The Impossible Takes Longer (28 page)

B
OHR,
N
IELS
(Denmark, 1885-1962). Physics, 1922. Bohr was honored for his work on the structure of the atom. At his institute in Copenhagen, he became a much-loved father figure to many future Nobel physicists and assisted many Jewish scientists fleeing Nazi Germany. Warned of his imminent arrest in 1942, he was spirited out of occupied Denmark
H
and joined the atom bomb project at Los Alamos. He met with both Roosevelt and Churchill to urge, unsuccessfully, the international control of atomic energy.

B
ÖLL,
H
EINRICH
(Germany, 1917-198$). Literature, 1972. Böll served in the Wehrmacht through World War II in France and on the Eastern Front, and was wounded four times. In some forty books of fiction and essays, he expressed compassion for the victims of society and condemned both contemporary materialism and the forces that led to the catastrophes of the twentieth century.

B
ORLAUG,
N
ORMAN
(USA, born 1914). Peace, 1970. Born on a farm in Iowa, Borlaug became a plant pathologist. While working in Mexico from 1944 to i960, he developed a high-yield, hardy, disease-resistant strain of wheat, which tripled Mexican wheat production. He was honored for his leadership of the "Green Revolution."

B
ORN,
M
AX
(Germany, Britain; 1882-1970) Physics, 1954. Born studied at Gottingen and Cambridge. During World War I, he conducted military research and worked at the University of Berlin, where his friendship with Albert Einstein began. He returned to Gottingen for its golden age, 1921-1933. He left Germany in 1933 and in 193$ became a professor at Edinburgh. Born won the Nobel Prize for his statistical interpretation of quantum theory. He refused to work on poison gas in World War I and on the atomic bomb in World War II. After retiring to Germany, he was active in the campaign against nuclear weapons.

B
OYER,
P
AUL
(USA, born 1918). Chemistry, 1997. Boyer was born and grew up in Utah. He was high school valedictorian at sixteen, and served in the U.S. Navy at the end of World War II. He spent his career at the University of Minnesota and at UCLA. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on enzymes.

B
RAGG,
W
ILLIAM
H
ENRY
(Britain, 1862-1942). Physics, 191$. After leaving Cambridge, Bragg taught in Australia for eighteen years. He did not begin serious research until 1904, when he quickly made major findings on alpha particles. He left sunny Adelaide in 1909 to take a position in rainy, smoky Leeds in England. During World War I, he headed submarine detection research; his younger son was killed in France. Bragg shared the Nobel Prize with his son Lawrence Bragg, for their X-ray analysis of crystal structure.

B
RANDT,
W
ILLY
(Germany, Norway; 1913-1992). Peace, 1971. A Social Democratic journalist, anti-Nazi, and anti-Communist, Brandt went into exile in Norway and Sweden during the Nazi era, making covert missions back into Germany during the war. He was mayor of West Berlin in 1957-1966 and chancellor of West Germany in 1969-1974, in which office he worked to normalize relations between West and East.

B
RENNER,
S
YDNEY
(South Africa, Britain; born 1927). Medicine, 2002. Born in South Africa, the son of a multilingual but illiterate Lithuanian cobbler, Brenner entered the University of Witwatersrand at fifteen, and qualified as a doctor before moving to Oxford and then Cambridge, where he spent most of his career. His prize was awarded for work in genetics.

B
RIDGMAN,
P
ERCY
(USA 1882-1961). Physics, 1946. During his forty years at Harvard, Bridgman never attended a faculty meeting, which enabled him to write 260 papers and thirteen books. He worked on sonar in World War I and on plutonium in World War II. Bridgman won the Nobel Prize for his work in high-pressure physics, leading to advances in thermodynamics, crystallography, and the production of synthetic diamonds.

B
RODSKY,
J
OSEPH
(USSR, USA; 1940-1996). Literature, 1987. Brodsky was a gifted translator of English poetry into Russian. He worked at many occupations while writing po-etry that circulated in underground samizdat publications. In x964, he was sentenced to exile with hard labor in Siberia for "social parasitism." In 1972, he emigrated to the United States. The Swedish Academy praised the "clarity of thought and poetic intensity" of his prose and poetry.

B
UCK,
L
INDA
(USA, born 1947). Medicine, 2004. Buck grew up in Seattle, the daughter of an electrical engineer. She explored various career possibilities before entering graduate school at twenty-eight in microbiology. Buck won the Nobel with Richard Axel for their research on the sense of smell.

B
UCK,
P
EARL
S. (USA, 1892-1973). Literature, 1938. Pearl Buck spent forty years in China, where her parents were missionaries. She spoke Chinese before English, and many of her eighty works were set in China. A woman of immense energy and drive, she adopted many children. With her literary earnings of more than $7 million, she endowed the Pearl S. Buck Foundation, founded to aid Asian children of U.S. servicemen.

B
UNCHE,
R
ALPH
(USA, 1904-1971). Peace, 1950. The great-grandson of a slave, Bunche was the first African American to win the Nobel Prize. A brilliant student and athlete, he earned a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1934. A prodigious worker, active in the civil rights movement, Bunche spent most of his career as an international troubleshooter at the United Nations. He received the Nobel Prize for his mediation of an armistice between Israel and the Arab states in 1949.

C
AMUS,
A
LBERT
(France, 1913-1960). Literature, 1957. Ca-mus's father was killed in World War I, and Albert grew up in poverty in Algeria. At twenty-five, he moved to Paris, where he worked in the theater as a producer and playwright. During the German occupation, he contributed articles to the Resistance newspaper
Combat,
An opponent of both fascist and Marxist ideology, he wrote about the problem of justice and the need to create personal meaning in an unfeeling and absurd universe. Camus died in a car crash at the age of forty-seven.