The Impossible Takes Longer (35 page)

M
ANDELA,
N
ELSON
(South Africa, born 1918). Peace, 1993. The son of a catde owner of the Xhosa royal family and one of his five wives, Mandela was an amateur boxer in his youth. He became an activist lawyer and helped organize the guerrilla army of the African National Congress. He was convicted of treason and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964. In 1991, a year after his release, he was elected president of the newly democratic South Africa.

M
ANN,
T
HOMAS
(Germany, Switzerland, USA; 1875-1955). Literature, 1929. The Swedish Academy cited
Buddenbrooks
(1901), which sold a million copies, but several of Mann's other novels are also regarded as classics of European literature. An outspoken opponent of Nazism, Mann left Germany in 1933 for Switzerland and lived in California from 1941 to 1952. He refused to return to Germany and spent his last years in Switzerland.

M
ARSHALL,
G
EORGE
C. (USA, 1880-1959). Peace, 1953. A career officer, Marshall served in the Philippines and in France. Between the wars he served three years in China, where he learned Chinese. As chief of staff of the U.S. Army in World War II, Marshall proved an outstanding administrator and strategist. A model public servant, he became secretary of state and secretary of defense under President Harry Truman. Marshall was recognized for his leadership in creating the "Marshall Plan" for the postwar reconstruction of Europe.

M
ATHER,
J
OHN
C. (USA, born 1946). Physics, 2006. A graduate of Swarthmore and Berkeley, Mather is a senior astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Center. He coordinated the work of the huge team that developed the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite. He and George F. Smoot were honored for research that revealed the black body form of the microwave background radiation. Their work threw new light on the nature of the universe immediately after the big bang.

M
AURIAC,
F
RANCOIS
(France, 1885-1970). Literature, 1952. Mauriac was a left-wing Catholic and prolific writer in many genres. He supported the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. During the occupation, though at first a Petain supporter, he soon began to produce underground writing for the Resistance. The Swedish Academy praised "the deep spiritual insight and the artistic intensity with which he has in his novels penetrated the drama of human life."

M
CFADDEN,
D
ANIEL
(USA, born 1937). Economics, 2000. McFadden grew up on the family farm deep in rural North Carolina. He earned his B.S. at nineteen and taught at MIT, Chicago, and Caltech. He bought a small vineyard and farm in the Napa Valley, to grow grapes and olives, and raise ducks and chickens. He won the Nobel Prize for his theory of "discrete choice," which predicts how a majority will behave if given a limited number of options.

M
EDAWAR,
P
ETER
(Britain, 1915-1987). Medicine, 1960. Medawar was born in Brazil, but spent most of his life in Britain at the universities of Oxford and London. During the Second World War, he worked on wound and burn healing, and his investigations of graft rejection led to the award of the Nobel Prize for his discovery of acquired im-munological tolerance. He wrote widely on scientific subjects, with a particularly acid pen when dealing with anything he considered pseudo-science.

M
ELLO,
C
RAIG
C. (USA, born i960). Medicine, 2006. A graduate of Brown and Harvard universities, Mello is professor of molecular medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He and Andrew Z. Fire were awarded the Nobel Prize for their discovery of RNA interference, adding another dimension to the understanding of life and providing new tools for medicine.

M
ILOSZ,
C
ZESLAW
(Poland, USA; 1911-2004). Literature, 1980. Born in Lithuania, Milosz was educated in the classics and law. He published his first book of verse at twenty-one. During the Nazi occupation of Poland, he wrote clandestine works for the Resistance. He was appointed cultural attache to Washington by the Communist government but sought asylum in France in 1951 and emigrated to the United States in i960, where he taught at Berkeley. He was honored for work of "uncompromising clear-sightedness."

M
ISTRAL,
G
ABRIELA
(Chile, 1889-1957). Literature, 1945. Mistral's father abandoned his family when she was three. She started her teaching career in a village school at sixteen and began to write poetry after the suicide of a former lover in 1909. Mistral left Chile in 1922 and lived in Mexico, Brazil, Europe, and the United States, often serving as an Hhonorary Chilean consul. Her poetry, lyrical and passionate, deals with themes of love, faith, childhood, and death.

M
ODIGLIANI,
F
RANCO
(Italy, USA; 1918-2003). Economics, 1985. Modigliani received a doctor of law degree from the University of Rome but left Italy in 1938 after Mussolini promulgated his racial laws. He earned a Ph.D. in economics at the New School of Social Research in New York and spent most of his career at MIT, consulting with the Federal Reserve Bank and with the government of Italy. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for theories of personal saving and corporate finance.

M
OMMSEN,
T
HEODOR
(Denmark, Germany; 1817-1903). Literature, 1902. Mommsen, a professor at the University of Berlin for forty-two years, had sixteen children. A liberal and outspoken opponent of German anti-Semitism, he was a gifted and prolific writer; his magnum opus was
History of
Rome.
He also produced major works on Latin inscriptions and on Roman law. Mommsen, who was chosen for the Nobel Prize over Tolstoy, was the earliest-born of all the laureates, as well as the first Nobel laureate to die.

M
ONOD,
J
ACQUES
(France, 1910-1976). Medicine, 1965. Monod was the son of a French painter and an American mother. During the German occupation, he was a major figure in the Resistance; he was once captured by the Gestapo but escaped. A classic French rationalist, a cellist and director of a Bach choir, a friend of Camus, Monod was a man of great charm and character. He shared the prize with Francois Jacob and Andre Lwoff, colleagues at the Pasteur Institute, "for their discoveries concerning genetic control of enzyme and virus synthesis."

M
ONTALE,
E
UGENIO
(Italy, 1896-1981). Literature, 1975. Montale served as an infantry officer in World War I and trained in opera before taming to poetry. He became the director of a prestigious library in Florence but was dismissed in 1938 for his refusal to join the Fascist Party; he withdrew from public life for many years to write and translate. In 1967, he was made a senator. The Swedish Academy praised his poetry, which "interpreted human values under the sign of an oudook on life with no illusions."

M
ORGAN,
T
HOMAS
(USA, 1866-1945). Medicine, 1933. A professor at Columbia and Caltech, Morgan was at the beginning and end of his career a marine biologist. But his major life's work was in genetics, in which his studies of drosophilae, fruit flies, led to greater understanding of the function of the chromosome in heredity.

M
ORRISON,
T
ONI
(USA, born 1931). Literature, 1993. A writer, editor, lecturer, and academic, Morrison was born to a working-class family in Ohio. She taught at Texas Southern, Howard, Yale, and Princeton universities. Her fiction and criticism focus on the black experience in America, especially the life of black women. Her best-known book is
Beloved.

M
ULLIS,
K
ARY
(USA, born 1944). Chemistry, 1993. A native of South Carolina, subsequently a dedicated California surfer with unconventional ideas and lifestyle, Mullis was awarded the Nobel Prize for devising the technique of polymerase chain reaction, which allowed duplication of a single gene fragment. Mullis worked mainly as a researcher and consultant in the chemical and pharmacological industry. His autobiography,
Dancing Naked in the Mind Field,
became a best seller.