmitters that often blew all the fuses in the house.","At the University of Pennsylvania he majored in chemistry but spent most of his time at the student paper, as features editor and briefly editor-in-chief.","His Nobel work was spurred by two siblings, aged 6 and 8, who kept having heart attacks because their LDL cholesterol was eight times normal.","In 1981, months after Merck halted its statin trials over a cancer scare, he and Goldstein showed in dogs that the drug boosted liver LDL receptors and lowered LDL.","He met Joseph Goldstein as a young doctor in Boston in 1966; they merged their Dallas labs by 1974 and were still publishing together four decades later."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"elie-wiesel","name":"Elie Wiesel","year":1986,"category":"peace","motivation":"for being a messenger to mankind: his message is one of peace, atonement and dignity","tagline":"An Auschwitz survivor who turned his memories into Night and a lifelong fight against indifference to suffering anywhere.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/61/Elie_Wiesel_2012_Shankbone.JPG/330px-Elie_Wiesel_2012_Shankbone.JPG","birthCountry":"Romania","birthYear":1928,"deathYear":2016,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["human-rights","education","culture","peace"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He was 15 when he and his family were deported to Auschwitz. His mother, father and little sister were killed; he and two older sisters survived.","Night first reached the best-seller list in 2006, nearly 50 years after it appeared, when Oprah Winfrey chose it for her book club. It is now in about 30 languages.","He wrote the 1979 report that proposed the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which has since had more than 50 million visitors; about 90% of visitors today are not Jewish.","While receiving a medal from President Reagan in 1985, he publicly urged him not to visit a German cemetery where Waffen-SS soldiers were buried.","The international commission he chaired led Romania in 2004 to accept that its wartime regime caused the deaths of 280,000 to 380,000 Jews."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"john-c-polanyi","name":"John C. Polanyi","year":1986,"category":"chemistry","motivation":"for their contributions concerning the dynamics of chemical elementary processes","tagline":"He read the faint infrared glow of newborn molecules to see how chemical reactions happen, and his idea led to the chemical laser.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fc/John_Polanyi_01.jpg/330px-John_Polanyi_01.jpg","birthCountry":"Germany","birthYear":1929,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["fundamental-science","technology","peace"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["His 1958 experiment ran on a neon-sign transformer and an infrared spectrometer borrowed from the whole chemistry department.","Physical Review Letters rejected his 1960 proposal for a chemical laser as lacking scientific interest. Another journal published the same manuscript.","His family left Berlin in 1933, when he was four, as Nazi attacks on Jewish intellectuals ended his father's career in Germany.","At 11, with Germany bombing Britain, he was sent to Canada and lived with a Toronto family for three years.","He was the founding chair of the Canadian Pugwash Group, which works against nuclear weapons, from 1960 to 1978."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"rita-levimontalcini","name":"Rita Levi-Montalcini","year":1986,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discoveries of growth factors","tagline":"Barred from her university by Fascist race laws, she kept working in her bedroom and went on to discover the first growth factor.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/57/Rita_Levi-Montalcini_%281986%29.png/330px-Rita_Levi-Montalcini_%281986%29.png","birthCountry":"Italy","birthYear":1909,"deathYear":2012,"gender":"female","refugee":true,"domains":["fundamental-science","health","education","womens-rights"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["After Fascist race laws pushed her out of her university post in 1938, she built a lab in her bedroom, using sewing needles as scalpels and a watchmaker's forceps.","In 1952 she flew to Rio de Janeiro with two tumour-bearing mice in her handbag. There, nerve tissue grown near the tumour sprouted a halo of fibres within a day.","Nerve growth factor was the first growth factor discovered. The Nobel Assembly said every group that later found a new one followed in her and Cohen's tracks.","At 97, as a senator for life, she held a deciding vote and threatened to withdraw her support until the government reversed a cut to science funding.","She started a new research project at 98 and published it in PNAS in January 2012, at 102. She died that December, aged 103."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"stanley-cohen","name":"Stanley Cohen","year":1986,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discoveries of growth factors","tagline":"He found EGF, the signal that tells skin cells to grow, and its receptor, now the target of drugs for lung and bowel cancer.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2b/Stanley_Cohen_Nobel.webp/330px-Stanley_Cohen_Nobel.webp","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1922,"deathYear":2020,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["His big clue came from newborn mice that opened their eyes at 6 to 7 days old instead of the usual 12 to 14, after he injected them with a gland extract.","For his PhD on earthworm metabolism he spent nights collecting more than 5,000 worms from the University of Michigan campus.","The son of a Russian Jewish tailor, he said his parents could never have paid for college. Brooklyn College charged no tuition.","The EGF receptor he found is the target of lung cancer pills. In a major trial, patients on the newest one lived a median 38.6 months.","A childhood polio survivor whose legs never fully recovered, he played tennis and the clarinet, and kept his lab small even after the Nobel."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"joseph-brodsky","name":"Joseph Brodsky","year":1987,"category":"literature","motivation":"for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity","tagline":"A Leningrad poet tried as a 'parasite' and expelled by the Soviet state, who became a Nobel laureate and America's Poet Laureate.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1c/Joseph_Brodsky_1988.jpg/330px-Joseph_Brodsky_1988.jpg","birthCountry":"Russia","birthYear":1940,"deathYear":1996,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["culture","human-rights","education"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["At his 1964 trial, the judge asked who had ranked him among poets. He replied by asking who had ranked him as a member of the human race.","At 14 he passed the entrance exams for a naval submarine school but was turned away because his papers listed his nationality as Jewish.","He won the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature at 47, one of the youngest writers ever to receive it.","After Moscow expelled him in 1972, he became US Poet Laureate in 1991 and urged that poetry books be put in hotel rooms and sold in drugstores.","For 12 years Soviet officials refused his elderly parents' requests to visit him abroad. Both died without seeing their only son again."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"k-alex-muller","name":"K. Alex Müller","year":1987,"category":"physics","motivation":"for their important break-through in the discovery of superconductivity in ceramic materials","tagline":"He bet that humble ceramics could carry current with zero resistance, and opened the era of high-temperature superconductors.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9b/Karl_Alexander_Mueller.jpg/330px-Karl_Alexander_Mueller.jpg","birthCountry":"Switzerland","birthYear":1927,"deathYear":2023,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","technology","energy"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He and Georg Bednorz reported their discovery in April 1986; the Nobel Prize was announced in October 1987, only about 18 months later.","The record for the warmest superconductor had been stuck at 23 degrees above absolute zero since 1973. Their ceramic beat it by 12 degrees.","The search nearly died in 1985 after about two years of failed samples. The winning material was first measured in January 1986.","Their discovery set off the 1987 'Woodstock of Physics', a New York session where about 50 speakers talked until after 3 a.m.","His first-year physics class at ETH Zurich was more than three times the usual size. Students called it the 'atom bomb semester'."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"robert-m-solow","name":"Robert M. Solow","year":1987,"category":"economics","motivation":"for his contributions to the theory of economic growth","tagline":"He showed that better ideas and skills, more than extra machines, are what make nations richer over time.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/95/Robert_Solow_by_Olaf_Storbeck.jpg/330px-Robert_Solow_by_Olaf_Storbeck.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1924,"deathYear":2023,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["economy","fundamental-science","education"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["As a high-school senior in 1940 he was turned down for a Harvard Club scholarship, he believed because he was Jewish. He won a different scholarship and went to Harvard anyway.","In World War II he spent two years in Italy intercepting and decoding German army radio messages from trucks close to the front line.","His 1957 study found that about seven-eighths of the doubling of US output per hour of work from 1909 to 1949 came from technical progress, not more machinery.","Four of his doctoral students, George Akerlof, Peter Diamond, William Nordhaus and Joseph Stiglitz, later won the Nobel Prize in economics themselves.","He reckoned he could have written 25 percent more papers by neglecting his students, and said the choice was easy."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"gertrude-b-elion","name":"Gertrude B. Elion","year":1988,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discoveries of important principles for drug treatment","tagline":"She designed drugs that help cure childhood leukemia and made organ transplants workable, and helped create the first selective herpes drug.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4f/Gertrude_Elion_%28cropped%29.jpg/330px-Gertrude_Elion_%28cropped%29.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1918,"deathYear":1999,"gender":"female","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["She never earned a PhD: after two years of night classes she was told to quit her job or quit school, and she kept the job.","Her leukemia drug 6-MP won US approval in 1953, about two years after she first made it. It is still a mainstay of care that cures over 90% of children with ALL in rich countries.","Her drug azathioprine, paired with prednisone, made kidney transplants from unrelated donors workable in the early 1960s and anchored anti-rejection treatment until about 1980.","In 1991 she became the first woman inducted into the US National Inventors Hall of Fame. She held 45 patents.","Turned away from paid lab jobs as a woman, she worked unpaid for a chemist and endured daily antisemitic jokes from the company's president."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"jack-steinberger","name":"Jack Steinberger","year":1988,"category":"physics","motivation":"for the neutrino beam method and the demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino","tagline":"Sent out of Nazi Germany at 13, he helped turn ghostly neutrinos into a beam and showed that matter's lightest particles come in families.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/42/Jack-Steinberger-2008.JPG/330px-Jack-Steinberger-2008.JPG","birthCountry":"Germany","birthYear":1921,"deathYear":2020,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["At 13 he left Nazi Germany with his older brother on the SS Washington in 1934, one of 300 German refugee children placed in American homes by Jewish charities.","The 1962 neutrino experiment hid its detector behind a 13.5-metre wall of steel from scrapped warships. Only neutrinos could get through.","He gave his Nobel medal to New Trier High School near Chicago, the school he attended after arriving in America as a young refugee.","Bad Kissingen, the town he fled as a boy, named its high school after him in 2001 and made him an honorary citizen in 2006.","In 1950 he left Berkeley, partly because he declined to sign the university's anticommunist loyalty oath."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"leon-m-lederman","name":"Leon M. Lederman","year":1988,"category":"physics","motivation":"for the neutrino beam method and the demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino","tagline":"A laundryman's son from the Bronx, he helped prove there are two kinds of neutrino, then spent decades bringing science to schoolchildren.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1b/Leon_M._Lederman.jpg/330px-Leon_M._Lederman.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1922,"deathYear":2018,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","education"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["To filter everything but neutrinos out of their beam, the prize-winning team built a wall of steel 13.5 metres thick from scrapped warships.","His mother came to America alone at 12, sent away by a family in danger, with a tag around her neck giving the address of someone in New York.","He found the upsilon particle in 1977, the first sign of the bottom quark, and later led Fermilab as it built the world's highest-energy particle collider.","He helped found a public boarding school for gifted Illinois teenagers, and sometimes wandered its halls wearing his Nobel medal because the students enjoyed it.","In 2015, with his memory failing, he and his wife auctioned his Nobel medal for $765,000 to pay for his long-term care."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"melvin-schwartz","name":"Melvin Schwartz","year":1988,"category":"physics","motivation":"for the neutrino beam method and the demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino","tagline":"He turned the ghostly neutrino into a beam physicists could aim, and used it to show nature has more than one kind of neutrino.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fe/Melvin_Schwartz.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1932,"deathYear":2006,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","technology"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["The idea for the first high-energy neutrino beam came to him the evening after a Columbia coffee-hour discussion in late 1959.","His team hid their detector behind a steel wall 13.5 metres thick, built from the plates of scrapped warships.","Around 1975-76, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak asked his company to invest $25,000 in Apple. He said no.","When he won the Nobel Prize in 1988, he was running a computer-security company in Silicon Valley, not a physics lab.","Growing up in New York, he went to a Sunday afternoon school run by a secular, Zionist Yiddish workers' group, and at 16 he met his wife at a Labor Zionist summer camp."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"harold-e-varmus","name":"Harold E. Varmus","year":1989,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes","tagline":"He showed that cancer genes are corrupted copies of our own growth genes, a key step toward drugs that target cancer.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/34/National_Cancer_Institute_director_Harold_E._Varmus.jpg/330px-National_Cancer_Institute_director_Harold_E._Varmus.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1939,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["Before medicine he studied English literature, earning a Harvard master's degree focused on Anglo-Saxon and metaphysical poetry.","He began lab research only as he neared 30, unusually late for a biomedical scientist, and shared a Nobel Prize about two decades later.","In 1985-86 he chaired an international virus-naming committee that proposed the name the AIDS virus still carries: HIV.","At the 1989 Nobel banquet he likened the cancer cell to Grendel, the monster in the Old English epic Beowulf.","He was the first Nobel laureate to run the US National Institutes of Health, whose budget grew from under $11 billion to almost $16 billion on his watch."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"sidney-altman","name":"Sidney Altman","year":1989,"category":"chemistry","motivation":"for their discovery of catalytic properties of RNA","tagline":"He showed that RNA, long seen as a mere messenger, can work as an enzyme, a finding that rewrote textbooks and hinted at how life began.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/Sidney_Altman_crop.jpg","birthCountry":"Canada","birthYear":1939,"deathYear":2022,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","health"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He planned to attend McGill, but a friend invited him along to take the American SAT exam, and both applied to MIT. He got in; his friend did not.","A stubborn RNA kept showing up in his purified enzyme. He asked a student to get rid of it; the student proved it was essential.","The decisive 1983 result came from a control experiment: his postdoc Cecilia Guerrier-Takada tested the RNA alone with extra magnesium, and it cut by itself.","As a teenager he offered book reviews to the Montreal Star. The editor advised him to stick to science while he was young.","In the year of his Nobel Prize he finished four years as Dean of Yale College, where he led an expansion of science and language requirements."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"harry-m-markowitz","name":"Harry M. Markowitz","year":1990,"category":"economics","motivation":"for their pioneering work in the theory of financial economics","tagline":"He turned the old advice not to put all your eggs in one basket into math that now shapes how retirement savings are invested.","thumb":null,"birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1927,"deathYear":2023,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["economy","technology"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["The core idea of portfolio theory came to him one afternoon in 1950, while he was reading a book on stock values in a University of Chicago library.","At his thesis defense, Milton Friedman argued that portfolio theory was not economics. Chicago awarded him the Ph.D. anyway.","He co-founded the software company CACI in 1962 to support SIMSCRIPT, a simulation language he helped create. His co-founder fired him in 1968.","He won operations research's John von Neumann Theory Prize in 1989 and the Nobel in economics a year later.","He taught at UC San Diego until 2019, when he was in his early 90s, and gave his Nobel medal to the university."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"jerome-i-friedman","name":"Jerome I. Friedman","year":1990,"category":"physics","motivation":"for their pioneering investigations concerning deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons, which have been of essential importance for the development of the quark model in particle physics","tagline":"He helped find the first direct evidence of quarks, showing that the protons and neutrons in every atom are built from smaller parts.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c6/Jerry_Friedman_in_Valencia%2C_Rey_Jaime_event%2C_June_2016.jpg/330px-Jerry_Friedman_in_Valencia%2C_Rey_Jaime_event%2C_June_2016.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1930,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","education"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He turned down an art-school scholarship to study physics after a short book on relativity by Einstein caught his imagination in high school.","His mother reached America in 1914 on one of the Lusitania's last voyages. She came from Motol, the Belarusian shtetl where Israel's first president was born.","As data piled up, the scattering his team measured climbed to about 1,000 times his own advance estimate, a clue that something tiny and hard sat inside the proton.","In 1968 a group vote barred him from mentioning possible point-like particles inside the proton when he presented the first results at a conference in Vienna.","In a 2001 lecture he noted that the quarks and electrons in a 150-pound person weigh only about 3 pounds; the rest of our weight comes from energy."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"merton-h-miller","name":"Merton H. Miller","year":1990,"category":"economics","motivation":"for their pioneering work in the theory of financial economics","tagline":"He showed that what a company does with its money matters more than how it raises it, laying the groundwork of modern corporate finance.","thumb":null,"birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1923,"deathYear":2000,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["economy","fundamental-science","education"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He liked to explain his Nobel-winning theorem with a Yogi Berra joke: asking for his pizza to be cut into 12 slices instead of six because he was extra hungry.","Professors and Wall Street first judged M&M's 1961 dividend paper to be wrong. Today every finance student learns the M&M theorems.","He urged Myron Scholes, then a student computer programmer, to do a PhD and helped Eugene Fama pick his thesis topic. Both later won economics Nobels.","He and Robert Solow, a future fellow economics laureate, sat in the same section of Harvard's introductory economics course.","In his Nobel lecture he rejected press reports calling him a co-inventor of the leveraged buyout, since his theorem said borrowing alone could not raise a firm's value."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"nadine-gordimer","name":"Nadine Gordimer","year":1991,"category":"literature","motivation":"who through her magnificent epic writing has - in the words of Alfred Nobel - been of very great benefit to humanity","tagline":"A novelist who showed the world how apartheid poisoned ordinary lives, while quietly helping the movement that ended it.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/37/Nadine_Gordimer_01.JPG/330px-Nadine_Gordimer_01.JPG","birthCountry":"South Africa","birthYear":1923,"deathYear":2014,"gender":"female","refugee":false,"domains":["culture","human-rights"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["In 1991 she became the first South African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and only the seventh woman to win it.","Her mother took her out of school at about 11 over a supposed heart problem. Taught at home and isolated, she said the town library became her real school.","Apartheid censors banned three of her novels. A World of Strangers stayed banned for 12 years and The Late Bourgeois World for a decade.","She and her husband hid fugitive ANC members wanted by the police, and illegally sheltered the ANC's president, Chief Albert Luthuli, for several weeks.","She said her proudest day was not winning the Nobel but testifying in court on behalf of anti-apartheid activists at the Delmas treason trial."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"edmond-h-fischer","name":"Edmond H. Fischer","year":1992,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discoveries concerning reversible protein phosphorylation as a biological regulatory mechanism","tagline":"He helped find the chemical on-off switch that controls proteins in our cells, now the target of dozens of cancer drugs.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/21/Edmond_Fischer_Nobel_Laureate_1992.jpg/330px-Edmond_Fischer_Nobel_Laureate_1992.jpg","birthCountry":"China","birthYear":1920,"deathYear":2021,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["In 1939, after Mussolini allied with Hitler, he burned his Italian passport on the steps of the Italian consulate in Geneva and took Swiss nationality.","He studied piano at the Geneva Conservatory for seven years and weighed a music career. He played at his grandson's wedding less than a month before he died.","He and Edwin Krebs solved a muscle-enzyme puzzle that Nobel laureates Carl and Gerty Cori had given up on, and did it in about 18 months.","He learned to fly at 60, bought a four-seat Cessna, and kept flying until he was 80.","The Nobel Prize came in 1992, 37 years after the 1955 experiments with Edwin Krebs that it honored."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"gary-becker","name":"Gary Becker","year":1992,"category":"economics","motivation":"for having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behaviour and interaction, including nonmarket behaviour","tagline":"He used economics to explain schooling, crime, prejudice and family life, and showed why investing in people pays off.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3f/GaryBecker-May24-2008.jpg/330px-GaryBecker-May24-2008.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1930,"deathYear":2014,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["economy","education","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["His theory of crime began when, running late to examine a student, he weighed a parking ticket against the cost of a lot. He parked illegally and was not ticketed.","In the 1950s and 1960s the phrase human capital was attacked for treating people like machines, so he hesitated a long time before giving his 1964 book that title.","When his father lost most of his sight, young Gary read him the stock quotations. Becker wondered if that sparked his interest in economics, though he found it boring.","In 2007 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, joining his teacher Milton Friedman among the few economists who hold both it and the economics Nobel.","He met his second wife, historian Guity Nashat, when she tried to haggle over a dining set he was selling. He would not cut the price but let her pay later."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"georges-charpak","name":"Georges Charpak","year":1992,"category":"physics","motivation":"for his invention and development of particle detectors, in particular the multiwire proportional chamber","tagline":"A Dachau survivor, he strung hair-thin wires into detectors that let physicists catch rare particles and doctors use gentler X-rays.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f6/CHARPAK_Georges-24x50-2005_cropped.JPG","birthCountry":"Poland","birthYear":1924,"deathYear":2010,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["fundamental-science","health","technology","education","human-rights"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He survived Dachau, where he was held as a Resistance fighter. A CERN colleague wrote that he lived because the guards never realized their political prisoner was Jewish.","His wire chamber, linked to a computer, could record up to a million particle tracks a second. The bubble chambers it replaced took about one photograph a second.","Through 2025 he is the last person to win the Nobel Prize in Physics alone. Every physics prize since 1993 has been shared.","At the Nobel banquet he joked that the official photographer called him his 137th laureate, a number physicists treat as almost magical.","He co-founded La main à la pâte, which brought hands-on science into French primary schools and has worked with more than 50 countries."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"rudolph-a-marcus","name":"Rudolph A. Marcus","year":1992,"category":"chemistry","motivation":"for his contributions to the theory of electron transfer reactions in chemical systems","tagline":"He explained why electrons hop between molecules fast or slow, the step at the heart of photosynthesis, rust and batteries.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/79/Prof._Dr._Rudolph_A._Marcus_%28cropped%29.jpg/330px-Prof._Dr._Rudolph_A._Marcus_%28cropped%29.jpg","birthCountry":"Canada","birthYear":1923,"deathYear":2026,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","energy","technology"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He recalled that Jewish applicants to McGill needed about a 75% average, close to an A. In the 1930s, other applicants needed 60%.","After his postdoc he wrote 35 letters seeking a faculty job, with little success; not everyone even replied. A chance meeting at a conference finally got him hired.","He worked out the core of his electron-transfer theory in about a month, which he later called the fastest thing he ever did.","His strangest prediction, that some reactions slow down when they release more energy, waited about 25 years for convincing proof.","He died at 102 while still working on three papers. Chemistry World called him the longest-lived chemistry Nobel laureate ever."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"robert-w-fogel","name":"Robert W. Fogel","year":1993,"category":"economics","motivation":"for having renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change","tagline":"He used numbers to rewrite American history, from railroads and slavery to why people today grow taller and live longer.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4f/Robert_William_Fogel.jpg/330px-Robert_William_Fogel.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1927,"deathYear":2013,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["economy","health","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["His parents were seven-year-olds in Odessa during the 1905 pogrom. In 1966 he tape-recorded their memories of the days when mobs attacked Jewish homes.","Typhus nearly killed his father on the family's way to America in 1922. A loan from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society paid for their steerage tickets.","His railroad book argued that without railroads, the US would have reached its 1890 level of income only about three months later.","He estimated that better nutrition explained roughly 30 percent of the growth in British income per person between 1790 and 1980.","From 1982 he and his wife Enid, a Black youth leader he met in 1948, hosted a dinner every fall to welcome minority students to Chicago's business school."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"alfred-g-gilman","name":"Alfred G. Gilman","year":1994,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discovery of G-proteins and the role of these proteins in signal transduction in cells","tagline":"He purified the first G-protein, the switch that carries hormone and drug signals into our cells.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7f/Alfred_Goodman_Gilman_%28cropped%29.jpg/330px-Alfred_Goodman_Gilman_%28cropped%29.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1941,"deathYear":2015,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science","economy"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["His middle name, Goodman, honours his father's co-author. Their pharmacology textbook came out in 1941, the year he was born, and a friend joked he was named after a textbook.","The key clue came from an experiment that worked for the wrong reason: a cell extract with its enzyme destroyed still restored the hormone response, exposing a hidden protein.","Told he had won the Nobel Prize, he joked that he had first activated his receptor, then his G-protein, and secreted all the adrenaline he had.","In 2012 he quit as chief scientist of Texas's $3 billion cancer institute, protesting a $20 million grant awarded without scientific review.","In 2003 he and 16 fellow Academy members, three of them Nobel laureates, urged Texas to judge biology textbooks on scientific accuracy alone."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"george-a-olah","name":"George A. Olah","year":1994,"category":"chemistry","motivation":"for his contribution to carbocation chemistry","tagline":"Hidden in Budapest as a teenager in 1944, he later used superacids to trap fleeting carbon ions, knowledge behind cleaner fuels.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/68/Ol%C3%A1h_Gy%C3%B6rgy_el%C5%91ad%C3%A1sa_8299.jpg/330px-Ol%C3%A1h_Gy%C3%B6rgy_el%C5%91ad%C3%A1sa_8299.jpg","birthCountry":"Hungary","birthYear":1927,"deathYear":2017,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["fundamental-science","technology","energy","environment"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["Magic Acid got its name after a lab party, when a postdoc dropped a leftover Christmas candle into the superacid. The wax dissolved and gave a clean NMR spectrum of a carbocation.","In the last months of World War II he hid in Budapest and was among the children sheltered by Lutheran pastor Gábor Sztehlo, whose 32 homes saved some 1,500 to 1,600 children.","He reached Sarnia, Ontario, in 1957 as a refugee from Hungary, with all his family's possessions in two cardboard boxes, and began his carbocation work in a Dow Chemical lab.","The strongest superacids he used are about a billion billion (10^18) times stronger than pure sulfuric acid, strong enough to force hydrogen ions onto methane.","An Icelandic plant that turns waste carbon dioxide into methanol fuel, the first of its kind at industrial scale, is named the George Olah plant in his honor."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"john-c-harsanyi","name":"John C. Harsanyi","year":1994,"category":"economics","motivation":"for their pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-cooperative games","tagline":"He escaped deportation in 1944, then gave economists the tools to analyze deals where each side hides what it knows.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/51/John_Harsanyi%2C_Eger.JPG/330px-John_Harsanyi%2C_Eger.JPG","birthCountry":"Hungary","birthYear":1920,"deathYear":2000,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["economy","fundamental-science","mathematics"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["In November 1944 he slipped away at a Budapest railway station just before his forced-labor unit was deported to Austria, then hid in a Jesuit monastery's cellar.","Arriving in Australia in 1950 with degrees that were not recognized there, he did factory work by day and studied economics at night.","His key idea grew out of advising the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, whose negotiators could not see the Soviet side's true aims.","At the 1994 Nobel banquet he recalled that a leading university library had once catalogued the founding book of game theory under the heading of games and physical exercises.","His 1994 prize, shared with John Nash and Reinhard Selten, was the first Nobel Prize to honor work in game theory."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"martin-rodbell","name":"Martin Rodbell","year":1994,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discovery of G-proteins and the role of these proteins in signal transduction in cells","tagline":"He found that cells pass outside messages inward through a GTP-powered switch, key to how hormones, senses and many drugs work.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e8/Rodbell%2C_Martin_%281925-1998%29.jpg/330px-Rodbell%2C_Martin_%281925-1998%29.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1925,"deathYear":1998,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science","economy"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["The key clue came from an impure chemical: commercial ATP carried traces of GTP, which worked at concentrations hundreds to a thousand times lower.","He and biochemist Oscar Hechter worked out the three-part model of cell signalling in a Washington hotel bar. Rodbell recalled sketching it on the tablecloth.","His wife, Barbara Ledermann, survived the Holocaust in Amsterdam under a false name. Her younger sister Sanne, a friend of Anne Frank, appears in Anne's diary.","For five or six years, colleagues at conferences asked whether he was going to talk about GTP again. In 1994 it won him a share of the Nobel Prize.","He wrote poems for special occasions all his life, and his speech at the 1994 Nobel banquet was written in verse."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"reinhard-selten","name":"Reinhard Selten","year":1994,"category":"economics","motivation":"for their pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-cooperative games","tagline":"He gave economists a test for spotting empty threats, and helped make the laboratory a place to study how real people decide.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/05/Reinhard_Selten2.jpg/330px-Reinhard_Selten2.jpg","birthCountry":"Poland","birthYear":1930,"deathYear":2016,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["economy","fundamental-science","mathematics"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["Classed as half-Jewish under the Nazis, he was forced out of high school at 14 and barred from learning a trade; only unskilled work was open to him.","Subgame perfection, the idea at the heart of his Nobel, was first defined in a 1965 oligopoly paper; he later wrote he never suspected it would be quoted almost only for that.","In 1984 he founded the BonnEconLab, which the University of Bonn describes as the oldest laboratory for experimental economics in Europe.","When he died in 2016, he was still the only German ever to have won the Nobel prize in economics.","The day his Nobel was announced, he came home from grocery shopping to a crowd of reporters and first helped his wife, a wheelchair user, into the house."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"shimon-peres","name":"Shimon Peres","year":1994,"category":"peace","motivation":"for their efforts to create peace in the Middle East","tagline":"He built Israel's military might, then spent decades pursuing peace, signing the 1993 Oslo declaration with the PLO.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/42/Shimon_Peres_-_portrait_photograh_-_1996_%28full%29.jpg/330px-Shimon_Peres_-_portrait_photograh_-_1996_%28full%29.jpg","birthCountry":"Belarus","birthYear":1923,"deathYear":2016,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["peace","economy"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He took his Hebrew surname, Peres, from the bearded vulture after his group found a nest on a banned 1944 trek into the Negev that ended in a British jail.","At 29 he became director-general of Israel's defense ministry, and in 1957 he signed the secret deal with France for the Dimona nuclear reactor.","At the 1993 White House ceremony it was Peres, not Rabin, who signed the Oslo declaration for Israel, alongside the PLO's Mahmoud Abbas.","As prime minister he pushed through a 1985 plan that brought Israel's inflation down from about 450% a year to under 20% within two years.","He served almost 48 years in the Knesset, the longest in its history, and was the first person to serve as both Israel's prime minister and its president."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"yitzhak-rabin","name":"Yitzhak Rabin","year":1994,"category":"peace","motivation":"for their efforts to create peace in the Middle East","tagline":"A general who led Israel's army in 1967, then signed peace deals with the Palestinians and Jordan, and was killed for it.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5f/Flickr_-_Israel_Defense_Forces_-_Life_of_Lt._Gen._Yitzhak_Rabin%2C_7th_IDF_Chief_of_Staff_in_photos_%2811%29.jpg/330px-Flickr_-_Israel_Defense_Forces_-_Life_of_Lt._Gen._Yitzhak_Rabin%2C_7th_IDF_Chief_of_Staff_in_photos_%2811%29.jpg","birthCountry":"Israel","birthYear":1922,"deathYear":1995,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["peace"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He planned to become a water engineer, but at 16 he was handed a rifle, as he recalled in his Nobel lecture.","In 1945 he helped plan and lead the Palmach raid that freed 208 Jewish refugees, many of them Holocaust survivors, from Britain's Atlit detention camp.","As army chief of staff he led Israel's forces in the 1967 Six-Day War; 26 years later he shook hands with PLO leader Yasser Arafat at the White House.","He was Israel's first native-born prime minister, and he remains the only one to have been assassinated.","In 1977 he gave up the race for prime minister after it emerged that he and his wife kept a US bank account, then illegal for Israelis."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"frederick-reines","name":"Frederick Reines","year":1995,"category":"physics","motivation":"for the detection of the neutrino","tagline":"He caught the 'undetectable' neutrino in 1956, opening a new window on stars and matter, after years spent testing nuclear weapons.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cb/Frederick_Reines%2C_early_1950s.jpg/330px-Frederick_Reines%2C_early_1950s.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1918,"deathYear":1998,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","space","technology","peace"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["Los Alamos says his neutrino detection is the only Nobel Prize-winning work ever done at the lab, though 18 Manhattan Project scientists were or became Nobel laureates.","Before switching to a reactor, he and Clyde Cowan planned to catch neutrinos from an atomic bomb blast, with the detector falling down a shaft to ride out the shock wave.","The Nobel Prize came in 1995, 39 years after the discovery. His partner Clyde Cowan had died in 1974, so Reines received it without him.","As a student he sang so well that a Metropolitan Opera voice coach taught him for free, and he briefly thought about singing for a living.","His first neutrino detector was big enough to hold a person, and his team used it to measure the natural radioactivity of living human bodies."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"joseph-rotblat","name":"Joseph Rotblat","year":1995,"category":"peace","motivation":"for their efforts to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international politics and, in the longer run, to eliminate such arms","tagline":"A physicist who walked away from the atomic bomb project and spent 60 years working to rid the world of nuclear weapons.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Josef_Rotblat_ID_badge.png","birthCountry":"Poland","birthYear":1908,"deathYear":2005,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["peace","health","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["In late 1944 he became the only scientist known to quit the Los Alamos atomic bomb project for reasons of conscience.","He left Warsaw days before Germany invaded Poland in 1939. His wife, Tola, was too ill to travel and stayed behind; she was killed in the Holocaust.","When he asked to leave Los Alamos, security officers produced a dossier falsely claiming he planned to hand bomb secrets to the Soviets.","Of the 11 scientists who signed the 1955 Russell-Einstein Manifesto warning against nuclear war, he was the youngest, and he outlived all the others.","At 87 he accepted the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize, shared with the Pugwash Conferences he had helped organize since 1957."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"martin-l-perl","name":"Martin L. Perl","year":1995,"category":"physics","motivation":"for the discovery of the tau lepton","tagline":"A chemical engineer turned physicist, he found the tau, the first evidence that matter's building blocks come in three families.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Martin_Perl_-_tau.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1927,"deathYear":2014,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He trained as a chemical engineer and worked on TV picture tubes at General Electric. At 23, after a teacher told him that what he loved was called physics, he switched.","The tau lepton weighs about 3,477 times as much as its cousin the electron, yet it lasts only about 0.3 trillionths of a second.","Until he was sure what he had found, Perl called the new particle 'U' for unknown. In 1977 he named it tau, from the Greek word for 'third'.","His Michigan graduate student Samuel Ting shared the 1976 physics Nobel for the J/psi, which the SLAC team Perl belonged to found at the same time.","In 1969 he co-founded Scientists and Engineers for Social and Political Action, the activist group that became Science for the People."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"david-m-lee","name":"David M. Lee","year":1996,"category":"physics","motivation":"for their discovery of superfluidity in helium-3","tagline":"He helped show that rare helium-3 becomes a frictionless superfluid near absolute zero, opening a new window on quantum matter.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c6/Nobel_Laureate_David_Morris_Lee_in_2007.jpg/330px-Nobel_Laureate_David_Morris_Lee_in_2007.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1931,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["Helium-3 makes up only about a millionth of all helium. The prize-winning experiments used just a few cubic centimetres of the liquid.","The team was hunting for magnetism in frozen helium-3. Their first paper placed the new effects in the solid; within months their own measurements showed it was the liquid.","Years before the discovery, his Cornell lab began collapsing into the excavation for a new physics building. By luck, all the equipment was rescued first.","While on night guard duty in the Army during the Korean War, a talk about superfluid helium with a fellow soldier helped steer him into graduate physics.","The superfluid transitions his team found are now fixed points of PLTS-2000, the international temperature scale below 1 kelvin."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"douglas-d-osheroff","name":"Douglas D. Osheroff","year":1996,"category":"physics","motivation":"for their discovery of superfluidity in helium-3","tagline":"As a graduate student he spotted the tiny kink that revealed superfluid helium-3, a new form of quantum matter near absolute zero.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6c/Douglas_Osheroff.jpg/330px-Douglas_Osheroff.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1945,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["On 24 November 1971, the day before Thanksgiving, graduate student Osheroff saw a small kink on a pressure chart. It was the first sign of superfluid helium-3.","Five days later the kink came back at the same pressure to within one part in 50,000. That is when he knew it was real.","In his last year of high school he built a 100 keV X-ray machine. Another home experiment blew up and sent glass into his face, narrowly missing his right eye.","At Caltech he struggled with math, working his way up from a C+ to an A+ over three years.","In 2003 he was one of 13 members of the board that investigated the loss of the space shuttle Columbia and its crew of seven."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"sir-harold-kroto","name":"Sir Harold Kroto","year":1996,"category":"chemistry","motivation":"for their discovery of fullerenes","tagline":"He helped find the buckyball, a football-shaped carbon molecule that opened a new chemistry, then spent his fame teaching science.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/87/Hkroto.jpg/330px-Hkroto.jpg","birthCountry":"United Kingdom","birthYear":1939,"deathYear":2016,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","technology","space","education"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["At school in Bolton he was 'the kid with the funny name': Krotoschiner. His father, a refugee from Berlin, shortened it to Kroto in 1955.","The discovery took less than two weeks. Kroto arrived at Rice University on 1 September 1985, and Nature received the paper proposing a football-shaped C60 on 13 September.","After 1985, Shell, BP and the Royal Society each turned down his request for £12,000 for a mass spectrometer. He felt the funding system cost Sussex the race to make C60 in bulk.","He was in the same school year as the actor Ian McKellen. Two colleagues, writing his Nature obituary, called him the only Nobel laureate to have shared a stage with McKellen.","His quest began with carbon chains around giant stars. In 2015 lab tests confirmed that charged C60 molecules drift between the stars, and he lived to see it."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"claude-cohentannoudji","name":"Claude Cohen-Tannoudji","year":1997,"category":"physics","motivation":"for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light","tagline":"He explained how laser light can chill atoms to near absolute zero, opening the way to ultra-precise clocks and new quantum physics.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a5/Claude_Cohen-Tannoudji.JPG/330px-Claude_Cohen-Tannoudji.JPG","birthCountry":"Algeria","birthYear":1933,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","technology"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He saw the first evidence of 'light shifts', an effect he had predicted, on Christmas Eve 1960, using a colleague's apparatus lent to him over the holidays.","His group cooled helium atoms to 0.18 millionths of a degree above absolute zero, so cold that they crept along at about 2 cm per second.","His surname means 'the Cohen family from Tangier'. His ancestors fled the Spanish Inquisition and settled in Tunisia and then Algeria in the 16th century.","His group coined the name 'Sisyphus cooling' in 1986, after the figure of Greek myth doomed to push a stone uphill forever.","In 2025 PHARAO, a clock using laser-cooled cesium atoms and developed with partners including his Paris laboratory, became the first such clock in orbit."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"myron-scholes","name":"Myron Scholes","year":1997,"category":"economics","motivation":"for a new method to determine the value of derivatives","tagline":"With Fischer Black he found how to price an option, giving firms and investors a common way to measure and shed financial risk.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cc/Myron_Scholes_2008_in_Lindau.png/330px-Myron_Scholes_2008_in_Lindau.png","birthCountry":"Canada","birthYear":1941,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["economy","technology"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["Scarred corneas made reading hard from his teens until a transplant at 26, so he learned to solve problems in his head and to listen closely.","The Journal of Political Economy rejected the first Black-Scholes paper without sending it for review. It ran in 1973 after Merton Miller and Eugene Fama stepped in.","In 1968 he urged Wells Fargo Bank to offer clients passive investing, which he later called the forerunner of index funds.","Texas Instruments sold a Black-Scholes calculator in 1977. When he asked for royalties, or at least a calculator, it suggested he buy one. He never did.","Hired as a junior programmer at Chicago with no coding experience, he found on day three that he was the only \"programmer\" left."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"robert-c-merton","name":"Robert C. Merton","year":1997,"category":"economics","motivation":"for a new method to determine the value of derivatives","tagline":"He helped crack the pricing of options, giving banks, firms and savers a shared way to value and trade financial risk.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4e/Robert_C._Merton.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1944,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["economy","technology"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He was the first to call it the \"Black-Scholes model,\" in a 1970 working paper. Today it is often called the Black-Scholes-Merton model.","He overslept and missed Black and Scholes presenting their option work at a July 1970 conference where he was also giving a paper.","As a teenager he rebuilt cars, raced hot rods at drag strips and planned to become an automobile engineer.","His father, sociologist Robert K. Merton, was born Meyer Schkolnick to Jewish immigrants and coined the phrases \"self-fulfilling prophecy\" and \"role model.\"","Within two years of the formula's 1973 debut, Chicago options traders were using it to price and hedge. Texas Instruments even sold a handheld calculator programmed to compute it."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"stanley-b-prusiner","name":"Stanley B. Prusiner","year":1997,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for his discovery of Prions - a new biological principle of infection","tagline":"He showed that a misfolded protein with no genes can spread infection in the brain, explaining mad cow disease and related dementias.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/12/Stanley_B._Prusiner_in_2024_%283x4_close_cropped%29.jpg/330px-Stanley_B._Prusiner_in_2024_%283x4_close_cropped%29.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1942,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["His hunt began in 1972, when a patient he admitted as a young neurology resident turned out to be dying of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare and always fatal brain illness.","He coined the word prion in 1982, from 'proteinaceous infectious particle'. Many virologists refused to believe an infection could exist without DNA or RNA.","Early experiments meant waiting about 200 days for infected mice to fall ill. Switching to hamsters, which sicken faster, sped up the work.","While his idea was under attack, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute stopped funding him and UCSF at first denied him tenure, a decision it later reversed.","His grandfather Ben came to the United States from Moscow as a boy in 1896 and grew up in Sioux City, Iowa, among many other Russian Jewish immigrants."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"robert-f-furchgott","name":"Robert F. Furchgott","year":1998,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discoveries concerning nitric oxide as a signalling molecule in the cardiovascular system","tagline":"He found that the lining of blood vessels sends a signal, later shown to be nitric oxide gas, that tells arteries to relax.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bd/Drfurchgott.jpg/330px-Drfurchgott.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1916,"deathYear":2009,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["His Nobel discovery began with a technician's mistake: in May 1978 a drug was tested in the wrong order, and a ring of artery relaxed when it should have tightened.","For about 25 years his standard way of cutting artery strips had rubbed off their inner lining without anyone noticing, hiding the very effect that later won him the prize.","He found that arteries relax in light after two strips near a window kept tightening and loosening in step on a partly cloudy day.","He first wrote down his guess that the mystery factor was nitric oxide during a 1986 airplane flight. The note was later put on display at SUNY Downstate in Brooklyn.","He was 82 when a New York Times reporter woke him at 5:30 a.m. to tell him he had won the Nobel Prize."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"walter-kohn","name":"Walter Kohn","year":1998,"category":"chemistry","motivation":"for his development of the density-functional theory","tagline":"Refugee from Nazi Vienna whose density-functional theory lets computers predict how molecules and materials behave.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5e/WalterKohnGraz21042006_1.jpg/330px-WalterKohnGraz21042006_1.jpg","birthCountry":"Austria","birthYear":1923,"deathYear":2016,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["fundamental-science","technology","energy"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["In a Vienna high school he got his only C in mathematics. After the Nazis expelled him, two teachers at a Jewish school turned him toward science.","Interned as an 'enemy alien' at 17, he earned 20 cents a day as a lumberjack in Canadian camps and saved it to buy textbooks on pure mathematics and chemical physics.","He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, yet his last chemistry class was at 17. In Toronto his German nationality kept him out of the chemistry building.","By 2003 his 1965 paper with Lu Jeu Sham was the most-cited article in more than a century of Physical Review journals. His 1964 paper with Pierre Hohenberg was second.","His parents, Salomon and Gittel, were killed at Auschwitz. He reached England in 1939 on one of the last Kindertransport children's trains."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"alan-heeger","name":"Alan Heeger","year":2000,"category":"chemistry","motivation":"for the discovery and development of conductive polymers","tagline":"The son of a Russian Jewish immigrant, he helped show that plastic can carry electricity, opening the way to flexible electronics.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/11/Heeger%2C_Alan_J._%281936%29.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1936,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["technology","energy","economy","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["On the bitter cold morning he was born, his father's car would not start. He walked to the hospital to see his wife and new son and got frostbitten ears.","His first meeting with chemist Alan MacDiarmid went nowhere at first: Heeger kept saying (SN)x, sulfur nitride, while MacDiarmid heard (Sn)x, which is tin.","No one in his family had studied past high school before him. He and his younger brother both went on to earn PhDs.","Exposing a thin film of the plastic polyacetylene to iodine or bromine vapor made it conduct electricity about ten million times better.","His 1995 paper on plastic solar cells has been cited more than 9,700 times, according to the Crossref citation database."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"eric-kandel","name":"Eric Kandel","year":2000,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discoveries concerning signal transduction in the nervous system","tagline":"A child refugee from Nazi Vienna who used a sea snail to show how memories are stored as physical changes between nerve cells.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f4/Eric_Kandel_by_aquaris3.jpg/330px-Eric_Kandel_by_aquaris3.jpg","birthCountry":"Austria","birthYear":1929,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["fundamental-science","health","education"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He fled Nazi-ruled Vienna at nine. When Viennese callers hailed another 'Austrian Nobel Prize' in 2000, he told them it was an American Jewish one.","His key lab animal was the sea snail Aplysia, with about 20,000 nerve cells. The largest are about a millimeter wide, big enough to see with the naked eye.","He first planned to be a psychoanalyst. At Harvard he studied history and literature and wrote his thesis on German writers' attitudes to Nazism.","The call from Stockholm came at 5:30 a.m. on Yom Kippur 2000, the morning after he and his wife had attended the Kol Nidre service.","Asked by Austria's president how the country could honor him, he asked for a University of Vienna symposium on Austria's response to National Socialism."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"paul-greengard","name":"Paul Greengard","year":2000,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discoveries concerning signal transduction in the nervous system","tagline":"Showed how dopamine and other brain chemicals change nerve cells from the inside, guiding research on mental illness and drugs.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dd/Paul_Greengard.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1925,"deathYear":2019,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science","economy"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["His mother died giving birth to him. He gave all of his $400,000 Nobel money to found a prize for women scientists named after her.","In 1948 he decided against graduate study in physics: the only fellowships came from the Atomic Energy Commission, and he would not help build deadlier weapons.","In World War II he worked as a Navy electronics technician at MIT on an early-warning system against kamikaze planes.","His idea that brain signals run through slow chemical chains inside nerve cells was at first met with skepticism and even hostility.","A company he co-founded developed Caplyta, a drug for schizophrenia and bipolar depression approved eight months after his death."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"zhores-alferov","name":"Zhores Alferov","year":2000,"category":"physics","motivation":"for developing semiconductor heterostructures used in high-speed- and opto-electronics","tagline":"Soviet physicist who pioneered the layered semiconductor crystals behind the lasers that carry internet data through glass fibres.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3a/Zhores_Alferov_April_2016.jpg/330px-Zhores_Alferov_April_2016.jpg","birthCountry":"Belarus","birthYear":1930,"deathYear":2019,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["technology","communication","economy"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["His Bolshevik father named him after the French socialist Jean Jaurès, and named his older brother Marx after Karl Marx.","In May 1970 his Leningrad team reported the first semiconductor laser to run nonstop at room temperature, about a month ahead of a rival team at Bell Labs.","At 22, about five weeks after joining his institute, he helped build the first Soviet transistor made on a p-n junction, on 5 March 1953.","Solar cells built on his layered design helped power the Soviet space station Mir.","His older brother Marx, a junior lieutenant, was killed in battle in 1944 at the age of 20."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"george-a-akerlof","name":"George A. Akerlof","year":2001,"category":"economics","motivation":"for their analyses of markets with asymmetric information","tagline":"Showed how hidden information can wreck a market, explaining why buyers fear lemons and why warranties, brands and fair rules matter.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/George_Akerlof.jpg/330px-George_Akerlof.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1940,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["economy","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["Three journals turned down \"The Market for 'Lemons'\" before it was accepted. Two said its subject was too trivial to publish.","He wrote the 13-page lemons paper that later won him the Nobel Prize during his first year as an assistant professor at Berkeley.","At 11 or 12 he worked out for himself how one lost job can cost others theirs, which he later saw as the basic idea of Keynesian economics.","His grandfather, a pioneering heart specialist, was denied tenure at Johns Hopkins. Akerlof links this to the family's German Jewish ancestry.","He is married to the economist Janet Yellen, who later chaired the US Federal Reserve and served as Treasury Secretary."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"joseph-e-stiglitz","name":"Joseph E. Stiglitz","year":2001,"category":"economics","motivation":"for their analyses of markets with asymmetric information","tagline":"He showed how hidden information bends markets for loans, jobs and insurance, and argued that governments must help repair the damage.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9e/Joseph_E._Stiglitz%2C_2019_%28cropped%29.jpg/330px-Joseph_E._Stiglitz%2C_2019_%28cropped%29.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1943,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["economy","health","environment"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He left Amherst for graduate school at MIT without a degree. His last-minute fellowship left him about a dollar a day to live on after rent.","Paul Samuelson, the 1970 economics laureate, also came from Gary, Indiana. As a graduate student Stiglitz edited Samuelson's collected papers.","His first paper at an academic meeting was written with George Akerlof, one of the two economists he shared the 2001 prize with.","A stay in Kenya from 1969 was pivotal for his work on information; sharecropping, where tenants give landlords half or more of the crop, puzzled him.","He chaired President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, then served as World Bank chief economist until 2000, leaving amid clashes with the IMF and US Treasury."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"daniel-kahneman","name":"Daniel Kahneman","year":2002,"category":"economics","motivation":"for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty","tagline":"He showed that human judgment goes wrong in predictable ways, reshaping economics and how governments help people save.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4d/Daniel_Kahneman_%283283955327%29_%28cropped%29.jpg/330px-Daniel_Kahneman_%283283955327%29_%28cropped%29.jpg","birthCountry":"Israel","birthYear":1934,"deathYear":2024,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["economy","health","education","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He won the Nobel in economics as a psychologist, and said he learned most of his economics in one year working with Richard Thaler and Jack Knetsch.","As a boy in Nazi-occupied Paris he wore the yellow star; his father was held for six weeks at Drancy, the camp through which most Jews deported from France passed.","At 21, as an Israeli army lieutenant, he designed an interview system for recruits that stayed in use, little changed, for decades.","He and Amos Tversky tossed a coin to decide whose name went first on their first joint paper, then took turns after that.","In 2017 he publicly admitted that his bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow had put too much faith in small, weak studies of priming."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"h-robert-horvitz","name":"H. Robert Horvitz","year":2002,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discoveries concerning genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death","tagline":"Found the genes that tell cells when to die, a worm discovery that changed how we understand cancer and brain disease.","thumb":null,"birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1947,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["Of the 1,090 cells made as a C. elegans worm develops, exactly 131 die on schedule. Horvitz found the genes that carry out those deaths.","He came to biology late: he earned MIT degrees in mathematics and economics and took his first biology course as a senior.","His first name, Howard, starts with H in memory of his great-grandfather Hersch, who was murdered by the Nazis.","After his father fell ill with ALS, Horvitz joined the team that in 1993 found the first gene known to cause inherited ALS.","Sydney Brenner was his fourth research supervisor to win a Nobel Prize, after Robert Solow, James Watson and Walter Gilbert."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"imre-kertesz","name":"Imre Kertész","year":2002,"category":"literature","motivation":"for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history","tagline":"Deported to Auschwitz at 14, he wrote Fatelessness, a novel showing how ordinary people are swallowed by history.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/87/Kert%C3%A9sz_Imre_%28Frankl_Aliona%29.jpg/330px-Kert%C3%A9sz_Imre_%28Frankl_Aliona%29.jpg","birthCountry":"Hungary","birthYear":1929,"deathYear":2016,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["culture","education","human-rights"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["A Buchenwald report dated 18 February 1945 listed prisoner 64,921, Imre Kertész, as dead. He survived, and in 2002 the Buchenwald memorial mailed him a copy.","The publisher Magvető rejected Fatelessness in 1973. When it finally appeared in 1975 it met near silence, and he later built his novel Fiasco around that experience.","A year after his Nobel Prize, his books had sold some 500,000 copies in Hungary, about one for every 20 Hungarians.","He was the first Hungarian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, yet for years he paid the rent by writing musical comedies and translating Nietzsche and Freud."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"sydney-brenner","name":"Sydney Brenner","year":2002,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discoveries concerning genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death","tagline":"A cobbler's son who helped crack how genes make proteins, then turned a tiny worm into a window on how animals are built.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/61/Sydney_Brenner_OIST_2008_%2833208371153%29_%28cropped%29.jpg/330px-Sydney_Brenner_OIST_2008_%2833208371153%29_%28cropped%29.jpg","birthCountry":"South Africa","birthYear":1927,"deathYear":2019,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","health"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["His father, a shoe repairer from Lithuania, never learned to read or write. Brenner started university in Johannesburg at 15.","After his bar mitzvah he earned sixpence a session as the tenth man needed for synagogue prayers for the dead.","In April 1953 he drove to Cambridge to see Watson and Crick's new DNA model. He later shared an office with Crick for 20 years.","In his Nobel lecture he called the worm C. elegans the fourth winner of that year's prize.","The worm he introduced to science later featured in Nobel Prize work on RNA interference (2006), the glowing protein GFP (2008) and microRNA (2024)."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"alexei-abrikosov","name":"Alexei Abrikosov","year":2003,"category":"physics","motivation":"for pioneering contributions to the theory of superconductors and superfluids","tagline":"He showed how magnetic fields thread through superconductors in tiny whirlpools, the physics that explains today's MRI magnets.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/AA_Abrikosov_ANL1.jpg","birthCountry":"Russia","birthYear":1928,"deathYear":2017,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","health","technology"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He worked out his vortex lattice in 1953 but held it back for four years because his teacher, Lev Landau, disagreed. It appeared only in 1957.","Experimenters doubted his vortex lattice for about ten years, until neutron and decoration experiments in the 1960s showed it directly.","His father, the pathologist Alexei Ivanovich Abrikosov, led the autopsy of Lenin in January 1924.","He passed Landau's famously hard 'theoretical minimum' exam in 1947, at the age of 19.","He moved to Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago in 1991, became a US citizen in 1999 and won the Nobel Prize at 75."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"vitaly-l-ginzburg","name":"Vitaly L. Ginzburg","year":2003,"category":"physics","motivation":"for pioneering contributions to the theory of superconductors and superfluids","tagline":"Co-wrote the theory of superconductors that explains the magnets inside MRI scanners, despite Stalin-era attacks on him as a Jew.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4a/Ginzburg_in_MSU_opaque.jpg/330px-Ginzburg_in_MSU_opaque.jpg","birthCountry":"Russia","birthYear":1916,"deathYear":2009,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","health","technology","education"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He did not start school until age 11, and later crammed three years of high-school work into three months to sit the Moscow University entrance exams.","His second wife, Nina, was jailed in 1944 on an invented charge of plotting to shoot Stalin from her window, and was kept out of Moscow until after Stalin died.","His idea to use lithium-6 as fuel was one of two key ideas behind the first Soviet hydrogen bomb. He later wrote that the bomb saved him.","He won the Nobel Prize at 87 for a theory he built with Lev Landau in 1950. Landau had died in 1968, and Nobel Prizes are not awarded after death.","He ran a Wednesday physics seminar in Moscow from the mid-1950s until 2001, closing it himself at its 1,700th meeting."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"aaron-ciechanover","name":"Aaron Ciechanover","year":2004,"category":"chemistry","motivation":"for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation","tagline":"He helped discover how cells tag unwanted proteins for destruction, knowledge that led to new drugs for a deadly blood cancer.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0c/Aaron_Ciechanover_1.jpg/330px-Aaron_Ciechanover_1.jpg","birthCountry":"Israel","birthYear":1947,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He and his doctoral supervisor, Avram Hershko, became Israel's first Nobel laureates in a natural science when they shared the 2004 chemistry prize.","The key protein turned up when the team boiled an extract of young red blood cells: the hemoglobin cooked into sludge, but the tiny protein they were after kept working.","The 1978 paper that started the field was rejected by the Journal of Biological Chemistry, and the journal that printed it misspelled his name as 'Ciehanover'.","He was orphaned at 16 and finished high school while living with an aunt in Haifa, spending weekends with his older brother in Tel Aviv.","As a navy doctor after the 1973 war, he sailed on a small missile boat from Haifa around Africa to Eilat, because the Suez Canal was blocked."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"avram-hershko","name":"Avram Hershko","year":2004,"category":"chemistry","motivation":"for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation","tagline":"A child survivor of the Holocaust, he helped discover how cells tag unwanted proteins for destruction, work behind new cancer drugs.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e6/Avram_Hershko.jpg/330px-Avram_Hershko.jpg","birthCountry":"Hungary","birthYear":1937,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["At six he was deported from the Szolnok ghetto on one of the few trains bound for forced labor in Austria instead of Auschwitz. He, his mother and brother survived.","Much of the ubiquitin system was discovered in an old two-floor monastery in Haifa, which housed the Technion's new medical school for more than 15 years.","His lab first nicknamed ubiquitin 'Red', because it came from the red, hemoglobin-rich part of the blood-cell extract they were studying.","He chose medicine partly because his older brother, already a medical student, could hand down his textbooks for free.","Aaron Ciechanover, who shared the 2004 Nobel Prize with him, did much of the prize-winning work as Hershko's graduate student."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"david-j-gross","name":"David J. Gross","year":2004,"category":"physics","motivation":"for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction","tagline":"Showed why quarks are locked inside every proton and neutron, completing our theory of the force that holds matter together.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8c/David_Gross_LANL.jpg/330px-David_Gross_LANL.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1941,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","education","peace"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["At age 11 he was paid 10 cents a page to proofread his father's book on the politics of lawmaking in Congress.","He moved to Jerusalem in 1953, at about 12, knowing no Hebrew, and later earned his first degree at the Hebrew University.","In early 1973 a sign error briefly convinced him and Wilczek that the theory was not asymptotically free after all. He spotted the mistake while writing up the result.","The calculation behind his Nobel Prize is now set as a homework problem in physics courses, he noted in his Nobel lecture.","He estimates a 2% yearly chance of nuclear war, which he says gives civilization a 'half-life' of about 34 years."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"elfriede-jelinek","name":"Elfriede Jelinek","year":2004,"category":"literature","motivation":"for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power","tagline":"An Austrian writer who turned everyday clichés inside out to expose sexism, violence and her country's buried Nazi past.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e5/Elfriede_jelinek_2004_small.jpg/330px-Elfriede_jelinek_2004_small.jpg","birthCountry":"Austria","birthYear":1946,"deathYear":null,"gender":"female","refugee":false,"domains":["culture","womens-rights"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["Social phobia kept her away from the 2004 Nobel ceremony in Stockholm. She sent her Nobel lecture, titled Sidelined, as a pre-recorded video instead.","In the 1995 election campaign, Jörg Haider's far-right party put up posters that set her against 'culture'. She answered by barring Austria's state theatres from staging her plays.","She trained as a musician first, passing the organist's exam at the Vienna Conservatory in 1971. She says she works with language the way a composer works with sound.","Her 1983 novel The Piano Teacher became Michael Haneke's 2001 film. In 2004 she became only the tenth woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.","Her 2008 play Rechnitz confronts the March 1945 massacre of almost 200 Jewish forced labourers near the village of Rechnitz in eastern Austria."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"h-david-politzer","name":"H. David Politzer","year":2004,"category":"physics","motivation":"for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction","tagline":"As a 23-year-old graduate student, he independently found the minus sign that explained how quarks behave inside protons and neutrons.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6e/H.D._Politzer.jpg/330px-H.D._Politzer.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1949,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","education"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["His prize-winning 1973 paper, written while he was a Harvard graduate student, was the first article he ever published.","Mildly dyslexic and ambidextrous, he rederived every step from scratch to be sure the crucial minus sign was right.","In 1989 he played Manhattan Project physicist Robert Serber in the film Fat Man and Little Boy, alongside Paul Newman.","He has written that his grandmother was held in a Slovak concentration camp and that, as far as he knows, his teenage aunt was murdered in Auschwitz.","At Caltech he now researches the physics of the banjo and the resonator guitar."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"irwin-rose","name":"Irwin Rose","year":2004,"category":"chemistry","motivation":"for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation","tagline":"A Brooklyn-born enzyme chemist whose lab hosted the discovery of how cells tag unwanted proteins for destruction.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/Nobel2004chemistrylaurets-Rose.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1926,"deathYear":2015,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["On the day his Nobel Prize was announced, he carried two test tubes in his shirt pocket and that night tested them on a UC Irvine mass spectrometer.","After retiring, he kept a spectrophotometer in his kitchen so he could run small experiments at home.","He spent about 20 years on the side trying to learn why cells burn energy to break down their own proteins.","A Fox Chase colleague said all the seminal ubiquitin work was done in his lab, yet he never tried to take credit for it.","The mystery tag was matched to ubiquitin after a postdoc in the lab next door was asked if he knew of any two proteins joined by a chemical bond."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"richard-axel","name":"Richard Axel","year":2004,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discoveries of odorant receptors and the organization of the olfactory system","tagline":"A Brooklyn tailor's son who found the huge gene family behind the sense of smell, and helped turn cells into factories for medicines.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3a/Richard_Axel.jpg/330px-Richard_Axel.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1946,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science","economy"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["With Linda Buck he found that rodents carry about 1,000 genes for smell receptors, one of the largest gene families in the genome.","Johns Hopkins let him graduate from medical school early on his promise never to practice medicine on live patients.","As a high school center he faced a teenage Lew Alcindor, later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who scored 54 points to his two.","In 1986 his lab cloned the gene for CD4, a protein on immune cells, and proved that it alone lets HIV attach to and infect human cells.","Two scientists who trained in his lab, Linda Buck and David Julius, went on to win Nobel Prizes of their own."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"harold-pinter","name":"Harold Pinter","year":2005,"category":"literature","motivation":"who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms","tagline":"A tailor's son from Hackney whose plays showed the menace hidden in everyday talk, and who spoke out against torture and war.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/58/Harold_Pinter_1962.jpg/330px-Harold_Pinter_1962.jpg","birthCountry":"United Kingdom","birthYear":1930,"deathYear":2008,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["culture","human-rights"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["For several years he acted in repertory theatre under the stage name David Baron, working as a waiter, doorman and snow-shoveller to get by.","His second play, The Birthday Party, was savaged by critics and closed within a week in 1958. It later became one of his most performed plays.","His name became an adjective: the Swedish Academy noted that 'Pinteresque' is listed in the Oxford dictionary.","Called up for National Service in 1948, he refused as a conscientious objector, risking prison. He escaped with fines.","Too ill to travel to Stockholm, he recorded his 2005 Nobel lecture on video, speaking from a wheelchair."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"robert-j-aumann","name":"Robert J. Aumann","year":2005,"category":"economics","motivation":"for having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis","tagline":"A boy who fled Nazi Germany in 1938 grew up to prove, in mathematics, why long-term relationships make cooperation possible.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/be/Robert_Aumann_2010.jpg/330px-Robert_Aumann_2010.jpg","birthCountry":"Germany","birthYear":1930,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["mathematics","economy","peace","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["His family left Frankfurt for New York in 1938, shortly before Kristallnacht, and his parents lost all their assets in the move.","His doctorate was in knot theory, which he called absolutely useless; fifty years later his grandson studied knots in medical school because DNA can tangle.","In the mid-1960s he advised a US arms-control project alongside three future Nobel laureates: John Harsanyi, Reinhard Selten and Gerard Debreu.","He says his best-known work with the public is a 1985 paper, written with Michael Maschler, that used game theory to explain a puzzling rule in the Talmud.","He brought 34 family members to Stockholm, where his Nobel ceremony began just minutes after the Jewish Sabbath ended."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"roy-j-glauber","name":"Roy J. Glauber","year":2005,"category":"physics","motivation":"for his contribution to the quantum theory of optical coherence","tagline":"He wrote the quantum theory of light behind today's photon counters, quantum cryptography and the young field of quantum optics.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/53/Roy_Glauber.jpg/330px-Roy_Glauber.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1925,"deathYear":2018,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","technology","communication","peace"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["At 18, while still a Harvard undergraduate, he joined Los Alamos and worked on critical-mass calculations for the first atomic bomb.","For more than 20 years he was the Ig Nobel ceremony's 'Keeper of the Broom', sweeping paper airplanes off the stage.","His prize-winning papers came out in 1963. The Nobel came 42 years later, when he was 80.","At a 1941 student science talk he shared the program with Baruch Blumberg, who later won a Nobel for finding the hepatitis B virus.","After his marriage ended he raised his son and daughter as a single father, and said the papers he lost to it were worth it."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"andrew-z-fire","name":"Andrew Z. Fire","year":2006,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discovery of RNA interference - gene silencing by double-stranded RNA","tagline":"He found that double-stranded RNA can switch off one chosen gene, a tool now used across biology and in new medicines.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/Andrew_Fire%2C_Stanford_University.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1959,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","health"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He finished high school at 15 and earned a mathematics degree from UC Berkeley at 19.","Stanford turned him down as an undergraduate. He later joined its medical school and won his Nobel Prize there.","The key clue was a twitch: worms injected with double-stranded RNA matching a muscle gene began twitching like worms born without it.","His Nobel Prize came just eight years after the 1998 paper, unusually fast by Nobel standards.","His Nobel banquet speech was a comic 'top ten list' of reasons for the 2006 laureates to return to Stockholm in 2036."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"roger-d-kornberg","name":"Roger D. Kornberg","year":2006,"category":"chemistry","motivation":"for his studies of the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription","tagline":"He made the first atom-by-atom pictures of the machine cells use to read their genes, showing how DNA's silent code comes to life.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/da/Roger_Kornberg_April_2016.jpg/330px-Roger_Kornberg_April_2016.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1947,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","health"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["At 12 he watched his father, Arthur, receive the 1959 Nobel Prize in Stockholm. Forty-seven years later, Roger won the chemistry prize himself.","In 1974, as a 27-year-old postdoc in Cambridge, he proposed the nucleosome: DNA wrapped around eight histone proteins, the basic unit of how chromosomes are packed.","His first crystals of the gene-reading enzyme would not diffract X-rays at all. A faint yellow tinge revealed oxidation, so the team grew them in a sealed box under argon.","Many doubted baker's yeast could teach us about human genes. His lab showed that the gene-reading machinery of yeast and human cells is nearly identical.","By 2006 he had been a visiting professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for about 20 years and was spending almost half of each year in Jerusalem."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"eric-s-maskin","name":"Eric S. Maskin","year":2007,"category":"economics","motivation":"for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory","tagline":"He showed when rules can be designed so that people acting in their own interest still reach the goals a society wants.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/07/05N3441_emaskin.jpg/330px-05N3441_emaskin.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1950,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["economy","fundamental-science","environment"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["The 1977 paper the Nobel committee singled out was not published until 1999. Economists already knew it from the working-paper version.","When he won the Nobel, he was living in the Princeton house where Albert Einstein had lived until his death.","He supervised Jean Tirole's PhD and also taught Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer. All three later won the economics prize themselves.","As a Harvard math major, he drifted into a course taught by Kenneth Arrow and was hooked by Leonid Hurwicz's ideas. Hurwicz later shared his Nobel.","A clarinetist, he calls himself culturally Jewish and names klezmer and the dishes he watched his grandmother cook among the things he loves."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"leonid-hurwicz","name":"Leonid Hurwicz","year":2007,"category":"economics","motivation":"for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory","tagline":"A Jewish refugee with no economics degree, he showed how to design rules that make honesty pay, from auctions to regulation.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2c/Leonid_Hurwicz_%28square%29.jpg/330px-Leonid_Hurwicz_%28square%29.jpg","birthCountry":"Russia","birthYear":1917,"deathYear":2008,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["economy","fundamental-science","communication"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He never earned a degree in economics. His only earned degree was in law, from Warsaw University in 1938.","At 90 he became the oldest Nobel laureate up to that time. Too frail to fly to Stockholm, he received the prize in Minneapolis.","As a law student in Warsaw, he and other Jewish students stood at the back of class for a whole year rather than accept segregated seats.","In 1940, as he made his way to America through Spain and Portugal, his parents and brother were being held in a Soviet labor camp.","He introduced 'incentive compatibility': designing rules so that telling the truth is each person's own best move."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"roger-b-myerson","name":"Roger B. Myerson","year":2007,"category":"economics","motivation":"for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory","tagline":"He showed how to write rules that make honesty pay, laying foundations for modern auctions, regulation and fairer institutions.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f6/Myerson_roger_b_print.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1951,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["economy","fundamental-science","communication"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["In 1972 a Harvard professor told his class that game theory was a field where only limited progress had been made. Myerson took that as his cue, and it became his life's work.","His father did research and engineering for a family business that made artificial teeth.","Yahoo! used optimal-auction theory from his 1981 paper to reset minimum ad prices on hundreds of thousands of search keywords, and revenue rose, mainly on popular keywords.","When Nash, Harsanyi and Selten won the 1994 economics prize for game theory, he opened champagne with his Northwestern colleagues.","In 2008 he spoke in Jerusalem at a conference President Shimon Peres organized for Israel's 60th anniversary, urging restraint as a path to peace."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"martin-chalfie","name":"Martin Chalfie","year":2008,"category":"chemistry","motivation":"for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP","tagline":"He got a jellyfish's green glow working inside other creatures, so scientists could watch genes and cells at work in living things.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/97/Martin_Chalfie-press_conference_Dec_07th%2C_2008-4.jpg/330px-Martin_Chalfie-press_conference_Dec_07th%2C_2008-4.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1947,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","health"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He slept through the early-morning call from Stockholm, then checked the Nobel website to see which \"schnook\" had won and found it was him.","After a summer in which every experiment failed, he decided science was not for him and taught high school chemistry before trying the lab again.","His GFP idea came at a lunchtime seminar on April 25, 1989. He admitted he was too excited to listen to the rest of the talk.","After his 1994 paper, his lab mailed about 1,500 sets of GFP DNA to other scientists before handing the job over to others.","He calls his prize the third \"worm prize\": the see-through roundworm he studies was also central to Nobel Prizes in 2002 and 2006."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"paul-krugman","name":"Paul Krugman","year":2008,"category":"economics","motivation":"for his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity","tagline":"He explained why similar countries trade similar goods and why cities keep growing, changing how we understand globalization.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5d/Paul_Krugman-press_conference_Dec_07th%2C_2008-4.jpg/330px-Paul_Krugman-press_conference_Dec_07th%2C_2008-4.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1953,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["economy","fundamental-science","education"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["As a teenager he secretly dreamed of becoming a 'psychohistorian' from Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels. He decided economics was the closest real thing.","The 1979 paper at the heart of his Nobel ran only about 10 pages, and it followed a frustrating year and a half of journal rejections for his new trade ideas.","He was the sole winner of the 2008 prize, at a time when the economics prize was usually shared, and the committee stressed it honored his research, not his New York Times columns.","As a young staffer in Ronald Reagan's White House in 1982-83, he wrote most of the 1983 Economic Report of the President.","In 2019 he publicly admitted that he and other economists had underestimated how hard trade with China would hit American factory towns."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"ada-e-yonath","name":"Ada E. Yonath","year":2009,"category":"chemistry","motivation":"for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome","tagline":"She spent two decades mapping the cell's protein factory atom by atom, then showed where antibiotics grip it.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4a/Ada_E._Yonath.jpg/330px-Ada_E._Yonath.jpg","birthCountry":"Israel","birthYear":1939,"deathYear":2026,"gender":"female","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","health"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["Her team made about 25,000 attempts before growing the first ribosome crystals in 1980, at a time when most experts thought it could not be done.","Her key idea came while she recovered from a bicycle accident and read about hibernating bears, whose cells pack ribosomes into neat, orderly arrays.","After first using a heat-loving bacterium, she also grew ribosome crystals from a salt-loving microbe that lives in the Dead Sea.","In 2009 she became the first Israeli woman to win a Nobel Prize and the first woman in 45 years to win the chemistry prize.","After her prize, Israelis coined a saying inspired by her famous curls: curly hair means a head full of ribosomes."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"elinor-ostrom","name":"Elinor Ostrom","year":2009,"category":"economics","motivation":"for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons","tagline":"She showed that communities can share forests, fisheries and water without ruining them, and was the first woman to win the economics prize.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/65/Nobel_Prize_2009-Press_Conference_KVA-30.jpg/330px-Nobel_Prize_2009-Press_Conference_KVA-30.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1933,"deathYear":2012,"gender":"female","refugee":false,"domains":["environment","economy","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["She was the first woman to win the economics prize, though she always described herself as a political scientist rather than an economist.","Although she went to a Protestant Sunday school, as a young child she was circled by classmates who shouted antisemitic taunts at her because her father was Jewish.","Indiana University first hired her to teach American government at 7:30 a.m. on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.","In her lab experiments, strangers sharing a resource overused it, but simply letting them talk first cut the overuse, against game-theory predictions.","In Nepal, her team found that irrigation systems run by farmers grew more rice and shared water more fairly than systems run by the government."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"peter-a-diamond","name":"Peter A. Diamond","year":2010,"category":"economics","motivation":"for their analysis of markets with search frictions","tagline":"He explained why jobless people and unfilled jobs exist side by side, and spent decades advising on how to keep Social Security sound.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b1/Peter_Diamond_%28economist%29.jpg/330px-Peter_Diamond_%28economist%29.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1940,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["economy","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He came to MIT as a math graduate student. A registration officer thought economics suited him better and moved him, fellowship and all, to the economics department.","The research that produced the \"Diamond paradox\" began in 1969, while he was a visiting scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.","Eight months after winning the Nobel for work on unemployment, he withdrew from a Federal Reserve nomination that Senate Republicans had blocked.","In 1975-76 he sat on a small panel of actuaries and economists that advised Congress on how to revise Social Security's benefit formula.","For his 70th birthday his wife arranged for him to throw the first pitch at Boston's Fenway Park, a longtime dream. A photo of it went to the Nobel Museum."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"adam-g-riess","name":"Adam G. Riess","year":2011,"category":"physics","motivation":"for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae","tagline":"He helped discover that the universe's expansion is speeding up, revealing that most of the cosmos is a mysterious dark energy.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9b/Nobel_Prize_2011-Press_Conference_KVA-DSC_7707.jpg/330px-Nobel_Prize_2011-Press_Conference_KVA-DSC_7707.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1969,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","space","education"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["In fall 1997 his calculations said the universe's expansion was speeding up. Suspecting a simple error, he spent a couple of weeks rechecking and found none.","He emailed his team that the data required Einstein's cosmological constant on the eve of his honeymoon, two days after his January 1998 wedding.","His grandfather, the Jewish journalist Curt Riess, left Nazi Germany in 1933. His father, born in Berlin in 1931, reached the United States as a small boy in 1936.","At 13 he taught an adult class in computer programming. His parents also had him wash dishes and bus tables part-time at his father's deli.","As a graduate student he traded his group's future telescope time for slices of other observers' nights, building 22 supernova light curves from 1,200 observations."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"bruce-a-beutler","name":"Bruce A. Beutler","year":2011,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discoveries concerning the activation of innate immunity","tagline":"He found how our cells sense a key bacterial molecule, and his lab invented the TNF-blocking design behind the arthritis drug Enbrel.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fd/Bruce_Beutler_-_Nobel_Prize_2011-Press_Conference_KI-DSC_7508.jpg/330px-Bruce_Beutler_-_Nobel_Prize_2011-Press_Conference_KI-DSC_7508.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1957,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science","economy"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["All four of his grandparents came to America to escape persecution as Jews. His father's parents, both doctors, fled Nazi Berlin with their children in 1935.","His grandmother, a Jewish pediatrician who fled Berlin, on rare occasions told him that maybe someday he would win the Nobel Prize. She lived to 102.","Every medical school he applied to turned him down except one, the University of Chicago. He started there at 19, the youngest in his class.","In 1998 the Howard Hughes Medical Institute told him his funding would end in 2000. Five months later his team found the gene behind his Nobel Prize.","The arthritis drug Enbrel grew from a TNF-blocking molecule his lab invented and patented. By 2021 Amgen's cumulative sales of it had topped $74 billion."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"dan-shechtman","name":"Dan Shechtman","year":2011,"category":"chemistry","motivation":"for the discovery of quasicrystals","tagline":"He saw atoms in an 'impossible' pattern, stood firm through years of ridicule, and changed what science calls a crystal.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5f/Nobel_Prize_2011-Nobel_interviews_KVA-DSC_8049.jpg/330px-Nobel_Prize_2011-Nobel_interviews_KVA-DSC_8049.jpg","birthCountry":"Israel","birthYear":1941,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","technology","education"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["On 8 April 1982 he wrote '10 fold ???' in his lab notebook next to sample 1725. The pattern he was looking at was supposed to be impossible in a crystal.","When he stood by his result, his group leader put a crystallography textbook on his desk, then told him he was a disgrace to the group and asked him to leave.","Two-time Nobel laureate Linus Pauling fought the idea until his death in 1994, reportedly saying there were no quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists.","His discovery made crystallographers rewrite the definition of a crystal. In 70 years of modern crystallography, every crystal studied had been a repeating pattern.","In 1986 he created a Technion course on starting technology companies. By 2016 he said more than 10,000 engineers and scientists had taken it."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"ralph-m-steinman","name":"Ralph M. Steinman","year":2011,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for his discovery of the dendritic cell and its role in adaptive immunity","tagline":"He discovered dendritic cells, the scouts that switch on our immune defences, changing how vaccines and immunotherapies are designed.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5e/RMSt.jpg/330px-RMSt.jpg","birthCountry":"Canada","birthYear":1943,"deathYear":2011,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He first thought of calling his new cells 'claudiacytes', after his wife and ballroom-dance partner Claudia, before choosing 'dendritic', from the Greek for tree.","He died on 30 September 2011, three days before his Nobel Prize was announced. The Nobel Foundation, which had not known, let the award stand, a first in its history.","At his 2007 Lasker award, Joseph Goldstein noted that a 1993 Scientific American issue on immunity, by 12 leading immunologists, never mentioned dendritic cells.","Diagnosed in 2007 with a pancreatic cancer that kills about 80% of patients within a year, he tried dendritic-cell vaccines on himself and lived four and a half more years.","His family gave all of his Nobel prize money to charity, including $500,000 for a Rockefeller professorship and $250,000 to a family foundation for young scientists."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"saul-perlmutter","name":"Saul Perlmutter","year":2011,"category":"physics","motivation":"for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae","tagline":"He tracked exploding stars billions of light-years away and found that the universe's expansion is speeding up, not slowing down.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5b/Nobel_Prize_2011-Press_Conference_KVA-DSC_7744.jpg/330px-Nobel_Prize_2011-Press_Conference_KVA-DSC_7744.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1959,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","space","education"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He set out in 1988 to measure how fast gravity was slowing the universe's expansion. A decade later his data showed the expansion is speeding up instead.","His grandfather welded in wartime shipyards and later ran a sandwich stand, while teaching Yiddish literature and history on the side. He taught young Saul Yiddish too.","Early on, his project got two and a half nights of good weather out of more than a dozen scheduled over almost two years at a telescope in Australia.","His team's first analysis of seven distant supernovae, published in 1997, found little sign of the force it would announce in January 1998.","A Department of Energy supercomputer at Berkeley Lab is named Perlmutter in his honor. He ran part of his Nobel-winning work on the same center's earlier machines."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"alvin-e-roth","name":"Alvin E. Roth","year":2012,"category":"economics","motivation":"for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design","tagline":"He turned matching theory into working systems that place doctors in residencies, students in schools and kidneys in patients.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/37/Alvin_E._Roth_3_2012.jpg/330px-Alvin_E._Roth_3_2012.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1951,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","education","economy"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He entered Columbia University's engineering school in 1968, at 16, without a high school diploma, after taking Saturday science classes there.","Around 1980 the editor George Stigler turned down his paper on the doctors' match, saying that apart from its title it was not about economics.","The algorithm he built with Elliott Peranson has run the US residency Match since 1998; in 2025 that Match drew a record 52,498 registered applicants.","In the first year of New York City's new school match, students left for officials to place by hand fell from about 26,000 to about 7,100.","After his Nobel, the Japan Karate Association made him an honorary 7th-degree black belt; he had trained in Shotokan karate as a Columbia student."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"robert-j-lefkowitz","name":"Robert J. Lefkowitz","year":2012,"category":"chemistry","motivation":"for studies of G-protein-coupled receptors","tagline":"He helped prove that the cell's hormone 'receivers' are real molecules and revealed the receptor family a third of all drugs act on.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/12/Robert_Lefkowitz_1_2012_%28cropped%29.jpg/330px-Robert_Lefkowitz_1_2012_%28cropped%29.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1943,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science","economy"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He went into research partly because of the Vietnam War: a Public Health Service post at the NIH let young doctors serve without being sent to war.","A few months into a run of failed experiments at the NIH, he and his father agreed he was not cut out to be a scientist. His father died of a heart attack weeks later.","A cardiologist who became a heart patient: after his father died at 63 of a heart attack, Lefkowitz himself needed quadruple bypass surgery in 1994.","He was the eighth Nobel laureate from the Bronx High School of Science. The seven before him had all won in physics.","As late as the 1970s, even the pharmacologist who had named the alpha and beta receptors doubted that they physically existed."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"serge-haroche","name":"Serge Haroche","year":2012,"category":"physics","motivation":"for ground-breaking experimental methods that enable measuring and manipulation of individual quantum systems","tagline":"He trapped light in a box of mirrors and counted its photons without destroying them, turning quantum thought experiments into real ones.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Serge_Haroche_at_Techfest%2C_IIT_Bombay.jpg/330px-Serge_Haroche_at_Techfest%2C_IIT_Bombay.jpg","birthCountry":"Morocco","birthYear":1944,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","technology"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["His superconducting mirrors held a single microwave photon for about a tenth of a second, long enough to travel some 40,000 km, about once around the Earth.","His team first recorded the birth and death of a single photon on his 62nd birthday, 11 September 2006, after a postdoc phoned him back to the lab.","His paternal grandparents met as teachers in the Alliance Israélite Universelle, a network of French-language Jewish schools; his grandfather was an early pupil in Marrakesh.","In 1963 he ranked first in the entrance exam of France's École Polytechnique, then chose the École Normale Supérieure instead.","It took his team about 15 years to build a photon box good enough to test ideas they had worked out on paper in the early 1990s."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"arieh-warshel","name":"Arieh Warshel","year":2013,"category":"chemistry","motivation":"for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems","tagline":"Kibbutz-born chemist who taught computers to model how enzymes work by joining quantum and classical physics.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/21/AW_TW_PS.jpg/330px-AW_TW_PS.jpg","birthCountry":"Israel","birthYear":1940,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","health","technology"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He had no high-school matriculation certificate, so he studied for outside exams during army service, carrying physics books in his kitbag.","His early modeling programs ran on the Weizmann Institute's computer Golem, named after the creature of Jewish legend.","The Weizmann Institute denied him tenure. He says the paper later honored by the Nobel was discussed in that same promotion review.","He fought in the 1967 and 1973 wars as a communications officer. A bullet once pierced his helmet, leaving a scar on his right ear.","Most of his father's family was murdered in 1941 in Lachowicze (now Lyakhavichy, Belarus), including an aunt who had studied engineering at the Technion."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"francois-englert","name":"François Englert","year":2013,"category":"physics","motivation":"for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider","tagline":"A Jewish boy hidden from the Nazis in Belgium who grew up to explain how the universe's basic particles get their mass.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/95/Francois_Englert_%283x4_cropped%29.jpg/330px-Francois_Englert_%283x4_cropped%29.jpg","birthCountry":"Belgium","birthYear":1932,"deathYear":2026,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["fundamental-science","education"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["As a Jewish boy in Nazi-occupied Belgium he lived under a false name, and a village priest baptized him so he could hide in a Catholic boarding school.","He and Robert Brout submitted their mass mechanism on 26 June 1964, a month before Peter Higgs's first paper on the subject. The two Nobel co-winners first met in 2012.","A few months after their 1964 paper, he and Brout celebrated with a bottle of champagne at a café, though few physicists were paying attention to their idea.","He first trained as an electrical-mechanical engineer, then switched to physics because he cared more about how things work than about applying them.","The café-owning family who hid him, a kind neighbor and a priest were honored as Righteous Among the Nations in 2017, after he brought their story to Yad Vashem."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"james-e-rothman","name":"James E. Rothman","year":2013,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells","tagline":"He showed how protein 'zippers' let tiny bubbles inside our cells deliver insulin, nerve signals and other cargo to the right place.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bf/James_Edward_Rothman.jpg/330px-James_Edward_Rothman.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1950,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He finished high school a year early and entered Yale at 16, set on theoretical physics. He first tried biology at his father's urging.","He took just one term of college chemistry and biology. Most of what he knows in science and medicine, he says, he taught himself.","When he set out to rebuild the cell's delivery system in a test tube, he recalls, everybody told him the idea was nuts.","On the day he won the Nobel Prize, he said in an Associated Press report that he had lost grant money for the very work the prize honored.","He never finished medical school. He had entered Harvard's MD program to learn biology, not to practice, and left it after the basic science years."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"martin-karplus","name":"Martin Karplus","year":2013,"category":"chemistry","motivation":"for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems","tagline":"Refugee from Nazi Vienna who taught computers to show atoms moving inside proteins, making simulation a core tool of biology.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0f/Martin_Karplus_Nobel_Prize_22_2013.jpg/330px-Martin_Karplus_Nobel_Prize_22_2013.jpg","birthCountry":"Austria","birthYear":1930,"deathYear":2024,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["fundamental-science","health","technology"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["Days after the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938 he fled Vienna with his mother and brother. His father, jailed as a hostage, rejoined them months later at Le Havre.","As a high-school student he was a top winner of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, with a project on seabirds, and met President Truman.","Linus Pauling, his PhD adviser and a two-time Nobel laureate, called him his most brilliant student.","His first protein simulation, published in 1977, covered just 9.2 trillionths of a second, yet it showed that proteins jiggle constantly instead of sitting still.","He was also a serious photographer and cook, and once worked in the kitchen of El Bulli, the famed Spanish restaurant."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"michael-levitt","name":"Michael Levitt","year":2013,"category":"chemistry","motivation":"for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems","tagline":"South African-born biophysicist who helped turn the computer into a chemistry lab, simulating how proteins fold, move and work.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/66/DIMG_7539_%2811253383215%29.jpg/330px-DIMG_7539_%2811253383215%29.jpg","birthCountry":"South Africa","birthYear":1947,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","health","technology"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He finished his last two years of high school in a single summer and started at the University of Pretoria a few months before turning 16.","To win a PhD place at Cambridge, the shy student stopped Nobel laureate Max Perutz in a corridor, wearing the suit from his bar mitzvah.","His first protein calculations ran on Golem A, a home-built Weizmann Institute computer with about 300,000 bytes of memory, fed with punched cards.","For two years in Cambridge he worked at the lab only in the mornings and cared for his baby son at home, telecommuting before the word existed.","He holds British and Israeli citizenship, and all three of his sons did their army service in Israel."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"randy-w-schekman","name":"Randy W. Schekman","year":2013,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells","tagline":"Using baker's yeast, he found the genes cells use to ship proteins out, work that later helped companies use yeast to make insulin.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7a/Randy_Shekman_01.JPG/330px-Randy_Shekman_01.JPG","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1948,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science","economy"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["As a boy he bought a microscope at a pawnshop after complaining to police that his mother kept borrowing his savings. It later went on display at the Nobel Museum.","He failed German twice at UCLA and could not graduate until a sympathetic dean waived the requirement.","When he chose to study cell transport in baker's yeast in 1976, some thought it a foolish decision.","He gave his Nobel Prize money to endow a cancer research chair at Berkeley named for his mother and sister, who both died of cancer.","The day before collecting his Nobel, he announced that his lab would avoid the journals Nature, Cell and Science."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"patrick-modiano","name":"Patrick Modiano","year":2014,"category":"literature","motivation":"for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and\r\nuncovered the life-world of the occupation","tagline":"A French novelist who used old files, addresses and phone books to give names back to people erased in Nazi-occupied Paris.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ae/Patrick_Modiano_6_dec_2014_-_23.jpg/330px-Patrick_Modiano_6_dec_2014_-_23.jpg","birthCountry":"France","birthYear":1945,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["culture","education"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["In 1988 he found a 1941 Paris newspaper notice from parents seeking their runaway 15-year-old, Dora Bruder. Years of digging showed she was deported to Auschwitz in 1942.","In 2015 Paris named a walkway in its 18th arrondissement the Promenade Dora Bruder, after the Jewish girl his book rescued from oblivion.","The title of his first novel, La Place de l'Étoile (1968), is a bitter pun: a famous Paris square, and the yellow star Jews were forced to wear.","Raised at first by his Flemish grandparents, he spoke only Flemish until he was four. In 1978 he won France's prestigious Prix Goncourt.","The Swedish Academy said his early novels anticipated the rethinking of Vichy France's collaboration that historian Robert Paxton began around 1970."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"bob-dylan","name":"Bob Dylan","year":2016,"category":"literature","motivation":"for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition","tagline":"A grandson of Jewish immigrants who fused folk, blues and poetry into songs that movements marched to and critics read as literature.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2a/DylanYoungKilkenny140719v2_%2850_of_52%29_%2852246124397%29_%28cropped%29.jpg/330px-DylanYoungKilkenny140719v2_%2850_of_52%29_%2852246124397%29_%28cropped%29.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1941,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["culture","human-rights"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He skipped the 2016 Nobel ceremony. The U.S. ambassador read his banquet speech, which likened him to Shakespeare, who wrote for the stage without asking if it was literature.","Universal Music, which bought his catalog in 2020, says his more than 600 songs have been recorded by other artists more than 6,000 times.","In 2008 he became the first rock and roll artist to receive a Pulitzer Prize special citation.","An offhand remark he made at Live Aid in 1985 about struggling U.S. farmers led Willie Nelson to start Farm Aid, which has since raised more than $90 million.","About 400 guests came to his 1954 bar mitzvah in Hibbing, Minnesota. That summer he attended Herzl Camp, a Zionist camp in Wisconsin, where he formed his first band."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"j-michael-kosterlitz","name":"J. Michael Kosterlitz","year":2016,"category":"physics","motivation":"for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter","tagline":"Son of a refugee from Nazi Berlin, he used topology to explain how ultra-thin films change state, opening a new field of physics.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b5/2016_Nobel_Reception_US_Embassy_Sweden_%2831557185216%29_%28cropped%29.jpg/330px-2016_Nobel_Reception_US_Embassy_Sweden_%2831557185216%29_%28cropped%29.jpg","birthCountry":"United Kingdom","birthYear":1943,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He found his Nobel problem by accident: after rivals, including a Berkeley group, beat him to results three times, he went door to door and found David Thouless.","A missed CERN application deadline sent him to Birmingham, a city he did not want to live in, where he began the work with Thouless.","In his twenties he was, by his own account, one of Britain's best climbers. A route he created in Italy's Orco Valley, Fessura Kosterlitz, went unrepeated for a decade.","His father fled Nazi Berlin in 1934 and later co-discovered the enkephalins, the body's own painkillers. Father and son were both elected Fellows of the Royal Society.","Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1978, he kept working and published nearly sixty papers after moving to Brown University."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"oliver-hart","name":"Oliver Hart","year":2016,"category":"economics","motivation":"for their contributions to contract theory","tagline":"He showed why ownership matters when contracts can't foresee everything, shaping how firms, loans and public services are designed.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c2/Nobel_Laureates_Oliver_Hart_2016_%2831341903482%29.jpg/330px-Nobel_Laureates_Oliver_Hart_2016_%2831341903482%29.jpg","birthCountry":"United Kingdom","birthYear":1948,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["economy","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["His German-born Jewish mother, Ruth, left Germany in 1933, just after Hitler took power. She later became a gynecologist in Britain, when women doctors were uncommon.","His father helped run Britain's landmark 1948 streptomycin trial, testing the TB drug that won Selman Waksman a Nobel Prize. He lived to 106.","A Cambridge tutor advised him to drop mathematics, and he ignored it. He took up economics partly because he kept losing political arguments about the balance of payments.","He and Sanford Grossman spent ten intense days in 1983 on the question behind his prize: why would one firm ever buy another instead of simply signing a contract with it?","His analysis of private prisons warned that contracts can't pin down guard quality or the use of force, so cost cutting can come at the expense of safety."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"barry-c-barish","name":"Barry C. Barish","year":2017,"category":"physics","motivation":"for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves","tagline":"He rescued a struggling gravitational-wave project and built it into the observatory that first detected black holes colliding.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f6/05-0367-92D.hr.jpg/330px-05-0367-92D.hr.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1936,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","space","technology"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["As a teenager he wanted to be a novelist. He took his first physics course at Berkeley, because his high school offered none, and soon switched his major from engineering.","His father's family ran a Ford dealership in Sioux City, Iowa, until they fell out with Henry Ford over Ford's antisemitic attitudes.","He chose not to join a SLAC experiment he expected to be routine. It revealed quarks inside the proton, and three of his colleagues won the 1990 Nobel Prize for it.","When he took charge of LIGO in 1994, it had failed two federal reviews and its construction was stalled.","He founded the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, open to researchers anywhere. It grew to about 1,200 scientists in 18 countries."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"michael-rosbash","name":"Michael Rosbash","year":2017,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm","tagline":"The son of refugees from Nazi Germany, he helped show how genes in our cells build the 24-hour clock that times sleep and waking.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5a/Michael_Rosbash%2C_2017_Nobel_Laureate_in_Medicine_%28cropped%29.jpg/330px-Michael_Rosbash%2C_2017_Nobel_Laureate_in_Medicine_%28cropped%29.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1944,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","health"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["The morning after Kristallnacht, the Gestapo came to his grandmother's home looking for his father. She told them they were too late: he had gone to America.","At his 1965 Caltech graduation, the dean told him he had entered with the lowest predicted grades in his class, and had done far better than predicted.","He spent $50,000 of his 1989 start-up grant on fly activity monitors built by a small local firm. Labs worldwide still use them; he never made money from them.","When the Nobel call woke him at home, he was so stunned he could barely breathe. His wife told him to start breathing.","He had a heart attack at 38, the kind of illness that killed his father at 42."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"rainer-weiss","name":"Rainer Weiss","year":2017,"category":"physics","motivation":"for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves","tagline":"A refugee from Nazi Berlin, he designed the laser detector that first heard gravitational waves from colliding black holes.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/41/Rainer_Weiss_EM1B8841_%2824027015857%29.jpg/330px-Rainer_Weiss_EM1B8841_%2824027015857%29.jpg","birthCountry":"Germany","birthYear":1932,"deathYear":2025,"gender":"male","refugee":true,"domains":["fundamental-science","space","technology","education"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He flunked out of MIT as a junior, by his own account over a failed romance, then worked there as a lab technician and went on to earn an MIT PhD.","The idea behind LIGO began as a way to explain gravitational waves to students in a general relativity course he taught at MIT in the late 1960s.","His family reached New York in January 1939, two months before German troops occupied Prague, with help from a St. Louis family that posted bond for Jewish refugees.","As a teenager he built and sold hi-fi systems from war-surplus parts and from speakers salvaged after a fire in a Brooklyn movie theater.","LIGO senses changes in length smaller than one ten-thousandth the width of a proton, along arms 4 kilometers long."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"richard-h-thaler","name":"Richard H. Thaler","year":2017,"category":"economics","motivation":"for his contributions to behavioural economics","tagline":"He showed that people are predictably human with money, then helped turn that insight into plans that got millions more workers saving.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2b/Richard_Thaler_Chatham.jpg/330px-Richard_Thaler_Chatham.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1945,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["economy","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["A coffee mug from his famous Cornell experiments on ownership sits in the Nobel Museum. He had kept one of the originals as a memento and donated it.","Days before his first job was due to start, the consulting firm that hired him fired him. A business school dean's offer the next day kept him in academia.","At the first firm to try his Save More Tomorrow plan, workers who joined raised their savings rate from 3.5% to 13.6% of pay over four pay raises.","He made a cameo in the 2015 film The Big Short, and on winning the Nobel he joked that he would spend the prize money as irrationally as possible.","His 1994 idea of signing workers up for retirement plans automatically went unnoticed at first. By 2024, 78% of Vanguard plans with 1,000+ members did it."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"arthur-ashkin","name":"Arthur Ashkin","year":2018,"category":"physics","motivation":"for the optical tweezers and their application to biological systems","tagline":"He turned laser light into tweezers that can hold a living cell or a single molecule without touching it.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1d/Arthur_Ashkin_EM1B5678_%2844417135450%29.jpg/330px-Arthur_Ashkin_EM1B5678_%2844417135450%29.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1922,"deathYear":2020,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","health","technology"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["At 96, Ashkin was the oldest person ever awarded a Nobel Prize at the time of his 2018 win.","Bell Labs' own theory department turned down his first light-trapping paper in internal review in 1970. It went on to be cited more than 5,000 times.","He learned his light trap could hold living bacteria by accident: virus samples left open overnight filled up with bacteria, and the trap caught them.","His father left the Russian Empire stateless; an immigration agent shortened the family name from Ashkenazi to Ashkin.","He held 47 patents, and after retiring he kept experimenting in his basement, working on cheaper solar power."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"william-d-nordhaus","name":"William D. Nordhaus","year":2018,"category":"economics","motivation":"for integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis","tagline":"He built the first models linking the economy to the climate, giving governments a way to put a price on carbon pollution.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/09/William_Nordhaus_EM1B6005_%2846234137031%29.jpg/330px-William_Nordhaus_EM1B6005_%2846234137031%29.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1941,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["environment","economy","energy"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["In 1975 he floated a 2 °C cap on warming as a rough first guess, 40 years before the 2015 Paris Agreement adopted that goal.","He liked the name DICE for his climate-economy model partly because it hints at the risk of gambling with the planet.","His first major DICE paper was turned down by economics journals and then published in the journal Science in 1992.","He co-wrote Paul Samuelson's famous textbook Economics from its 12th edition in 1985 onward, a book translated into 17 languages.","His great-grandfather was a rabbi in Paderborn, Germany, and his grandfather was a partner in one of New Mexico's largest merchant firms."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"michael-kremer","name":"Michael Kremer","year":2019,"category":"economics","motivation":"for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty","tagline":"He brought randomized trials into the fight against poverty, testing what really helps poor children learn, stay healthy and survive.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/ff/Kremer_bio.jpg/330px-Kremer_bio.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1964,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["economy","health","education"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["The Nobel Foundation's profile notes that he descends from Jewish immigrants from Poland and Austria. His mother wrote books on Holocaust literature.","After college he taught for a year at a rural secondary school in Kenya, then co-founded WorldTeach to send volunteer teachers to poorer countries.","In a Kenyan trial, a fee of under 40 US cents per child for deworming pills cut take-up from about 70% to 17%.","When a friend in Sweden messaged that they urgently needed to speak to him, he first suspected phishing. The message was about his Nobel Prize.","Gavi estimates that by the end of 2019 more than 215 million children had been immunized with pneumococcal vaccine backed by the $1.5 billion fund he helped conceive."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"andrea-ghez","name":"Andrea Ghez","year":2020,"category":"physics","motivation":"for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy","tagline":"She tracked stars racing around the Milky Way's center and helped show that a black hole of four million suns sits there.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b4/Andrea_Ghez_%28cropped1%29.jpg/330px-Andrea_Ghez_%28cropped1%29.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1965,"deathYear":null,"gender":"female","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","space","technology","education"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["In 1995 her first request for Keck telescope time to track stars at the galaxy's center was turned down. She borrowed time from another astronomer and applied again.","Her favorite star, S0-2, circles the Milky Way's black hole in about 16 years. The Sun needs more than 200 million years to circle the galaxy once.","Her father was born in Rome in 1938, the year Fascist Italy passed anti-Jewish laws. His Jewish family, with roots in Tunisia, left Italy and spent most of the war in New York.","In 2020 she became only the fourth woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics, after Marie Curie, Maria Goeppert Mayer and Donna Strickland.","The starlight she studies left the black hole's neighborhood about 26,000 years ago. She has said that thought amazes her every time she goes to the telescope."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"harvey-j-alter","name":"Harvey J. Alter","year":2020,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for the discovery of Hepatitis C virus","tagline":"He tracked a hidden virus through donated blood, helping make transfusions safe from hepatitis C and opening the way to a cure.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Harvey_J._Alter.jpeg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1935,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["Early in the NIH heart-surgery study Alter later ran, about a third of transfused patients caught hepatitis; from 1992 to 1997 his team found no hepatitis C in 650 patients.","In 1975 he and his NIH colleagues named the mystery illness \"non-A, non-B hepatitis,\" a placeholder that lasted until the virus was identified in 1989.","A 1961 army draft notice steered him to the NIH instead; he reported there three days before he was due at Fort Dix.","His coded panel of blood samples stumped about 20 labs hoping they had a test for the mystery virus, until Chiron's new hepatitis C test cracked the code.","As a young NIH fellow he co-discovered the Australia antigen with Baruch Blumberg, the clue that led to the hepatitis B virus."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"louise-gluck","name":"Louise Glück","year":2020,"category":"literature","motivation":"for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal","tagline":"A poet who turned grief, family pain and ancient myth into spare, plain-spoken poems that speak to readers one at a time.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/dd/Louise_Gl%C3%BCck_circa_1977.jpg/330px-Louise_Gl%C3%BCck_circa_1977.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1943,"deathYear":2023,"gender":"female","refugee":false,"domains":["culture","education"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["Her first book, Firstborn, was rejected 28 times before a publisher accepted it. Soon after it came out she could not write at all for about two and a half years.","Her father, the son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants, co-founded X-Acto with his brother-in-law, the company that made the famous hobby knife.","The AP called her the first American poet to win the literature Nobel since T.S. Eliot in 1948, though Eliot was by then a British citizen.","As a teenager she was taken out of high school with severe anorexia. She credited seven years of psychoanalysis with making her life possible.","At seven, in a Paris convent school, she refused a nun's order to kneel and pray before a statue of Jesus, because she knew Jews did not bow down to statues."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"paul-r-milgrom","name":"Paul R. Milgrom","year":2020,"category":"economics","motivation":"for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats","tagline":"He co-designed the auctions governments use to sell airwaves, raising billions for the public and putting spectrum to work for phone users.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e1/Paul_Milgrom_Headshot.jpg/330px-Paul_Milgrom_Headshot.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1948,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["economy","communication","technology"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He learned he had won the Nobel when his co-laureate and neighbor, Robert Wilson, rang his doorbell at 2:15 a.m.; his wife, who was in Stockholm, watched on the doorbell camera.","To convince skeptical FCC staff that his new auction would work, he built a working version of it in Excel spreadsheets.","The FCC order that set the rules for the first US spectrum auctions cited him by name more than 100 times.","He began his career as an actuary. A Stanford professor, impressed by one answer in class, urged him to drop his MBA for a PhD.","He met his wife, Eva Meyersson, at the 1996 Nobel dinner in Stockholm, where he had come to honor the late laureate William Vickrey."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"roger-penrose","name":"Roger Penrose","year":2020,"category":"physics","motivation":"for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity","tagline":"He proved that Einstein's theory predicts black holes will form, turning a mathematical oddity into something astronomers set out to find.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ab/Roger_Penrose_9560.JPG/330px-Roger_Penrose_9560.JPG","birthCountry":"United Kingdom","birthYear":1931,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","mathematics","space","culture"],"disputed":true,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["The key idea for his black-hole proof came to him in 1964 as he crossed a London street. He traced it later that day while puzzling over a sudden feeling of elation.","His endless staircase, drawn with his father and published in 1958, inspired M.C. Escher's famous 1960 lithograph Ascending and Descending.","His never-repeating two-tile patterns of the mid-1970s helped scientists understand quasicrystals, a discovery that won Dan Shechtman the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.","In a wartime Canadian school he was judged slow at arithmetic and moved down a class. A later teacher let him take as long as he needed on maths tests, and he scored in the 90s.","His Jewish grandmother, a concert-level pianist from St Petersburg, kept her origins so secret that she hid even her maiden name."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"david-julius","name":"David Julius","year":2021,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch","tagline":"A Brooklyn grandson of Jewish immigrants who used chili peppers to find the nerve sensor that feels burning heat and pain.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/13/Davidjuliuswithsnake.jpg/330px-Davidjuliuswithsnake.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1955,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He found the body's sensor for painful heat by using capsaicin, the chemical that makes chili peppers taste hot.","His grandparents fled Czarist Russia and antisemitism. He grew up in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, a landing place for Eastern European immigrants, many of them Jewish.","He is the fourth Nobel laureate from Brooklyn's Abraham Lincoln High School, after Arthur Kornberg, Paul Berg and Jerome Karle.","After a year of three-hour daily subway trips, he took himself out of elite Stuyvesant High School and switched to his local public school.","His lab studied the same heat sensor in vampire bats, which carry a version tuned to about 30°C that helps them find warm blood."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"joshua-d-angrist","name":"Joshua D. Angrist","year":2021,"category":"economics","motivation":"for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships","tagline":"He showed how lotteries and accidents of policy can reveal cause and effect, giving schools and governments evidence they can trust.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/42/Joshua_Angrist_-_2011.jpg/330px-Joshua_Angrist_-_2011.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1960,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["education","economy","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He left high school after 11th grade and got into Oberlin College off the waitlist, despite poor grades. At first he needed tutoring in math.","His PhD used the Vietnam draft lottery. In the early 1980s, white veterans were earning about 15% less than comparable men who had not served.","He became an Israeli citizen in 1983 and spent two years in the Israel Defense Forces as a paratrooper, with deployments in Lebanon.","One of his best-known studies used a 12th-century rule from Maimonides, which caps classes at 40 pupils, to measure how class size affects learning in Israel.","In 2020 he volunteered for the Phase 3 trial of Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine. His father had caught polio a few years before the Salk vaccine arrived."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"ben-bernanke","name":"Ben Bernanke","year":2022,"category":"economics","motivation":"for research on banks and financial crises","tagline":"He showed how bank collapses turned the 1930s slump into the Great Depression, then used that lesson to fight the 2008 crisis.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3f/Ben_Bernanke_official_portrait.jpg/330px-Ben_Bernanke_official_portrait.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1953,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["economy","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["As a boy he asked his grandmother why some Depression children had worn-out shoes or none. Their fathers' shoe factories had closed, she said, because nobody could buy shoes.","In sixth grade he won South Carolina's spelling bee, then was knocked out of the national finals in Washington on the word edelweiss.","To help pay for Harvard, he spent college summers as a waiter at South of the Border, a Mexican-themed roadside attraction near his hometown.","As a teenager he helped lead services and prepare the Torah scrolls at his town's tiny synagogue, which served about a dozen Jewish families.","He learned he had won the Nobel from his daughter, who called after hearing the news; he and his wife had turned their phones off for the night, as usual."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"douglas-diamond","name":"Douglas Diamond","year":2022,"category":"economics","motivation":"for research on banks and financial crises","tagline":"He explained why banks exist and why fear alone can topple a healthy bank, giving deposit insurance a clear theoretical rationale.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1c/Douglas_Diamond.jpg/330px-Douglas_Diamond.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1953,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["economy","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["By his own account he was a weak student until high school. His mother privately told relatives she would be happy if he managed to graduate from junior college.","As a summer research assistant at the Federal Reserve in the 1970s, he built a model showing savings and loans would go broke if interest rates rose sharply.","He and co-laureate Philip Dybvig got to know each other waiting outside their adviser's office at Yale, where an assistant kept them supplied with cookies.","He gave the Nobel Prize Museum his old college exam book, in which he had argued as a senior that bank failures hurt the real economy.","Both of his children became economists. He jokes that his family lacks a well-diversified portfolio of human capital."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"claudia-goldin","name":"Claudia Goldin","year":2023,"category":"economics","motivation":"for having advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes","tagline":"She dug 200 years of hidden women's work out of the archives and showed why women still earn less than men.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/43/Claudia_Goldin_%28cropped%29.jpg/330px-Claudia_Goldin_%28cropped%29.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1946,"deathYear":null,"gender":"female","refugee":false,"domains":["economy","womens-rights","education","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["She became the first woman tenured in Harvard's economics department. The year before Harvard's 1989 offer, five of its nearly 70 economics professors were women, none tenured.","In 2023 she became the third woman to win the economics prize and the first to win it alone.","In the National Archives she found 1939 surveys asking firms if they barred married women or fired women who wed. With no anti-bias law yet, managers replied openly.","Her family attended an Orthodox synagogue and kept a kosher home so her grandparents could visit, but ate lobster and Chinese food outside it.","She advised the WNBA players' union without pay. Its March 2026 contract raised players' salaries nearly 400 percent over seven years."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"drew-weissman","name":"Drew Weissman","year":2023,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19","tagline":"With Katalin Karikó, he kept lab-made mRNA from setting off the immune alarm, a key step behind mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7b/Drew_Weissman_Life_Science_medalist.jpg/330px-Drew_Weissman_Life_Science_medalist.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1959,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He met his research partner Katalin Karikó in the late 1990s while they competed for the same photocopier at the University of Pennsylvania.","Nature and Science both turned down the pair's key 2005 paper. It ran in the journal Immunity instead and later won them the Nobel Prize.","Both the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines swap one RNA building block for a chemically modified cousin, the trick the pair pioneered.","Diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at age five, he says he took things apart so often as a child that the family toaster never worked.","After building a facility in Thailand to make vaccines and medicines to clinical standards, he says he helped build 17 more across four continents."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"david-baker","name":"David Baker","year":2024,"category":"chemistry","motivation":"for computational protein design","tagline":"Turned the computer into a workshop for building proteins that never existed in nature, aimed at disease, pollution and energy.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/38/DBaker_SparkPlugMtn_July2013.JPG/330px-DBaker_SparkPlugMtn_July2013.JPG","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1962,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["health","fundamental-science","technology"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He started at Harvard in social studies and philosophy, and only took the biology course that redirected his life in his final year.","Top7, designed in his laboratory in 2003, folds into a shape found nowhere in nature; at 93 amino acids it was larger than any protein previously designed from scratch.","He told his Nobel interviewer that his 101st PhD student had graduated just before he left for Stockholm.","Both his parents are retired University of Washington scientists, a physicist and a geophysicist, and both travelled to Stockholm for the ceremony.","He donated a ski pole that had snapped in half to the Nobel Prize Museum, as a reminder to keep going when plans break."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"gary-ruvkun","name":"Gary Ruvkun","year":2024,"category":"medicine","motivation":"for the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation","tagline":"He helped discover microRNAs, tiny RNA switches that fine-tune our genes, and showed that humans share them with worms.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/ce/Gary_Ruvkun%2C_2024_Nobel_Prize_Laureate_in_Medicine.jpg/330px-Gary_Ruvkun%2C_2024_Nobel_Prize_Laureate_in_Medicine.jpg","birthCountry":"USA","birthYear":1952,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","health"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["His grandparents were Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire. His father's parents ran a junkyard in Stockton, California.","After college he lived in his van for a year while planting trees in Oregon, then travelled through Latin America before starting graduate school.","In 2000 his lab found that a tiny worm RNA called let-7 also exists in flies, fish and humans, which turned a worm curiosity into a new field.","Massachusetts General Hospital says microRNA research has grown from his and Victor Ambros's two 1993 papers to about 176,000 papers.","He has co-led a NASA-funded project to adapt DNA-sequencing tools to search for life on Mars and other worlds."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"joel-mokyr","name":"Joel Mokyr","year":2025,"category":"economics","motivation":"for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress","tagline":"Economic historian who showed how science and skilled hands, working together, turned short bursts of invention into lasting prosperity.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1f/Joel_Mokyr.png/330px-Joel_Mokyr.png","birthCountry":"the Netherlands","birthYear":1946,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["economy","technology","education"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["He was born in Leiden in 1946 to Dutch Jewish parents who had survived the Theresienstadt ghetto. His father died when he was one.","At nine he moved to Israel with his mother and sister, grew up in Haifa and served in the Israeli army before studying at the Hebrew University.","He joked to colleagues that, Jewish as he is, he was more likely to be elected pope than to win a Nobel Prize.","A study he co-wrote tracked 759 British inventors and 'tweakers' born before 1830 and found that 40 percent of them never took out a patent.","He has taught at Northwestern University since 1974 and has supervised more than 65 PhDs in economics and history."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"laszlo-krasznahorkai","name":"László Krasznahorkai","year":2025,"category":"literature","motivation":"for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art","tagline":"Hungarian novelist whose long, dark and funny sentences stare into collapse and terror yet insist that art still matters.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/69/Krasznahorkai_L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_portrait.jpg/330px-Krasznahorkai_L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_portrait.jpg","birthCountry":"Hungary","birthYear":1954,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["culture"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["His grandfather changed the family name from Korin to Krasznahorkai. The family's partly Jewish roots were not talked about, and he learned of them only as a boy.","After he angered police during questioning, Hungary's communist authorities took his passport. He had none until 1987.","Each of the 12 chapters of his first novel, Satantango, is one single paragraph. Béla Tarr's film version runs more than seven hours.","In 2015 he became the first Hungarian author to win the Man Booker International Prize.","He is the second Hungarian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, after Imre Kertész in 2002."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"michel-h-devoret","name":"Michel H. Devoret","year":2025,"category":"physics","motivation":"for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit","tagline":"Showed that an electric circuit you can hold obeys quantum rules, then spent 40 years turning such circuits into qubits.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c0/Michel_Devoret_%2854987873184%29.jpg/330px-Michel_Devoret_%2854987873184%29.jpg","birthCountry":"France","birthYear":1953,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["fundamental-science","technology"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["The chip in the 1985 experiment was about a centimetre across, yet billions of paired electrons in it acted together like one single quantum particle.","He gave the 2025 Nobel banquet speech for all three laureates and joked that his English-speaking co-laureates had picked the one with a thick French accent.","He co-authored the 2007 paper introducing the transmon, a superconducting qubit design now used in quantum computing efforts around the world.","At Yale he co-taught a course called Cinema and Physics with a film professor, after the pair won a campus contest to link the sciences and humanities.","He slept through the Nobel announcement and first thought the flood of messages was a joke, until he called his daughter in Paris to check."],"verification":"corrected"},{"slug":"philippe-aghion","name":"Philippe Aghion","year":2025,"category":"economics","motivation":"for the theory of sustained growth through creative destruction","tagline":"With Peter Howitt, he modeled creative destruction, showing how new ideas replacing old ones keep lifting living standards.","thumb":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9f/Phillipe_Aghion_-_The_State_of_France_%28cropped%2Boptimised%29.jpg/330px-Phillipe_Aghion_-_The_State_of_France_%28cropped%2Boptimised%29.jpg","birthCountry":"France","birthYear":1956,"deathYear":null,"gender":"male","refugee":false,"domains":["economy","technology","environment"],"disputed":false,"hasProfile":true,"quickFacts":["His mother, Gaby Aghion, founded the Paris fashion house Chloé. As a boy, he sometimes got help with his German homework from Karl Lagerfeld.","He failed an oral exam for Harvard's elite Society of Fellows, took a job at MIT instead, and there met Peter Howitt, his partner for the prize-winning model.","In 1956, the year he was born, Egypt froze the assets of many Jewish families after the Suez war, and his parents lost their family fortune.","The core of his model fits in one line: an economy's growth rate equals how often innovations arrive times how big each step forward is.","He joined the French Communist Party as a teenager. Decades later he co-chaired a French commission on artificial intelligence for President Macron."],"verification":"corrected"}]