The Impossible Takes Longer (41 page)

W
IESEL,
T
ORSTEN
(Sweden, USA; born 1924). Medicine, 1981. The son of a psychiatrist, Wiesel took medical degrees in Sweden and the United States. At Harvard for twenty-four years, he moved to Rockefeller University in 1983, becoming president in 1991. Wiesel shared the Nobel Prize for his work on information processing in the visual system. This research lent strong support to the view that prompt surgery is imperative in correcting certain eye defects that are detectable in newborn children.

W
IGNER,
E
UGENE
(Hungary, USA; 1902-1995). Physics, 1963. Born in Hungary, Wigner immigrated to the United States in 1930 and worked at Princeton for more than forty years. He was one of the group of physicists that persuaded the U.S. government of the need for an atomic bomb project, and he worked with Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago in building the first atomic reactor. He received the Nobel Prize for his contributions to elementary particle physics, particularly the principles of symmetry. His five hundred papers fill eight volumes.

W
ILKINS,
M
AURICE
(New Zealand, Britain; 1916-2004). Medicine, 1962. Born in New Zealand, Wilkins moved to England at the age of six, studied physics at Cambridge, and spent most of his career at the University of London. He worked on the Manhattan Project in World War II, subsequendy moving to the field of biophysics. With Francis Crick and James Watson, he discovered the structure of DNA.

W
ILLIAMS,
B
ETTY
(Northern Ireland, USA; born 1943). Peace, 1976. Williams, an office receptionist, witnessed a tragic accident in 1976, when a car driven by a terrorist who had been shot by British soldiers crashed and killed three children. With Mairead Corrigan, aunt of the slain children, she launched the organization Peace People, for which the two women received the Nobel Prize. In 1982, Betty Williams moved to the United States.

W
ILLIAMS,
J
ODY
(USA; born 1950). Peace, 1997. Lifelong human rights activist Williams shared the Nobel Prize with the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which she coordinated. Their work culminated in the 1997 treaty to ban landmines signed by 121 countries, but not including Russia, China, or the United States.

W
ILSON,
W
OODROW
(USA, 1856-1924). Peace, 1919. The son and grandson of Presbyterian ministers, Wilson became professor of jurisprudence and later president of Princeton University. He was governor of New Jersey in 1911-1913, and the twenty-eighth president of the United States in 1912-1920, the only president with an earned doctorate. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for his "Fourteen Points," an effort to secure a just and lasting peace at the end of World War I.

X
INGJIAN,
G
AO
(China, France; born 1940). Literatare, 2000. Xingjian took a degree in French in Beijing. During the Cultural Revolution, he was sent to a reeducation camp for six years. He produced many stories, essays, and plays between 1980 and 1986, when they began to be banned. In 1987, he left China and settled in France. He paints in ink and has held many international exhibitions of his work.

Y
ALOW,
R
OSALYN
(USA, born 1921). Medicine, 1977. Rosalyn Yalow earned a Ph.D. in nuclear physics in 1945. Married, with two children, she worked for three decades at Bronx Veterans Administration Medical Center. Yalow shared the Nobel Prize "for the development of radioim-munoassays of peptide hormones." After a stroke in 1995, she was rejected as a suspected indigent by a New York hospital whose parent university had conferred on her an honorary degree.

Y
ANG,
C
HEN
N
ING
(China, USA; born 1922). Physics, 1957. The son of a mathematics professor, Yang was educated in China, then went to the United States in 1945 for graduate stadies at the University of Chicago, where he worked with Enrico Fermi. From 1965, he taught at SUNY, Stony Brook. He shared the Nobel Prize with Tsung-Dao Lee for their investigation of the parity laws with respect to subatomic particles.

Y
EATS,
W
ILLIAM
B
UTLER
(Ireland, 1865-1939). Literatare, 1923. Yeats received the Nobel Prize for his dramatic works but is remembered more for his poetry, the finest of which he wrote after the age of fifty. An Irish patriot who served six years in the Irish Senate, Yeats led an Irish literary revival through his writing and his leadership of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin.

Y
UNUS,
M
UHAMMAD
(Bangladesh, born 1940). Peace, 2006. Known as "banker to the poor," Yunus earned a Ph.D. in economics from Vanderbilt University in 1969. In 1974, he gave twenty-seven dollars to a group of poor women to save them from the clutches of moneylenders. This led in 1976 to his foundation of Grameen Bank to make small loans to the poor to enable them to achieve self-sufficiency. Since then the bank has loaned $6 billion to 7 million villagers in Bangladesh, 97 percent of them women. The bank has a 99 percent repayment rate, makes a profit, and has extensive programs of housing, scholarships, and telecommunications.