The Impossible Takes Longer (40 page)

T
AGORE,
R
ABINDRANATH
(India, 1861-1941). Literatare, 1913. A nationalist and friend of Gandhi, the Bengali poet Tagore also wrote novels, plays, short stories, and essays, all of which reflected his mystical beliefs and his Indian background. He wrote the words to the national anthem of India. Tagore studied in Britain and received a knighthood in 1915, which he repudiated in 1919in protest against the Amritsar Massacre, in which British troops killed several hundred unarmed demonstrators.

T
ANAKA,
K
OICHI
(Japan, born 1959). Chemistry, 2002. Tanaka's mother died a month after his birth. He was educated at Tohoku University and then went to work for the Shimadzu Corporation, where six out of nine Japanese science laureates had been employed. He shared the Nobel Prize for his contribution to the development of "soft desorption ionisation methods for mass spectrometric analyses of biological macromolecules."

T
ERESA,
M
OTHER
(Yugoslavia, India; 1910-1997). Peace, 1979. Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, known as Mother Teresa, went to India in 1928 as a Catholic missionary. In 1950, she founded her own order, the Society of Missionaries of Charity, to care for the destitute, the dying, and the orphaned. The society now operates in more than twenty-five countries.

T
HOMSON,
J. J. (Britain, 1856-1940). Physics, 1906. The son of a Manchester bookseller, Thomson went to college at fourteen and arrived in Cambridge at nineteen. He spent the rest of his life at Cambridge, rising to be master of Trinity College. While he was head of the Cavendish Laboratory, seven future Nobel laureates worked under him. He won the Nobel Prize for his work on the conduction of electricity through gases, but more important was his discovery of the electron in 1897.

T
RIMBLE,
D
AVID
(Northern Ireland, born 1944). Peace, 1998. A lecturer in law at Queen's University, Belfast, Trimble, leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, became first minister of Northern Ireland in 1999. Originally a hardline Protestant, he won the Nobel Prize with John Hume for their work for peace in Northern Ireland that resulted in the 1998 peace agreement.

T
UTU,
D
ESMOND
(South Africa, born 1931). Peace, 1984. An Anglican priest, Tutu spent several years working and studying in Britain. As secretary-general of the South African Council of Churches, he became a leading spokesman against apartheid. The Nobel Committee cited his lifelong concern for "human dignity, fraternity, and democracy." Subsequent to the Nobel Prize, Tutu became archbishop of Cape Town. After the end of apartheid, he chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

W
ALCOTT,
D
EREK
(St. Lucia, Trinidad; born 1930). Literatare, 1992. One of two Nobels from the tiny and isolated volcanic island of St. Lucia, Walcott is of African, Dutch, and English descent. A poet and playwright, he taught school in the Caribbean for some years; he now divides his time between Trinidad and Boston, where he teaches at Boston University. "In him," the Swedish Academy stated, "West Indian culture has found its great poet."

W
ALD,
G
EORGE
(USA, 1906-1997). Medicine, 1967. Wald was born on New York's Lower East Side. A professor at Harvard for forty years, he received the Nobel for research on the role of vitamin A in forming the three color pigments in the retina. In addition to his scientific work, he was a dedicated teacher and a dogged campaigner against nuclear weapons. His opposition to the United States' involvement in Vietnam earned him a place on President Richard Nixon's "enemies list."

W
ALESA,
L
ECH
(Poland, born 1943). Peace, 1983. Walesa was honored for his nonviolent efforts to win the right of Polish workers to organize freely. He was leader of the union Solidarity, which originated in the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk. When martial law was imposed in 1981, Solidarity was banned and Walesa was imprisoned for a year. With the end of martial law, Solidarity won a majority in parliamentary elections. Walesa was president of Poland in 1990-1995.

W
ATSON,
J
AMES
(USA, born 1928). Medicine, 1962. Watson entered the University of Chicago at fifteen. At twenty-four, he became codiscoverer of the double helix structure of DNA. Watson's views were often provocative; his 1968 book,
The Double Helix,
became a best seller. He taught at Harvard for twenty years and then moved to the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, which he made a world center for molecular biology. He helped direct the Human Genome Project at the National Institutes of Health from 1988 to 1992.

W
EINBERG,
S
TEVEN
(USA, born 1933). Physics, 1979. A graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, Cornell, and Princeton, Weinberg taught at the University of California at Berkeley, MIT, Harvard, and the University of Texas at Austin. He shared the Nobel Prize for formulating the electroweak theory. He is well known for his 1977 book,
The First Three
Minutes,
on the origin of the universe.

W
HITE,
P
ATRICK
(Australia, 1912-1990). Literatare, 1973. The son of a sheep rancher, White spent several years in Britain, attended Cambridge, and served during World War II in Royal Air Force Intelligence. After his return to Australia, he produced a series of novels and plays that reflected the Australian landscape and experience. The Swedish Academy praised his "epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature."

W
IEMAN,
C
ARL
(USA, born 1951). Physics, 2001. Wieman grew up in the forests of the Oregon coastal range. A professor at the University of Colorado since 1984, he is married to a physicist and is deeply involved in efforts to improve undergraduate physics education, to which project he dedicated the Nobel Prize money. He shared the Nobel award for the creation of Bose-Einstein condensate in 1995.

W
IESCHAUS,
E
RIC
(USA, born 1947). Medicine, 1995. Wieschaus studied at Notre Dame, Yale, and Zurich. He has been at Princeton since 1981. In high school he was interested in music and the arts; he was captivated by science at a National Science Foundation summer school. Wieschaus shared the Nobel Prize for his work on drosophila genetics, which promised greater understanding of human congenital malformation.

W
IESEL,
E
LIE
(Romania, France, USA; born 1928). Peace, 1986. Elie Wiesel said that his youth died in the cattle cars in which he was deported in 1944 from Romania to Auschwitz. He survived ten months in different concentration camps, in which he lost a sister and both parents, until he was liberated at Buchenwald. He moved to Paris in 1948, and in 1955 to the United States. He has written extensively about the Holocaust and is a champion of the oppressed everywhere.