The Impossible Takes Longer (36 page)

M
URRAY,
J
OSEPH
(USA, born 1919). Medicine, 1990. Murray was one of very few practicing physicians to receive the Nobel Prize for Medicine. A pioneering transplant and plastic surgeon, he applied his experience from skin grafts on badly burned soldiers in World War II, performing the first kidney transplant between identical twins in 1954, between fraternal twins in 1959, and from an unrelated cadaver in 1962. The principles he developed were subsequendy used in the general practice of organ transplants.

M
YRDAL,
A
LVA
(Sweden, 1902-1986). Peace, 1982. Alva Myrdal was a Swedish educator and public servant. She worked for the UN and UNESCO, was a member of parliament and cabinet minister, and Swedish ambassador to India. As Sweden's ambassador for disarmament to the United Nations, she worked for nuclear disarmament with great perseverance and in the face of constant discouragement.

M
YRDAL,
G
UNNAR
(Sweden, 1898-1987). Economics, 1974. Husband of Alva Myrdal, Gunnar Myrdal became widely known for his 1944
An
American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy.
He was honored for his work on money, economic fluctuations, and the interdependence of economic, social, and institutional phenomena. A professor at the University of Stockholm, he served as minister of commerce and was active in the United Nations.

N
AIPAUL,
V. S. (Trinidad, Britain; born 1932). Literature, 2001. Naipaul left Trinidad at eighteen for Oxford University and thereafter lived in England, with long periods of world travel. The first of his many books to achieve celebrity was
A House of Mr. Biswas
(1961). The Swedish Academy praised him for "having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories."

N
ANSEN,
F
RIDTJOF
(Norway, 1861-1922). Peace, 1922. Nansen made three voyages of exploration to the Arctic and was the first to cross the Greenland ice cap on skis. He wrote works on zoology, oceanography, and anthropology. He was active in the peaceful separation of Norway from Sweden in 1905 and in the League of Nations. After World War I, he organized the repatriation of four hundred thousand prisoners of war and helped save millions of Russians from starvation.

N
ERUDA,
P
ABLO
(Chile, 1904-1973). Literature, 1971. Neruda's 1924 book,
Twenty Love Poems and A Song of Despair,
sold 2 million copies and made him famous throughout Latin America. He was honorary consul for Chile to many countries, including Burma, Indonesia, and Spain. He joined the Communist Party, and became a senator in 1945, but was forced into exile in 1948. Appointed ambassador to France by President Salvador Allende, Neruda died a few days after Allende's death in the 1973 military coup.

N
OEL
-B
AKER,
P
HILIP
(Britain, 1889-1982). Peace, 1959. Noel-Baker competed as a runner in three Olympic games. The son of Canadian Quakers, he served in an ambulance unit during World War I and was decorated several times. Fluent in seven languages, he was a Labor member of Parliament for thirty-five years and a cabinet minister for sixteen. Noel-Baker helped draft the UN charter and campaigned widely for peace through multilateral disarmament.

O
E,
K
ENZABURO
(Japan, born 1935). Literature, 1994. Oe was born to a clan of storytellers. His father died in the Pacific war when Kenzaburo was nine. Oe's life and his writing were deeply influenced by the war, Hiroshima, the American occupation, his commitment to democracy, and his fatherhood of a brain-damaged son. The latter is the subject of his best-known work,
A Personal Matter.

O
'NEILL,
E
UGENE
(USA, 1888-1953). Literature, 1936. O'Neill's father was a touring actor, his mother a morphine addict. After expulsion from Princeton, he spent some years as a sailor, actor, reporter, gold prospector, and derelict. He became malarial, tubercular, and alcoholic. He began to write plays, cofounded the Playwrights' Theater, and had his first Broadway play produced in 1920. His powerful and tragic drama owes much to Greek theater;
A Long Day's Journey into Night
is considered his masterpiece.

O
RR,
J
OHN
B
OYD
(Britain, 1880-1971). Peace, 1949. Trained in medicine and physiology, Orr was a decorated medical officer in both the army and the navy during World War I. He built the Nutrition Institute in Aberdeen, helped formulate national food policy in World War II, and became the first director of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for his efforts to eliminate world hunger and to promote global unity.

O
SSIETZKY,
C
ARL
V
ON
(Germany, 1889-1938). Peace, 1935. Ossietzky's experiences as a soldier in World War I reinforced his pacifist views. His writings against militarism resulted in frequent arrests and imprisonment. In 1933, the Nazis sent Ossietzky to Oranienburg concentration camp, where he suffered severe ill-treatment and eventually died. His Nobel award, the result of an international campaign, so infuriated Hider that he prohibited any future German from accepting a Nobel Prize.

P
AMUK,
O
RHAN
(Turkey, born 1952). Literature, 2006. Born into a prosperous secular family in Istanbul, Pamuk originally wanted to become a painter. He studied architecture and journalism and has spent his entire working life as a writer. He was the first author in the Muslim world to publicly condemn the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. After referring in an interview to the genocide of a million Armenians in Turkey, he was charged with insulting the state, but charges were dropped after international protests. His books have been translated into over forty languages.

P
ASTERNAK,
B
ORIS
(Russia, 1890-1960). Literature, 1958. Originally a musician, Pasternak became the preeminent poet and translator in the Soviet Union. He fell into disfavor when his only novel,
Dr. Zhivago,
considered by the authorities to be critical of Soviet communism, was published abroad in 1957. He was forced to refuse the prize and was expelled from the Writers Union. Continuing pressure on him and those close to him is thought to have hastened his death.

P
AULI,
W
OLFGANG
(Austria, Switzerland; 1900-1958). Physics, 1945. Pauli won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the exclusion principle, also known as the Pauli principle, which posits that no two electrons in the same atom can exist in the same state. At age twenty, he wrote a book on relativity that was praised by Einstein, who later nominated him for the Nobel Prize. At thirty, he postulated the existence of the neutrino. It was claimed that if Pauli was nearby, experimental equipment would break spontaneously; this became known as the Pauli effect.