Why is Kailash Satyarthi a popular Nobel laureate?


            Kailash Satyarthi is a renowned Indian child rights activist and the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014.



            Satyarthi was born on 11th January 1954, in Vidisha, Madhya Pradesh. An electrical engineering graduate, Satyarthi, started a journal called ‘The Struggle Shall Continue’ in 1980 in order to create awareness about the problem of child labour.



            Satyarthi is the founder of the Bachpan Bachao Andolan, an organization dedicated towards the eradication of child labour and rehabilitation of the rescued former child workers. The organisation acts to protect the rights of more than 83,000 children from 144 countries. The success of this organisation led to the creation of the South Asian Coalition on Child Servitude (SACCS) in 1989. SACCS has till date liberated several thousands of child labourers working in different industries.



            His work is recognized through various national and international honours and awards including the Nobel Peace Prize of 2014, which he shared with Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan.














Who is Amartya Sen?


            Amartya Kumar Sen is the 1998 Nobel prize-winner in economics. He is a well-known economic theorist whose works link ethical questions with economic issues.



            Sen was born in Santiniketan, West Bengal. In 1956, at the age of 23, he was appointed as the Professor and head of the Economics Department at the Jadavpur University, Calcutta.



            After two years, he went to Cambridge University to pursue his Ph.D In 1959; he submitted his Ph.D thesis titled ‘the choice of techniques’, after which he was a visiting Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.



            From 1961 to 1972, he was a Professor at the Delhi School of Economics, after which he was a Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics. Since 1972, had taught and worked in the United Kingdom and the United States.



            Sen has made contributions to welfare economics, social choice theory, economic and social justice and economic theories of famines.



            In 1999, he was awarded the Bharat Ratna, which is the highest civilian award in India.












What made Mother Teresa prominent among the Nobel laureates of India?


            Mother Teresa was the founder of the Missionaries of Charity, dedicated to helping the poor. Considered one of the 20th Century’s greatest humanitarians, she was canonized as Saint Teresa of Calcutta in 2016.



            Mother Teresa was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in Skopje, Macedonia, on 26th August 1910. But she later moved to India, where she lived for most of her life.



            The Missionaries of Charity came into being on 7th October 1950, in Calcutta, with the Vatican decree recognizing the diocesan congregation. Mother Teresa proceeded with the aim to care for the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, and all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared. It had over 4,500 sisters, and became active in 133 countries by 2012.



            She received the Padma Shree in 1962 and the Bharat Ratna in 1980. She was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Peace and International Understanding in 1962.



            Mother Teresa accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.










What were the contributions of C. V. Raman?


            Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman was an Indian physicist, who became the first Indian to win the Nobel Prize in Physics.



            C.V. Raman was born in the former Madras Province in British India, presently the state of Tamil Nadu.



            He carried out ground-breaking work in the field of light scattering, which earned him the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics. Raman led experiments at the Indian Association for Cultivation of Science with collaborators, including K. S. Krishnan, on the scattering of light. He discovered that, when light traverses a transparent material, some of the deflected light changes in wavelength. This phenomenon is now called Raman scattering and is the result of the Raman Effect.



            Raman was president of the 16th session of the Indian Science Congress in 1929. He was conferred a knighthood, and medals and honorary doctorates by various universities.



            In 1954, India honoured him with its highest civilian award, the Bharat Ratna. Raman died in 1970, in Bangalore, at the age of 82.








Who was the first Nobel laureate from India?


 



 



            Rabindranath Tagore, a renowned Indian poet, who became the first Asian poet to be awarded the 1913 Nobel Prize for Literature, for his extraordinary work ‘Gitanjali’. He also became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.



            Tagore was born on 7th May 1861, in Calcutta, India. He wrote his first poem at the age of six, and as a young boy, studied the classical poetry of Kalidasa.



            After a brief stay in England to attempt to study law, he returned to India, and instead, pursued a career as a writer, playwright, songwriter, poet, philosopher and educator.



            He authored almost 50 odd volumes of poetry. Tagore’s poetic songs were viewed as spiritual and mercurial. Initially, Tagore wrote his poems in his native language Bengali. Later, his works were translated into foreign languages. Gradually, he became well known in the West. In fact he toured many countries, and delivered many lectures on international platforms.



            In 1950, his song ‘Jana Gana Mana’ was adopted as India’s national anthem.






Why are Francis Crick and James Watson considered to be great?


            Francis Crick was one of the world’s great scientists. He is best known for his work with James Watson, which led to the identification of the structure of DNA in 1953. Their work was based partly on fundamental studies done by Rosalind Franklin, Raymond Gosling, and Maurice Wilkins.



            Crick was born on 8th June 1916, in England. He was a British molecular biologist, bio-physicist, and neuroscientist.



            A critical influence in Crick’s career was his friendship, beginning in 1951, with James Watson, who was an American molecular biologist, geneticist and zoologist. Together with Watson and Maurice Wilkins, he was jointly awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology, or Medicine.



            In 1962, Crick became the director of Cambridge University’s Molecular Biology Laboratory, as well as a non-residential fellow of the Salk Institute in California. In 1964, he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.



            Crick died in the US on 28th July, 2004.




What makes Alexander Fleming prominent among Nobel laureates in Physiology or Medicine?


 



 



            Alexander Fleming was a Scottish bacteriologist and Nobel Prize winner, best known for his discovery of penicillin.



            Fleming was born in Ayrshire on 6th August 1881, the son of a farmer. He moved to London at the age of 13, and later trained as a doctor.



            During World War I, he served as a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps.



            In 1928, while studying influenza, Fleming noticed that a mould had developed accidentally on a set of culture dishes being used to grow the staphylococcus bacteria. The mould had created a bacteria-free circle around itself. Fleming concluded that the mould contained a substance that was effective against bacteria. The substance was named penicillin, and became the basis for medication to treat bacterial infections.



           Fleming shared the Nobel Prize in 1945 with Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain. His invention saved many lives especially during times of war. Sir Alexander Fleming died on 11th March, 1955.







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What were the contributions of Karl Landsteiner?


            Karl Landsteiner was an Austrian-born American immunologist, physician and pathologist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1930 for Physiology or Medicine for detecting the major blood groups and creating the ABO system of blood typing that revolutionized the process of blood transfusion.



            Before him, scientists thought that the blood of every person was the same. Blood transfusion was often considered dangerous. Landsteiner discovered why: when different people’s blood was mixed, the blood cells sometimes clotted.



            He announced in 1901, that there were three major human blood groups: A, B and C (which was later called O). One year later in 1902, Landsteiner’s three fellow scientists discovered a fourth blood type named AB. He identified the presence of agglutinins in the blood, and identified, with Alexander S. Wiener, the Rhesus factor, in 1937, thus enabling physicians to transfuse blood without endangering the patient’s life.



            Along with his ground-breaking discovery of blood groups, Landsteiner, Constantin Levaditi, and Erwin Popper discovered the polio virus in 1909.



            Landsteiner died of a heart attack in 1943.






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What makes Charles Nicolle a popular Nobel Laureate?


 



            Charles Jules Henry Nicolle was a French bacteriologist who won the 1928 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his identification of lice as the transmitter of epidemic typhus. Nicolle was born on 21st September 1866.



            After it was established that several diseases, including malaria, were spread by insects, suspicions arose that this might also be the case with typhus fever.



            However, Nicolle suspected that the key point of typhus was unhygienic conditions. When patients were bathed, and their clothes were confiscated, the carrier of typhus in the patients’ clothes or on their skin could be removed. Charles Nicolle noticed that sick people ceased to infect others when they had an opportunity to keep themselves clean. In 1909, he demonstrated that body lice spread typhus fever by successfully transferring the infection among apes by allowing a body louse to first bite infected, and then uninfected, apes.



            Nicolle was an Associate of l’Academie de Medecine. He was awarded the Montyon Prize in 1909, 1912, and 1914. He died in 1936.





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Who was Willem Einthoven?


            Willem Einthoven was a renowned Dutch physiologist who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1924 for inventing the first practical electrocardiogram (ECG). He was born on 21st May 1860, in Semarang on the island of Java, in the former Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia).



            In 1885, Einthoven received his medical degree from the University of Utrecht. He became a professor at the University of Leiden in 1886.



            In 1902, Einthoven became a Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1903, Einthoven developed the first string galvanometer. The device could measure the changes of electrical potential caused by contractions of the heart muscle and record them graphically. He is best remembered for this ground-breaking invention, which was the first practical electrocardiograph.



            He was awarded the 1924 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his discovery of the mechanism of the electrocardiogram. Einthoven’s invention could detect, and record even the minutest electric currents produced by the human heart. Einthoven died on 29th September 1927.




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When did Alexis Carrel win the Nobel Prize?


            Alexis Carrel, the French surgeon and biologist, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1912 for pioneering vascular suturing techniques.



            Carrel was born at Lyons, France, on 28th June, 1873. In 1900, he received his formal medical degree from the University of Lyons. He was elected twice, in 1924 and 1927, as an honorary member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.



            During the first decade of the 20th century, Alexis Carrell developed methods for sewing blood vessels together. These were much required, and a crucial part of surgery. It also laid the groundwork for transplant surgery.



            He invented the first perfusion pump with Charles A. Lindbergh opening the way to organ transplantation. During World War I, Carrel and the English chemist Henry Drysdale Dakin developed the Carrel—Dakin method of treating wounds based on chlorine which preceding the development of antibiotics was a major medical advance in the care of deep wounds.



            He died in Paris on 5th November, 1944.



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What were the contributions of Robert Koch?


            Robert Koch was a German physician who is widely credited as one of the founders of bacteriology and microbiology. Robert Koch was born on 11th December 1843, in Hanover in Germany.



            Koch came from a poor mining family and it took him a lot of determination to get a university place where he first studied mathematics and natural science, and then studied medicine. Koch attended the University of Gottingen, where he studied medicine, graduating in 1866. He then became a physician in various provincial towns.



            Koch received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1905. He discovered the anthrax disease cycle in 1876. Koch found out that the anthrax microbe produced spores that lived for a long time, after an animal had died. He proved that these spores could then develop into the anthrax germs and could infect other animals.



            He also developed ways of staining bacteria to improve the bacteria’s visibility under the microscope, and were able to identify the bacterial causes of tuberculosis in 1882, and cholera 1883.



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What makes Ivan Pavlov a legendary figure?


            Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov developed his concept of the ‘conditioned reflex’ through a famous study with dogs, and won a Nobel Prize in 1904, and became the first Russian Nobel laureate.



            Conditioned reflex is a response that does not occur naturally, but that may be developed by regular association of some physiologic function with an unrelated outside event, such as ringing of a bell, or flashing of a light.



            Soon the physiological function starts whenever the outside event occurs. Pavlov trained dogs to expect food whenever he rang a bell. The dogs eventually produced saliva when they heard the bell ring, without even seeing the food.



            He was born on 26th September 1849, in Russia. Pavlov’s principles of classical conditioning have been found to operate across a variety of experimental settings, including educational classrooms.



            Starting in 1901, Pavlov was nominated over four successive years for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He did not win, because his previous nominations were not specific to any discovery, but based on a variety of laboratory findings. Pavlov died in Russia on 27th February, 1936.




What were the contributions of Ronald Ross?


 



 



          The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1902 was awarded to Ronald Ross for his work on malaria, by which he has shown how it enters the organism and thereby, has laid the foundation for successful research on this disease and methods of combating it.



            Ross was born in Almora, India, and educated in Great Britain. Young Ross was witness to his father falling seriously ill with malaria. In 1881, he became a military medical officer in India. Ronald Ross began working in West Africa in 1899, to find a way to combat malaria.



            Ronald Ross was the first British Nobel laureate, and the first born outside Europe. He wrote ‘The Prevention of Malaria’ in 1910.



            Ross returned to England in 1899, and joined the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. He was knighted in 1911. In 1926, he became Director of the Ross Institute and Hospital for Tropical Diseases, named in honour of his work.



            Ronald Ross died on 16th September, 1932.











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Why is Emil von Behring ever remembered in the history of Nobel Prizes?


          Emil von Behring, German physiologist, was a pioneer in the field of immunology. In 1889, while working at the Institute of Hygiene in Berlin, Behring discovered that it was possible to neutralize bacterial toxins using antitoxins.



          Behring was born on 15th March 1854, in West Prussia. He was the first recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in the year 1901. He received the prestigious prize for his discovery of a diphtheria antitoxin. He was widely known as a ‘saviour of children’, as diphtheria used to be a major cause of child death.



          He was mainly a military doctor. His ground-breaking work resulted in the development of blood serums for vaccinations against diphtheria and tetanus, and in modern methods of immunization that have largely eradicated diphtheria world-wide. He, along with Shibasaburo Kitasato, developed the effective therapeutic serum against diphtheria and tetanus. The first successful therapeutic serum treatment of a child suffering from diphtheria occurred in 1891. Behring died on 31st March, 1917.










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