The Impossible Takes Longer (34 page)

L
AUGHLIN,
R
OBERT
(USA, 1950-2007). Physics, 1998. Laughlin attended the University of California at Berkeley during the days of Vietnam War protests and was then drafted into the military, spending much of his tour of duty in Germany. He subsequendy worked at MIT, Bell Labs, the Livermore Lab, and Stanford University. His Nobel-winning work explained how electrons in a powerful magnetic field can condense to form a kind of quantum fluid.

L
AUTERBUR,
P
AUL
(USA, 1929-2007). Medicine, 2003. A professor of medicine at the College of Medicine at Illinois from 1985 until his death, Lauterbur was honored for "discoveries concerning Magnetic Resonance Imaging" which led to the widespread development and use of MRI in medical diagnosis.

L
EDERBERG,
J
OSHUA
(USA, born 1925). Medicine, 1958. Lederberg's parents immigrated to the United States from Palestme. He earned his B.A. at nineteen and trained as a doctor in the navy during World War II. He was a consultant to the World Health Organization and NASA, and president of Rockefeller University for twelve years. Lederberg won the Nobel Prize "for his discoveries concerning genetic recombination and the organization of the genetic material of bacteria."

L
EDERMAN,
L
EON
(USA, born 1922). Physics, 1988. Born and educated in New York, Lederman served three years in the U.S. Army in World War II. During his twenty-eight years at Columbia, he had fifty Ph.D. students. ("None, to my knowledge is in jail," he reports.) He was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery of neutrinos.

L
EHN,
J
EAN
-M
ARIE
(France, born 1939). Chemistry, 1987. Born in Alsace, Lehn studied the classics, philosophy, and science in high school. Lehn spent his entire career in France, at the National Center for Scientific Research, the University of Strasbourg, Universite Louis Pasteur, and the College de France. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for his part in "development and use of molecules with structure-specific interactions of high selectivity."

L
EONTIEF,
W
ASSILY
(Russia, USA; 1906-1999). Economics, 1973. Born in St. Petersburg, where his father was a professor of economics, as a boy Leontief witnessed Lenin addressing a mass rally at the Winter Palace. He took his B.A. at Leningrad and earned his Ph.D. at Berlin at twenty-two. Leontief moved to the United States in 1931 and spent forty-four years at Harvard. The Swedish Academy of Sciences cited his "development of the input-output method of economic analysis," which became a standard technique in the economic planning of many countries.

L
EWIS,
A
RTHUR
(St. Lucia, West Indies, 1915-1991). Economics, 1979. With Derek Walcott, Lewis was one of two Nobel laureates from the tiny island of St. Lucia. The son of teachers, he graduated from high school at fourteen. He studied at the London School of Economics and was one of the first blacks to be appointed to a university lectureship in Britain. He worked for the UN for several years, mainly in Africa. He was honored for his work on poverty, growth, and development in Third World countries.

L
EWIS,
I
NCLAIR
(USA, 1885-1951). Literature, 1930. The first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Lewis achieved fame with
Main Street
(1920), a satirical view of the hypocrisy of Middle America, which sold five hundred thousand copies. Attacked for his critical treatment of American life, Lewis in turn rejected the Pulitzer Prize. An alcoholic and perpetual nomad, Lewis died in Rome.

L
ORENZ,
K
ONRAD
(Austria, 1903-1989). Medicine, 1973. A dedicated naturalist from early childhood, this son of a surgeon earned an M.D. but was working as a professor of psychology in 1941 when he was drafted into the Wehrmacht as a medical officer. Captured on the Armenian front in 1944, he served as a doctor in Soviet prison camps until his release in 1948. The founder of modern ethology, Lorenz was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discoveries "concerning organization and elicitation of individual and social behavior patterns."

L
UCAS,
R
OBERT
(USA, born 1937). Economics, 1995. Lucas grew up in Seatde and attended the University of Chicago, where he was a student of Milton Friedman. He returned to teach at Chicago in 1974. He was awarded the Nobel Prize "for having developed and applied the hypothesis of rational expectations, and thereby having transformed macroeconomic analysis."

L
URIA,
S
ALVADOR
(Italy, USA; 1912-1991). Medicine, 1969. Luria served as a medical officer in the Italian army before leaving Italy for Paris, emigrating to the United States in 1940. An active socialist, he opposed the Vietnam War and was deprived of his passport in the McCarthy era. He founded and directed the Center for Cancer Research at MIT, where he also taught a course on world literature. He won the Nobel Prize for his work on the genetic structure of viruses.

L
UTULI,
A
LBERT
(South Africa, 1898-1967). Peace, i960. Lutuli was a teacher and lay preacher who was elected chief of the Zulu Abasemakholweni tribe and later became president of the African National Congress. He spent much of his life in internal exile under a ban by the government of South Africa. He was honored for his leadership of nonviolent resistance to apartheid.

M
AATHAI,
W
ANGARI
(Kenya, born 1940). Peace, 2004. Maathai studied in Germany and earned her doctorate at the University of Nairobi, where she became chair of the Department of Veterinary Anatomy. She also headed the Kenyan National Council of Women. She founded the Green Belt Movement, whose members (mosdy women) have planted over 20 million trees. In 2002, she was elected to the Kenyan parliament and served as assistant minister of environment, natural resources, and wildlife.

M
ACBRIDE,
S
EAN
(Ireland, 1904-1988). Peace, 1974. MacBride was the son of the Irish nationalists Maud Gonne, a muse of William Buder Yeats, and John MacBride, who was executed after the Easter Rising in 1916. MacBride served in the IRA for twenty years. He subsequendy became an expert trial lawyer and Irish minister for external affairs. He worked with several international human rights organizations and was chairman of Amnesty International from 1961 to 1974.

M
ACDIARMID,
A
LAN
(New Zealand, USA; 1927-2007). Chemistry, 2000. During the depression in New Zealand, MacDiarmid went to his two-room school barefoot and had an early morning milk round. He left school at sixteen and became a lab boy and janitor at the university. He studied part-time and won a Fulbright fellowship to the United States, where he spent forty-five years at the University of Pennsylvania. MacDiarmid shared the Nobel Prize for the discovery that modified plastics can conduct electricity.

M
ACKINNON,
R
ODERICK
(USA, born 1956). Chemistry, 2003. After completing his M.D. at Tufts University and his residency at Harvard Medical School, MacKinnon decided to embark on postdoctoral studies in basic research. Later, he gave up a tenured professorship at Harvard to move to Rockefeller University, where he continued the research on ion channels for which he won the Nobel Prize.

M
AETERLINCK,
M
AURICE
(Belgium, 1862-1949). Literature, 1911. Maeterlinck trained as a lawyer but practiced moral and philosophical issues. The king of Belgium named him a count in 1932. An opponent of totalitarianism, Maeterlinck spent World War II in Portugal and the United States.

M
AHFOUZ,
N
AGUIB
(Egypt, 1911-2006). Literature, 1988. The author of over forty novels and one hundred short stories, as well as plays and screenplays, Mahfouz is widely recognized as the foremost exponent of the Arab novel. His 1957 Cairo Trilogy made him famous throughout the Arab world, but he continued working as a cultural officer in the Egyptian civil service until the age of sixty. In 1994, he survived a near-fatal assassination attempt.