Word: nobelity
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...detailed scientific study of the Laetoli hominid fossils confirmed that they belonged to a new hominid species, best represented by the 3.2 million-year-old Lucy skeleton I had discovered four years earlier at Hadar, Ethiopia. When I presented these findings in May 1978 at a Nobel symposium in Sweden, Mary had already agreed to be one of the coauthors on the scientific paper defining the new species, Australopithecus afarensis. A few months later, however, when the paper was being printed, she cabled me demanding removal of her name. I respected her wishes and had the title page redone. Like...
...someone could get them to function as electronic valves. Shockley and his team figured out how to accomplish this trick. Understanding of the significance of the invention of what came to be called the transistor (for transfer resistance) spread quite rapidly. In 1956 Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain shared a Nobel Prize in Physics--an unusual awarding of the Nobel for the invention of a useful article...
...inflammatory ideas in a series of articles and speeches. Regularly interrupted by boos and catcalls, he argued that remedial educational programs were a waste of time. He suggested that individuals with IQs below 100 be paid to undergo voluntary sterilization. He donated openly and repeatedly to a so-called Nobel sperm bank designed to pass on the genes of geniuses. He filed a $1.25 million libel suit against the Atlanta Constitution, which had compared his ideas to Nazi genetic experiments; the jury awarded him $1 in damages. He ran for the U.S. Senate on the dysgenics platform and came...
...have quiet careers. But Salk's career stands out in at least two respects: the sheer speed with which he outraced all the other tortoises in the field and the honors he did not receive for doing so. How could the Man Who Saved the Children be denied a Nobel Prize? Or summarily be turned down for membership in the National Academy of Sciences? What was it about Salk that so annoyed his fellow scientists...
Just as some politicians are at their best when running for office, so Salk came into his own as a spokesman for vaccination. Although it is generally accepted in the field that the real man on the monument should be Enders (who in 1954 shared the only Nobel Prize given for polio research), it seems unlikely that either he or the pugnacious Sabin would have performed half so patiently as Salk the ceremonial chores expected of monuments or would have sat so politely through so many interviews and spread the gospel of disease prevention quite so far and wide...