The Impossible Takes Longer (30 page)

C
URIE,
M
ARIE
(Poland, France; 1867-1934). Physics, 1903; Chemistry, 1911. Born in Poland, Marie Curie moved to France to attend the Sorbonne. She and her husband, Pierre, working under difficult physical conditions, isolated radium, for which they shared the Nobel Prize. She was the first woman laureate and the first person to win two Nobels. Like her daughter Irene, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1935, Marie Curie died of leukemia, probably due to radiation exposure.

D
AE-JUNG,
K
IM
(Korea, born 1925). Peace, 2000. Kim Dae-jung, the leader of the New Democratic Party, ran for the presidency of South Korea in 1971. Imprisoned many times by a series of military governments, he was once sentenced to death, and he survived five assassination attempts. He was elected president in 1997 and won the Nobel Prize for his efforts to normalize relations with North Korea. He is the first Korean laureate.

D
ALAI
L
AMA, THE
F
OURTEENTH
(Tibet, born 1935). Peace, 1989. Chosen as Dalai Lama at age five, and considered the reincarnation of the Buddha of Compassion, he is the spiritual and secular head of the Tibetan people. He went into exile in 1959 after the Chinese occupation of Tibet. He received the Nobel Prize for his consistent advocacy of tolerance and nonviolence in the solution of human and international problems, especially those of Tibet.

DE
D
UVE,
C
HRISTIAN
(Belgium, born 1917). Medicine, 1974. Born in London to Belgian refugees, de Duve took his medical degree at Louvain. Briefly in the army in 1940, and then in a prison camp, from which he escaped, he returned to Louvain to take a doctorate in chemistry. From 1962 he held joint appointments at Louvain and Rockefeller University. He shared the Nobel Prize for research on the structure and function of cells.

DE
K
LERK,
F. W. (South Africa, born 1936). Peace, 1993. The son of a conservative Afrikaner senator, de Klerk practiced law and was elected to parliament in 1972. Becoming president in 1989, he called for a democratic, nonracist South Africa, lifted the ban on the African National Congress, and released Nelson Mandela from prison. His actions initiated the end of apartheid and the transition to democracy.

D
ELBRÜCK,
M
AX
(Germany, USA; 1906-1981). Medicine, 1969. Del-bruck grew up in Berlin, the son of a professor of history, and studied at Gottingen. He left Germany in 1937 on a Rockefeller scholarship and spent most of his career at Caltech. Interested in music and philosophy, he was an expert on the poet Rilke. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for "discoveries concerning the replication mechanism and the genetic structure of viruses."

D
ELEDDA,
G
RAZIA
(Italy, 1871-1936). Literature, 1926. Deledda was born in a village of Sardinia so remote that the local language was a variant of Latin. She published her first story at fifteen and her first novel at twenty-two, and produced a book a year for thirty years. Littie read today, her early fiction focused on life in Sardinia, her later work on the theme of redemption through love.

D
IRAC,
P
AUL
(Britain, 1902-1984). Physics, 1933. Dirac became Lu-casian Professor at Cambridge at the age of thirty. The author of over two hundred papers, in 1928 he formulated a relativistic quantum mechanical wave equation since known as the Dirac equation. Famously reticent and exact, a keen mountain climber, he traveled widely, making a journey around the world with Werner Heisenberg in 1929. Niels Bohr said of him, "Of all physicists, Dirac has the purest soul." After retirement from Cambridge, he joined the faculty at the University of Florida at Tallahassee.

D
UNANT,
H
ENRI
(Switzerland, 1828-1910). Peace, 1901. The first winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Dunant founded the Red Cross after witnessing, and helping to relieve, the suffering of the wounded at the Battle of Solferino in 1859. In his dedicated work organizing the Geneva Conventions, Dunant neglected his business interests, went bankrupt, was forgotten, and lived in poverty for many years before his rediscovery and winning of the Nobel Prize. He spent none of the prize money and bequeathed it to charity.

E
BADI,
S
HIRIN
(Iran, born 1947). Peace, 2003. Appointed one of Iran's first female judges in 1975, Ebadi was forced to resign after the revolution in 1979 and was subsequendy imprisoned on numerous occasions for her advocacy of democracy and human rights, especially those of women and children, and for her defense of victims of conservative attack and repression.

E
CCLES,
J
OHN
(Australia, Britain, USA, Switzerland; 1903-1997). Medicine, 1963. Eccles spent his research career in Australia, New Zealand, Britain, and the United States; after retirement in 197$, he set-ded in Switzerland. The research for which he won the Nobel Prize was on nerve cells; his later research focused on the brain and consciousness. He also wrote a number of books on the relation of science and religion.

E
DELMAN,
G
ERALD
(USA, born 1929). Medicine, 1972. Originally trained as a concert violinist, after he obtained his medical degree Edelman was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1955 and served as a surgeon at European Command Headquarters in Paris. He spent almost fifty years at Rockefeller University. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for his research on the chemical structure of antibodies. His subsequent work focused on the issue of consciousness.

E
INSTEIN,
A
LBERT
(Germany, Switzerland, USA; 1879-1955). Physics, 1921. The outstanding physicist of the twentieth century, Einstein saw his prize delayed for a decade because the Nobel committee chairman thought he was "just writing formulas." Although Einstein is known for his theory of relativity, the prize was awarded for his work on the photoelectric effect. Einstein left Europe for the United States in 1933 and spent the rest of his life at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He declined an invitation to become president of Israel.

E
L
B
ARADEI,
M
OHAMED
(Egypt, born 1942). Peace, 200$. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and its director general, ELBaradei, shared the Peace Prize "for their efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes and to ensure that nuclear energy for peaceful purposes is used in the safest possible way." ELBaradei received a doctorate in international law from New York University. He joined the Egyptian diplomatic service, moving to the UN in 1980, and to the IAEA Secretariat in 1984, being appointed director in 1997.

E
LIOT,
T. S. (USA, Britain; 1888-196$). Literature, 1948. The most revolutionary poet of the early twentieth century, Eliot was a social and political conservative. Unlike the ninety laureates who became American, Eliot was an American who became British. He settled in England in 1914 and adopted English dress, manners, speech, churchmanship, and prejudices. As a poet and critic, editor of the magazine
Criterion,
and a director of Faber & Faber publishers, he was enormously influential in shaping literary trends. He is best known for his 1922 poem,
The Waste Land.