The Impossible Takes Longer (33 page)

H
ERZBERG,
G
ERHARD
(Germany, Canada; 1904-1999). Chemistry, 1971. Deprived of his professorship because his wife was Jewish, Herzberg left Germany for Canada in 1934, where he found a position at the University of Saskatchewan. Subsequendy, he worked at the National Research Council in Ottawa into his nineties. An unaffected man with a fine singing voice, Herzberg was known as "the father of modern molecular spectroscopy." He was honored for his discoveries in the structure of molecules.

H
ESSE,
H
ERMAN
(Germany, Switzerland; 1877-1962). Literature, 1946. Hesse left school at sixteen and was apprenticed first to a clockmaker, then to a book dealer. He moved to Switzerland in 1912. During World War I, his pacifism made him unpopular in Germany. This, together with the stress of his wife's mental illness, produced a mental crisis that took Hesse into therapy with a disciple of Jung. His books were banned by the Nazis. Hesse's prolific works largely deal with the search for spiritual truth and the essential self.

H
ITCHINGS,
G
EORGE
(USA, 1905-1998). Medicine, 1988. A researcher at Burroughs Wellcome, Hitchings was for forty years the mentor of and collaborator with Gertrude Elion, with whom he shared the Nobel Prize for designing drugs that operated selectively against various diseases, including leukemia and malaria.

H
OFFMANN,
R
OALD
(Poland, USA; born 1937). Chemistry, 1981. Born in what is now Ukraine, Hoffmann lost most of his family in the Holocaust. He spent World War II in a ghetto, a labor camp, and in hiding. His father, who smuggled Hoffmann and his mother out of the camp, died in a breakout attempt. After three years in a camp for displaced persons, Hoffmann emigrated to the United States. Multilingual and a published poet, Hoffmann won the Nobel Prize for his studies of orbital symmetry in chemical reactions.

H
ULL,
C
ORDELL
(USA, 1871-1955). Peace, 1945. Born in a log cabin in Tennessee, Hull was successively a state legislator, an infantry captain, a judge, a U.S. congressman, a U.S. senator, and secretary of state. He was honored for his work in international relations and specifically for his role in the establishment of the United Nations.

J
ACOB,
F
RANCOIS
(France, born 1920). Medicine, 1965. Jacob was the grandson of the first Jewish four-star general in the French army. He joined the Free French Forces in 1940, served as a medical officer in central and north Africa, and participated in the invasion of Normandy. Serious wounds from a fragmentation bomb prevented him from realizing his long-cherished ambition to be a surgeon. He shared the Nobel Prize with colleagues at the Pasteur Institute "for their discoveries concerning genetic control of enzyme and virus synthesis."

J
IMÉNEZ,
J
UAN
R
AMÓN
(Spain, United States; 1881-1958). Literature, 1956. The son of a banker, Jimenez abandoned law studies for poetry. At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, the Republican government sent him to the United States as cultural attache. After Franco's victory, Jimenez stayed in the United States and in 1951 setded in Puerto Rico. Periodically hospitalized for depression, he dealt in his poetry with the experience of beauty as a means to struggle against nothingness.

K
AHNEMAN,
D
ANIEL
(Israel, USA; born 1934). Economics, 2002. Kah-neman survived World War II in occupied France and then emigrated to Palestine, graduating in psychology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Drafted into the Israeli Defense Force in 1954, he worked on the assessment of officer candidates. He moved to the University of California at Berkeley in 1958. Kahneman received the Nobel Prize "for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science."

K
APITSA,
P
YOTR
(Russia, 1894-1984). Physics, 1978. The son of a czarist general, Kapitsa was born in St. Petersburg. One of his daughters died of scarlet fever, and his other daughter, his father, and his wife perished during the 1920 influenza epidemic. In 1921, he went to Cambridge to work with Ernest Rutherford. Visiting Russia in 1934, he was prevented from leaving on Stalin's orders. He continued his research in low-temperature physics in Moscow, for which he later won the Nobel Prize. During the war, he worked on large-scale production of oxygen for the steel industry but was later disgraced for refusing to work on nuclear weapons.

K
ENDALL,
H
ENRY
(USA, 1926-1999). Physics, 1990. Kendall joined the Merchant Marines in the summer of 1945, resigning to attend Amherst College in 1946, afterward spending forty years at MIT. For many years the head of the Union of Concerned Scientists, he was honored for his work on subatomic particles, which confirmed the existence of quarks. A keen photographer, mountaineer, and diver, Kendall died while scuba diving on a National Geographic Society expedition in Florida.

K
ERTESZ,
I
MRE
(Hungary, born 1929). Literature, 2002. Born in Budapest, as a teenager Kertesz survived both Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Dismissed by the Communist government from his newspaper position, he shared a one-room flat with his wife and worked as a translator. The Nobel presentation speech cited Kertesz "for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbarian arbitrariness of history."

K
ING,
M
ARTIN
L
UTHER
(USA, 1929-1968). Peace, 1964. A Baptist minister, King became the eloquent voice of the American civil rights movement. Deeply influenced by Gandhi, he advocated nonviolent resistance to injustice. He was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, at the age of tfnrty-riine. He was the youngest recipient of the Peace Prize and the only laureate to die before the age of forty.

K
IPLING,
R
UDYARD
(Britain, 1865-1936). Literature, 1907. Born in India, Kipling spoke Hindustani before learning English. He experienced great cruelty during his schooling in England. He returned to India for some years as an adult, and India was frequendy the setting for his poetry, novels, and stories for adults and children. He was deeply affected by the loss of a daughter to pneumonia and of his only son in World War I. A superb literary craftsman, he held conservative and imperialist views, which made his reputation controversial.

K
ISSINGER,
H
ENRY
(Germany, USA; born 1923). Peace, 1973. Kissinger's immediate family immigrated from Germany to the United States in 1938; thirteen other relatives perished in the Holocaust. He served in army counterintelligence during World War II and taught at Harvard University from 1954 to 1969. He was an adviser to five presidents, and secretary of state under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. He shared the Nobel award with Le Due Tho of North Vietnam (who refused it) for their attempts to negotiate an end to the Vietnam War. The award was controversial, and two of the five members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee resigned in protest.

K
OHN,
W
ALTER
(Austria, Canada, USA; born 1923). Chemistry, 1998. Kohn was rescued from Austria by the Kindertransport to Britain; the rest of his family perished in the Holocaust. In Britain, he was interned as an enemy alien and then sent to Canada. He studied at Toronto and Harvard. Most of his career was spent at the University of California. He won the Nobel Prize "for his development of the density-functional theory."

K
ORNBERG,
A
RTHUR
(USA, born 1918). Medicine, 1959. Kornberg graduated from high school at fifteen and, like eight other Nobel laureates, attended the tuition-free City College of New York. He served as an officer in the U.S. Public Health Service and as a ship's doctor in the navy, and taught at Washington University, St. Louis, and Stanford. A world authority on enzymes, Kornberg was awarded the Nobel Prize for his studies of RNA and DNA.

K
REBS,
H
ANS
(Germany, Britain; 1900-1981). Medicine, 1953. Krebs served in the German army in 1918. Dismissed by the Nazis from his professorship at the University of Freiberg in 1934, he emigrated to Britain, where he taught at the universities of Sheffield, Cambridge, and Oxford. His Nobel was awarded for his discovery of the citric acid cycle, now known as the Krebs cycle.

L
AGERLOF,
S
ELMA
(Sweden, 1858-1940). Literature, 1909. An educator, novelist, story writer, poet, biographer, and dramatist, Lagerlof was a leading figure in the romantic revival in Swedish literature. In her last days, she saved the life of the German poet Nellie Sachs by endorsing her application for a visa to Sweden. In her writing, she was influenced by Greek tragedy, the Old Testament, and Icelandic sagas.