Elie Wiesel - Nobel 1986

Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel (born September 30, 1928 in Sighet) is a writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor.


Elie Wiesel was born in Sighet, a little town in Transylvania, (now Sighetu Marmaţiei), Maramureş, Kingdom of Romania. His father, Sholomo Wiesel, was an Orthodox Jew, who instilled a strong sense of humanism in his son, encouraging him to learn modern Hebrew and to read literature, whereas his mother, Sarah, encouraged him to study the Torah and Kabbalah. Wiesel’s early life, spent in a small Hasidic community, was a rather hermetic existence of prayer and contemplation. In 1940 Sighet was annexed by Hungary, and in March 1944 the town was brought into the Holocaust. Within days, Jews were “defined” and their property confiscated. By April they were ghettoized, and on May 15 the deportations to Auschwitz began. Wiesel, his parents, and three sisters were deported to Auschwitz, where his mother and a sister (Tzipora) were killed. He and his father were sent to Buna-Monowitz, the slave labour component of the Auschwitz camp. In January 1945 they were part of a death march to Buchenwald, where his father died on January 28 and from which Wiesel was liberated in April.


After the war Wiesel settled in France, studied at the Sorbonne (1948–51), and wrote for French and Israeli newspapers. Wiesel went to the United States in 1956 and was naturalized in 1963. He was a professor at City College of New York (1972–76), and from 1976 he taught at Boston University, where he became Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities.

During his time as a journalist in France, Wiesel was urged by the novelist François Mauriac to bear witness to what he had experienced in the concentration camps. The outcome was Wiesel’s first book, in Yiddish, Un di velt hot geshvign (1956; “And the World Has Remained Silent”), abridged as La Nuit (1958; Night), a memoir of a young boy’s spiritual reaction to Auschwitz. It is considered by some critics to be the most powerful literary expression of the Holocaust. In the US, Wiesel wrote over 40 books, both fiction and non-fiction, and won many literary prizes.

All of Wiesel’s works reflect, in some manner, his experiences as a survivor of the Holocaust and his attempt to resolve the ethical torment of why the Holocaust happened and what it revealed about human nature. He became a noted lecturer on the sufferings experienced by Jews and others during the Holocaust, and his ability to transform this personal concern into a universal condemnation of all violence, hatred, and oppression was largely responsible for his being awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. In 1978 U.S. President Jimmy Carter named Wiesel chairman of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, which recommended the creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Wiesel also served as the first chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council. He was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1985, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, The International Center in New York's Award of Excellence, KBE (Knight of The British Empire) and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1996. (From Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica)

Herta Müller - Nobel 2009

Herta Müller (born 17 August 1953) is a Romanian-born German novelist, poet and essayist noted for her works depicting the harsh conditions of life in Communist Romania under the repressive Nicolae Ceauşescu regime, the history of the Germans in Banat, and the persecution of Romanian ethnic Germans by Stalinist Soviet occupying forces in Romania.


She was born in August 1953 in the German-speaking village of Niţchidorf (German: Nitzkydorf), in the Banat district of Romania. The daughter of Banat Swabian farmers, her family was part of Romania's German minority; her father had served in the Waffen SS and her mother survived five years (1944-1949) in a slave labour camp in the Soviet Union during and after World War II. While she speaks German as a native language, she is also fluent in Romanian. Hertha left her village to study German and Romanian literature at the University of Timişoara. Here she became part of the Aktionsgruppe Banat (Campaign Group Banat), a group of idealistic Romanian-German writers seeking freedom of expression under the Ceauşescu dictatorship.


After her studies she was employed as a translator in a machine factory. Contacted by intermediaries of the Romanian Secret Service (Securitate), she strictly refused any collaboration which led to her losing her job in the factory. The Secret Service expected to get information from her about the Aktionsgruppe Banat, of which she was a member. During this period, she began writing her first stories which she collected under the title of 'Niederungen', but she had difficulty satisfying the censors, and this work was not published until 1982, and then in radically modified form.


In 1984, 'Niederungen' was published in Germany in an uncensored version. Awards and invitations to Germany followed. Although Herta Müller hadn’t had the permission to leave Romania as yet, traveling became possible for her hereupon. She even achieved an employment as teacher shortly before. After she had criticized severely the Ceauşescu dictatorship in interviews, however, a publication and traveling ban was imposed on her – culminating in death threats by the Secret Service. In 1987, she left Romania with her husband, novelist Richard Wagner and since then they lived in Berlin. Over the following years she received many lectureships at universities in Germany and abroad. She currently lives in Berlin. Müller received membership of the German Academy for Writing and Poetry in 1995, and other positions followed. Beside the prizes for her debut (among others the 'aspekte Literaturpreis'), she received many awards, such as Kleist, Aristeion, Würth, Impac, Cicero, and many others.


Herta Müller was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999 and 2009. The Swedish Academy awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature to Müller "who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed".

A refused Nobel

Nicolae Paulescu (October 30, 1869 – July 17, 1931), Romanian physiologist and professor of medicine, the inventor of insulin.


Born in Bucharest, he displayed remarkable abilities as early as his first school years. He learned French, Latin and Ancient Greek at an early age, so that a few years later he became fluent in all these languages and was able to read classical works of Latin and Greek literature in the original. He also had a particular gift for drawing and music and special inclinations towards natural sciences, such as physics and chemistry. He graduated from the Mihai Viteazu High School in Bucharest, in 1888. In the autumn of 1888, Paulescu left for Paris, where he enrolled in medical school. In 1897 he graduated with a Doctor of Medicine degree, and was immediately appointed as assistant surgeon at the Notre-Dame du Perpétuel-Secours Hospital. In 1900, Paulescu returned to Romania, where he remained until his death (1931) as Head of the Physiology Department of the University of Bucharest Medical School, as well as a Professor of Clinical Medicine at the St. Vincent de Paul Hospital in Bucharest.

In 1916, he succeeded in developing an aqueous pancreatic extract which, when injected into a diabetic dog, proved to have a normalizing effect on blood sugar levels. After a gap during World War I, he resumed his research and succeeded in isolating the anti-diabetic pancreatic hormone (pancreine). From April 24 to June 23, 1921, Paulescu published four papers at the Romanian Section of the Society of Biology in Paris:
* The effect of the pancreatic extract injected into a diabetic animal by way of the blood.
* The influence of the time elapsed from the intravenous pancreatic injection into a diabetic animal.
* The effect of the pancreatic extract injected into a normal animal by way of the blood.
* Research on the Role of the Pancreas in Food Assimilation, an extensive paper on this subject, was submitted by Paulescu on June 22 to the Archives Internationales de Physiologie in Liège, Belgium, and was published in the August 1921 issue of this journal. Furthermore, Paulescu secured the patent rights for his method of manufacturing pancreine (his own term for insulin) on April 10, 1922 (patent no. 6254) from the Romanian Ministry of Industry and Trade.


Eight months after Paulescu's works were published, doctor Frederick Grant Banting and biochemist John James Richard Macleod from the University of Toronto, Canada, published their paper on the successful use of a pancreatic extract for normalizing blood sugar (glucose) levels (glycemia) in diabetic dogs. Their paper is a mere confirmatory paper, with direct references to Paulescu's article. Surprisingly, Banting and Macleod received the 1923 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of insulin, while Paulescu's pioneering work was being completely ignored by the scientific and medical community. International recognition for Paulescu's merits as the true discoverer of insulin came only 50 years later.

In 1990, Nicolae Paulescu was elected posthumously to the Romanian Academy. On June 27, 1993, in Cluj-Napoca, a postmark was dedicated in Paulescu’s honor to observe the World Day Against Diabetes. Paulescu was also honored on a postage stamp issued by Romania in 1994. The stamp is one in a set of seven stamps honoring famous Romanians. In 1993, a new Institute of Diabetes, Nutrition and Metabolic Diseases in Bucharest was named in his honor.

George Emil Palade

George Emil Palade (November 19, 1912 – October 7, 2008) was a highly regarded Romanian cell biologist. Palade's pioneering research was recognized in 1974 when he shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology with Christian René de Duve of Belgium and Albert Claude of the United States for work on the structure and function of the internal components of cells. In addition to this honor, Palade was elected into the National Academy of Sciences in 1961 and has received numerous awards including the Lasker Award (1966), the Gairdner Special Award (1967), the Hurwitz Prize (1970), and the U. S. National Medal of Science (1986), the 'Star of Romania' Order (2007). He was also honored on a postage stamp issued in 2001 by his native Romania.


George Emil Palade was born in 1912 in Jassy, Romania. He received his bachelor's degree in 1930, and entered the School of Medicine at the University of Bucharest in 1930 and received his M.D. in 1940. However, during medical school he developed a strong interest in basic biomedical sciences and started working in an anatomy laboratory. After completing his degree, he became an instructor at the University of Bucharest, where he was assistant professor of anatomy from 1941 to 1945. Later, in 1945, he was named associate professor.

In the 1940s it was common for European researchers to spend a year or two abroad pursuing advanced studies. Palade received a 2-year fellowship as a visiting investigator at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now Rockefeller University) in New York City. He joined Albert Claude's electron microscopy research group at the Institute. Expecting to stay just a year or two, Palade ended up remaining at Rockefeller for 27 years. In 1953, he was named an associate member of the Rockefeller Institute, and in 1956 he was promoted to full professor of cell biology.

By fractionating the cells in 0.88 M sucrose, Palade, Hogeboom, and Schneider were able to isolate and characterize intact mitochondria for the first time. They also noted the presence of a fraction enriched in submicroscopic particles (microsomes) that contained large amounts of nucleic acid. In the 1950s, after using electron microscopy to study the structures of mitochondria, the endoplasmic reticulum, and chemical synapses, Palade decided to use electron microscopy to monitor cell fractionation. Using these methods, Palade was able to integrate structural and functional information on a number of cellular components including mitochondria. He and Philip Siekevitz also discovered that the microsomes found earlier in Claude's laboratory were part of the endoplasmic reticulum and that they contained large amounts of RNA. These cellular components were subsequently named ribosomes. His name has become attached to the Weibel-Palade bodies (a storage organelle unique to the endothelium), which he described in collaboration with Ewald R. Weibel. The electron microscopy work coming out of Rockefeller soon became known worldwide. Researchers from numerous disciplines, including anatomy, physiology, and pathology came to Rockefeller to work on this new instrument and to train in Palade's laboratory. The result was the birth of the field of cell biology.


In 1973, Palade left Rockefeller University to become Professor and Chairman of the Section of Cell Biology at Yale University, where he focused his attention on the synthesis of cellular and intracellular membranes. He then assumed the role of Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Cell Biology and Special Advisor to the Dean of the School of Medicine in 1983. Then, in 1990, Palade accepted a position as Professor of Medicine in Residence and Dean for Scientific Affairs at the School of Medicine of the University of California at San Diego.

As a major figure in the birth of cell biology, Palade was also a founding member of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB). He was active in the society and served as its president from 1974 to 1975. During his administration, Palade introduced poster presentations to cell biology meetings. He also served as editor of the Journal of Biophysical and Biochemical Cytology (predecessor of the Journal of Cell Biology) for more than a dozen years and as editor of the Annual Review of Cell Biology with Bruce Alberts and James Spudich for more than 10 years.