Kip Anastasiou will be speaking on Canadian Nobel laureates at SKY on Monday, January 16, at 11 a.m.
When Fred Banting received his Nobel Prize for medicine in 1923, he didn't want to accept it because his partner in the discovery of insulin was not included in the honour. It took a lot of persuading but he finally accepted it and shared his prize money with Charles Best. If he had turned it down, our first Nobel in science would have had to wait until 1949. That was the year that low temperature scientist William Giauque was awarded the physics prize for his hyper low temperature work. Giauque was born and mostly raised in Niagara Falls, Ontario, and it is cold there in the winter. He got closer to absolute zero than anyone thought possible at that time but he hated living in a cold place. When he first arrived at Berkeley, California, as an undergraduate, he decided that this was the right kind of temperature for him and he went right on to his doctorate with a professorship following. He never left Berkeley again, not even for vacations or conferences except to receive major awards. He must have been miserably cold when he received his Nobel in Stockholm on December 10, 1949.
When Gerhardt Herzberg, a young professor in Hitler's Germany, realized that he had to leave. His wife was Jewish and that was enough for the Nazis. Thousands of Jewish professors had already left, filling every possible position around the world. He had a friend at the University of Saskatchewan and soon found himself and his brilliant physicist wife taking his first steps on the icy cold prairie, toward one of the most incredible careers, culminating in a Nobel Prize in 1971.
David Hubel, in his 80's, still works at Harvard University at the end of a career that brought him the Nobel Prize for demonstrating how the brain interprets the signals from the eyes. He was a McGill graduate in physics and math who somehow found himself taking medicine but he really didn't want to go into practice.
Every one of the Canadian laureates has a fascinating story of years of determined hard work and long hours at the lab. At the same time, they were also well-rounded people. Henry Taube, one of Herzberg's students, was an ardent vegetable gardener and loved to check on his grad students with a squash in one hand and a beer in the other.
In his talk, Anastasiou will also spend a few minutes on the science aspect of Hedy Lamarr's career.
