The Impossible Takes Longer (39 page)

S
CHWEITZER,
A
LBERT
(Germany, France, Gabon; 1875-1965). Peace, 1952. Born in Alsace-Lorraine, Schweitzer was a renowned organist, with doctorates in philosophy, theology, and medicine. In 1913, he left Europe to found a hospital in Lambarene, in French Equatorial Africa. During World War I, he was interned in France as an enemy alien. He retained to Africa in 1924 and rebuilt the hospital, added a leper colony, and worked at Lambarene until his death.

S
EABORG,
G
LENN
(USA, 1912-1999). Chemistry, 1951. Seaborg won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of nine new elements, including plutonium, which he discovered at the age of twenty-eight. He gave his acceptance speech in Stockholm in Swedish, his first language. Element 106 was named seaborgium in his honor. Seaborg was chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and scientific adviser to nine presidents. He held the record for the longest entry in
Who's Who in America.

S
EFERIS,
G
IORGOS
(Greece, 1900-1971). Literature, 1963. Seferis was born in Smyrna and educated in Paris. A diplomat for thirty years, he ended his career as ambassador to London in 1957-1961. He celebrated in vivid poetry the landscape and color of Greece, and the glory and tragedy of its history, sharpened by his own sense of distance from his homeland. He died in Athens, where people wept in the streets on the news of his death.

S
EN,
A
MARTYA
(India, Britain; born 1933). Economics, 1998. Sen was born in India and educated in Calcutta and at Cambridge. He taught at Cambridge, Delhi, the London School of Economics, Oxford, and Harvard, before becoming master of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1998-2004. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on welfare economics, with a particular interest in poverty and farnine in developing nations.

S
HAW,
G
EORGE
B
ERNARD
(Ireland, Britain; 1856-1950). Literatare, 1925. Shaw modernized British drama. A vegetarian, self-taught musician, popular orator, critic, pro-feminist, and polemicist, he advocated the simplification of English spelling and was a leading member of the influential socialist Fabian Society. In more than fifty plays he showed himself a master of comedy, tragedy, satire, and intellectual argument. His best-known works are
Pygmalion
and
St. Joan.

S
IENKIEWICZ,
H
ENRYK
(Poland, 1846-1916). Literatare, 1905. Most of Sienkiewicz's epic novels were set in Poland during the mid-seventeenth century, but the best known today is
Quo Vadis,
set in the time of Christ. In 1876-1878, he paid an extended visit to the United States, traveling across the country by train, and recording his impressions in his
Letters
from America.
The Utopian agricultaral colony that he and a group of fellow intellectuals attempted to establish in California failed after a few years.

S
IMON,
H
ERBERT
(USA, 1916-2001). Economics, 1978. Simon taught at Carnegie Mellon University for forty-four years. He received the Nobel Prize for his work on decision making in economic organizations. Multilingual, a pianist, painter, and expert chess player, Simon was often described as a Renaissance man. He made contributions in the fields of mathematics, administrative theory, psychology, political science, and artificial intelligence.

S
INGER,
I
SAAC
B
ASHEVIS
(Poland, USA; 1904-1991). Literatare, 1978. Singer spent his teenage years in Bilgoraj, a Polish shted virtually unchanged since the Middle Ages. He moved to the United States in 1935 to join the staff of a Jewish newspaper in Brooklyn, New York. His much-loved books for adults and children about the world of East European Jewry in the early twentieth century were written in Yiddish. His best-known works are
Enemies: A Love Story
and
Yentl.

S
MOOT,
G
EORGE
F. (USA, born 1945). Physics, 2006. Born in Florida to scientist parents, Smoot graduated from MIT and is now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was honored with John C. Mather for their work with the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite. Smoot was responsible for the instruments that determined with great precision the temperature of the black body radiation emanating from the earliest state of the universe.

S
OLOW,
R
OBERT
(USA, born 1924). Economics, 1987. Solow served three years in the U.S. Army in North Africa and Sicily. He taught at MIT for forty-five years. His research showed that the rate of technological progress is more important to economic growth than capital accumulation. His stadies were influential in persuading governments to support technological research and development.

S
OLZHENITSYN,
A
LEXANDR
(Russia, born 1918). Literatare, 1970. A decorated artillery captain in World War II, Solzhenitsyn served eight years in prison camps for criticizing Stalin. During a brief cultural thaw in 1962, his novel
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch,
describing conditions in a labor camp, was published. After a resumption of censorship, his books could be published only outside the USSR. He was not permitted to go to Stockholm to receive his Nobel Prize. In 1974, he was expelled from the USSR, and lived in the United States until 1994, when he returned to Russia.

S
OYINKA,
W
OLE
(Nigeria, born 1934). Literatare, 1986. The first African to win a Nobel Prize in Literatare, Soyinka writes poetry, plays, novels, and criticism. After his return from study in Britain, he founded a national theater company. In 1967, during the civil war between Nigeria and Biafra, he published an appeal for peace and was imprisoned for twenty-two months. Subsequendy, he has been frequendy exiled.

S
TEINBECK,
J
OHN
(USA, 1902-1968). Literatare, 1962. Steinbeck's lifelong advocacy for the oppressed, expressed in such novels as
The Grapes of
Wrath
and
Of Mice and Men,
earned him a large FBI file. His book
The Moon
Is Down
became an inspiration to occupied Europe during World War II, when Steinbeck served as a war correspondent. He wrote the screenplay for the movie
Viva Zapata!
and speeches for President Lyndon Johnson.

S
TIGLER,
G
EORGE
(USA, 1911-1991). Economics, 1982. Stigler, an economist at the University of Chicago, where he was head of the Center for the Study of the Economy and the State, was honored for his work on industry, markets, and regulatory legislation.

S
TIGLITZ,
J
OSEPH
(USA, born 1943). Economics, 2001. Stiglitz studied economics at MIT under four future Nobel laureates. In 1992, he became chairman of President Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisors, where he developed the concept of the "third way" between the roles of government and the market. In 1997, he moved to the World Bank as chief economist. Disagreeing with the bank's practice of imposing neoliberal policies on developing countries, he resigned in 2000.

S
ULSTON,
J
OHN
(Britain, born 1942). Medicine, 2002. The son of an Anglican priest, Sulston was educated at Cambridge. In his prize-winning work, he "identified the first mutation of a gene participating in the cell death process." In the 1990s, he led Britain's involvement in the Human Genome Project and successfully fought to keep the results of the research in the public domain and prevent privatization of the genome by commercial interests.

S
ZENT
-G
YORGYI,
A
LBERT
(Hungary, USA; 1893-1986). Medicine, 1937. From a family of landed nobility, Szent-Gyorgyi served in the Austrian army during World War I. He studied at several universities and laboratories in Europe, taking his doctorate at Cambridge. Between the wars, he did pioneering research on muscle contraction. He received the Nobel Prize for his work on vitamin C. During World War II, he joined the Hungarian Resistance, and his arrest was personally ordered by Hider. In 1945, he moved to Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where he worked on cancer research for the rest of his life.

S
ZYMBORSKA,
W
ISLAWA
(Poland, born 1923). Literatare, 1996. The poet Szymborska has lived almost all her life in Krakow, Poland. During the German occupation, she worked with an illegal underground theater. The Nobel Committee cited her "poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality."