My Science School

            Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman was an Indian physicist, who became the first Indian to win the Nobel Prize in Physics.

            C.V. Raman was born in the former Madras Province in British India, presently the state of Tamil Nadu.

            He carried out ground-breaking work in the field of light scattering, which earned him the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics. Raman led experiments at the Indian Association for Cultivation of Science with collaborators, including K. S. Krishnan, on the scattering of light. He discovered that, when light traverses a transparent material, some of the deflected light changes in wavelength. This phenomenon is now called Raman scattering and is the result of the Raman Effect.

            Raman was president of the 16th session of the Indian Science Congress in 1929. He was conferred a knighthood, and medals and honorary doctorates by various universities.

            In 1954, India honoured him with its highest civilian award, the Bharat Ratna. Raman died in 1970, in Bangalore, at the age of 82.

 

 

            Rabindranath Tagore, a renowned Indian poet, who became the first Asian poet to be awarded the 1913 Nobel Prize for Literature, for his extraordinary work ‘Gitanjali’. He also became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

            Tagore was born on 7th May 1861, in Calcutta, India. He wrote his first poem at the age of six, and as a young boy, studied the classical poetry of Kalidasa.

            After a brief stay in England to attempt to study law, he returned to India, and instead, pursued a career as a writer, playwright, songwriter, poet, philosopher and educator.

            He authored almost 50 odd volumes of poetry. Tagore’s poetic songs were viewed as spiritual and mercurial. Initially, Tagore wrote his poems in his native language Bengali. Later, his works were translated into foreign languages. Gradually, he became well known in the West. In fact he toured many countries, and delivered many lectures on international platforms.

            In 1950, his song ‘Jana Gana Mana’ was adopted as India’s national anthem.

            Francis Crick was one of the world’s great scientists. He is best known for his work with James Watson, which led to the identification of the structure of DNA in 1953. Their work was based partly on fundamental studies done by Rosalind Franklin, Raymond Gosling, and Maurice Wilkins.

            Crick was born on 8th June 1916, in England. He was a British molecular biologist, bio-physicist, and neuroscientist.

            A critical influence in Crick’s career was his friendship, beginning in 1951, with James Watson, who was an American molecular biologist, geneticist and zoologist. Together with Watson and Maurice Wilkins, he was jointly awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology, or Medicine.

            In 1962, Crick became the director of Cambridge University’s Molecular Biology Laboratory, as well as a non-residential fellow of the Salk Institute in California. In 1964, he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

            Crick died in the US on 28th July, 2004.

 

 

            Alexander Fleming was a Scottish bacteriologist and Nobel Prize winner, best known for his discovery of penicillin.

            Fleming was born in Ayrshire on 6th August 1881, the son of a farmer. He moved to London at the age of 13, and later trained as a doctor.

            During World War I, he served as a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps.

            In 1928, while studying influenza, Fleming noticed that a mould had developed accidentally on a set of culture dishes being used to grow the staphylococcus bacteria. The mould had created a bacteria-free circle around itself. Fleming concluded that the mould contained a substance that was effective against bacteria. The substance was named penicillin, and became the basis for medication to treat bacterial infections.

           Fleming shared the Nobel Prize in 1945 with Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain. His invention saved many lives especially during times of war. Sir Alexander Fleming died on 11th March, 1955.

            Karl Landsteiner was an Austrian-born American immunologist, physician and pathologist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1930 for Physiology or Medicine for detecting the major blood groups and creating the ABO system of blood typing that revolutionized the process of blood transfusion.

            Before him, scientists thought that the blood of every person was the same. Blood transfusion was often considered dangerous. Landsteiner discovered why: when different people’s blood was mixed, the blood cells sometimes clotted.

            He announced in 1901, that there were three major human blood groups: A, B and C (which was later called O). One year later in 1902, Landsteiner’s three fellow scientists discovered a fourth blood type named AB. He identified the presence of agglutinins in the blood, and identified, with Alexander S. Wiener, the Rhesus factor, in 1937, thus enabling physicians to transfuse blood without endangering the patient’s life.

            Along with his ground-breaking discovery of blood groups, Landsteiner, Constantin Levaditi, and Erwin Popper discovered the polio virus in 1909.

            Landsteiner died of a heart attack in 1943.

 

            Charles Jules Henry Nicolle was a French bacteriologist who won the 1928 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his identification of lice as the transmitter of epidemic typhus. Nicolle was born on 21st September 1866.

            After it was established that several diseases, including malaria, were spread by insects, suspicions arose that this might also be the case with typhus fever.

            However, Nicolle suspected that the key point of typhus was unhygienic conditions. When patients were bathed, and their clothes were confiscated, the carrier of typhus in the patients’ clothes or on their skin could be removed. Charles Nicolle noticed that sick people ceased to infect others when they had an opportunity to keep themselves clean. In 1909, he demonstrated that body lice spread typhus fever by successfully transferring the infection among apes by allowing a body louse to first bite infected, and then uninfected, apes.

            Nicolle was an Associate of l’Academie de Medecine. He was awarded the Montyon Prize in 1909, 1912, and 1914. He died in 1936.

            Willem Einthoven was a renowned Dutch physiologist who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1924 for inventing the first practical electrocardiogram (ECG). He was born on 21st May 1860, in Semarang on the island of Java, in the former Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia).

            In 1885, Einthoven received his medical degree from the University of Utrecht. He became a professor at the University of Leiden in 1886.

            In 1902, Einthoven became a Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1903, Einthoven developed the first string galvanometer. The device could measure the changes of electrical potential caused by contractions of the heart muscle and record them graphically. He is best remembered for this ground-breaking invention, which was the first practical electrocardiograph.

            He was awarded the 1924 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his discovery of the mechanism of the electrocardiogram. Einthoven’s invention could detect, and record even the minutest electric currents produced by the human heart. Einthoven died on 29th September 1927.

            Alexis Carrel, the French surgeon and biologist, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1912 for pioneering vascular suturing techniques.

            Carrel was born at Lyons, France, on 28th June, 1873. In 1900, he received his formal medical degree from the University of Lyons. He was elected twice, in 1924 and 1927, as an honorary member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.

            During the first decade of the 20th century, Alexis Carrell developed methods for sewing blood vessels together. These were much required, and a crucial part of surgery. It also laid the groundwork for transplant surgery.

            He invented the first perfusion pump with Charles A. Lindbergh opening the way to organ transplantation. During World War I, Carrel and the English chemist Henry Drysdale Dakin developed the Carrel—Dakin method of treating wounds based on chlorine which preceding the development of antibiotics was a major medical advance in the care of deep wounds.

            He died in Paris on 5th November, 1944.

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            Robert Koch was a German physician who is widely credited as one of the founders of bacteriology and microbiology. Robert Koch was born on 11th December 1843, in Hanover in Germany.

            Koch came from a poor mining family and it took him a lot of determination to get a university place where he first studied mathematics and natural science, and then studied medicine. Koch attended the University of Gottingen, where he studied medicine, graduating in 1866. He then became a physician in various provincial towns.

            Koch received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1905. He discovered the anthrax disease cycle in 1876. Koch found out that the anthrax microbe produced spores that lived for a long time, after an animal had died. He proved that these spores could then develop into the anthrax germs and could infect other animals.

            He also developed ways of staining bacteria to improve the bacteria’s visibility under the microscope, and were able to identify the bacterial causes of tuberculosis in 1882, and cholera 1883.

Picture credit: google

            Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov developed his concept of the ‘conditioned reflex’ through a famous study with dogs, and won a Nobel Prize in 1904, and became the first Russian Nobel laureate.

            Conditioned reflex is a response that does not occur naturally, but that may be developed by regular association of some physiologic function with an unrelated outside event, such as ringing of a bell, or flashing of a light.

            Soon the physiological function starts whenever the outside event occurs. Pavlov trained dogs to expect food whenever he rang a bell. The dogs eventually produced saliva when they heard the bell ring, without even seeing the food.

            He was born on 26th September 1849, in Russia. Pavlov’s principles of classical conditioning have been found to operate across a variety of experimental settings, including educational classrooms.

            Starting in 1901, Pavlov was nominated over four successive years for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He did not win, because his previous nominations were not specific to any discovery, but based on a variety of laboratory findings. Pavlov died in Russia on 27th February, 1936.

 

 

          The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1902 was awarded to Ronald Ross for his work on malaria, by which he has shown how it enters the organism and thereby, has laid the foundation for successful research on this disease and methods of combating it.

            Ross was born in Almora, India, and educated in Great Britain. Young Ross was witness to his father falling seriously ill with malaria. In 1881, he became a military medical officer in India. Ronald Ross began working in West Africa in 1899, to find a way to combat malaria.

            Ronald Ross was the first British Nobel laureate, and the first born outside Europe. He wrote ‘The Prevention of Malaria’ in 1910.

            Ross returned to England in 1899, and joined the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. He was knighted in 1911. In 1926, he became Director of the Ross Institute and Hospital for Tropical Diseases, named in honour of his work.

            Ronald Ross died on 16th September, 1932.

          Emil von Behring, German physiologist, was a pioneer in the field of immunology. In 1889, while working at the Institute of Hygiene in Berlin, Behring discovered that it was possible to neutralize bacterial toxins using antitoxins.

          Behring was born on 15th March 1854, in West Prussia. He was the first recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in the year 1901. He received the prestigious prize for his discovery of a diphtheria antitoxin. He was widely known as a ‘saviour of children’, as diphtheria used to be a major cause of child death.

          He was mainly a military doctor. His ground-breaking work resulted in the development of blood serums for vaccinations against diphtheria and tetanus, and in modern methods of immunization that have largely eradicated diphtheria world-wide. He, along with Shibasaburo Kitasato, developed the effective therapeutic serum against diphtheria and tetanus. The first successful therapeutic serum treatment of a child suffering from diphtheria occurred in 1891. Behring died on 31st March, 1917.

          Sir John Richard Nicholas Stone was an outstanding figure in post-war British applied econometrics. Stone was born on 30th August 1913, in London.

          He was an eminent British economist. Stone was educated in Westminster School, and Cambridge University. In 1984, he received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for developing an accounting model that could be used to track economic activities on a national and, later, an international scale.

          He visited India along with his father, as his father was appointed as a judge in Madras. He returned to London in 1931.

          He is sometimes known as the ‘father of national income accounting’. The first official estimates of British national income and expenditures were made according to Stone’s method in 1941.

          He was co-author with J.E. Meade of ‘National Income and Expenditure’ and author of several other works.

          He died on 6th December 1991 at the age of 78, in England.

          The American economist James Tobin received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in the year 1981 for his analysis of financial markets and their relations to expenditure decisions, employment, production, and prices.

          James Tobin was born on 5th March 1918 in the US. He served as a member of President John F. Kennedy’s the Council of Economic Advisers, and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. He was with the University of Yale since 1950.

          A collection of his selected articles, ‘National Economic Policy’, was published in 1966.

          In 1970, Tobin was president of the American Economic Association. Tobin was widely known for his suggestion of a tax on foreign exchange transactions, now known as the ‘Tobin tax’. This was designed to reduce speculation in the international currency markets. He died on 11th March 2002, in Connecticut, US.

          Paul Samuelson used mathematics to formulate influential economic theories and, in 1970, became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. He was awarded the prize for actively contributing to raising the level of  analysis in economic science.

          Samuelson was born on 15th May 1915, in Gary, US, in a family that emigrated from Poland. In 1923, he moved to Chicago, where he began studying economics at the university. He presented his doctoral thesis at Harvard in 1941. Named an assistant professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1940, Samuelson eventually became an institute professor during his longtime association with the university.

          He served as an advisor to two American presidents, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson. Samuelson was probably the most influential economist of the later 20th century. He wrote the best-selling book ‘Economics’ in 1948, which was later translated into 20 languages; it was selling 50,000 copies a year a half century after it first appeared.

          Samuelson died on 13th December 2009, at the age of 94.