Canadian Nobel Prize Winners

Prize Winners Who Were Born In Canada and Worked in Canada

Frederick Grant Banting - The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1923 – shared with John James Richard Macleod for the discovery of insulin.

Banting was born on November 14, 1891, at Alliston, Ontario. Educated at the Public and High Schools at Alliston, he later went to the University of Toronto to study divinity, but soon transferred to the study of medicine.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1923/banting-bio.html

Bertram N. Brockhouse – The Nobel Prize in Physics 1994 – shared with Clifford G. Shull for pioneering contributions to the development of neutron scattering techniques for studies of condensed matter.

Brockhouse was born in Lethbridge, Alberta, and worked at McMaster University Hamilton, Ontario.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1994/brockhouse-autobio.html

Prize Winners Who Were Born In Canada and Worked Elsewhere

David H. Hubel – The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1981 – for discoveries concerning information processing in the visual system – shared with Roger W. Sperry and Torsten N. Wiesel.

Hubel was born in Windsor, Ontario.

“Three of my grandparents were also born in Canada: the fourth, my paternal grandfather, emigrated as a child to the U.S.A. from the Bavarian town of Nördlingen.

“When I was born I acquired U.S. citizenship through my parents and Canadian citizenship by birth. (When it comes to prizes I don’t know whether each country gets half credit or both get full credit.)”

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1981/hubel-autobio.html

Henry Taube – The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1983 – for his work on the mechanisms of electron transfer reactions, especially in metal complexes.

Taube was born in Neudorf, Saskatchewan where he obtrained a B.S. and an M.S. before undertaking Ph.D. Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1983/taube-cv.html

Sidney Altman – The Nobel Prize for Chemistry 1989 – shared with Thomas R. Cech for their discovery of catalytic properties of RNA

“I was born in Montreal in 1939, the second son of poor immigrants. My mother worked in a textile mill and my father in a grocery store before they met and married.

“For our immediate family and relatives, Canada was a land of opportunity. However, it was made clear to the first generation of Canadian-born children that the path to opportunity was through education.”

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1989/index.html

Richard E. Taylor – The Nobel Prize in Physics 1990 – for pioneering investigations concerning deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons, which have been of essential importance for the development of the quark model in particle physics.

Taylor was born in Medicine Hat, Alberta.

“My father was the son of a Northern Irish carpenter and his Scottish wife who homesteaded on the Canadian prairies; my mother was an American, the daughter of Norwegian immigrants to the northern United States who moved to a farm in Alberta shortly after the first World War.”

Taylor obtained in M.S. at the University of Alberta in Edmonton before moving to Stanford, USA for his graduate studies.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1990/taylor-autobio.html

Rudolph A. Marcus – The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1992 – for his contributions to the theory of electron transfer reactions in chemical systems.

Marcus was born in Montreal, Canada, where he attended McGill University.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1992/marcus-autobio.html

Willard S. Boyle – The Nobel Prize in Physics 2009 – for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor – shared with Charles K. Kao and George E. Smith.

Willard S. Boyle was born in Amherst, Nova Scotia.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2009/

Prize Winners Who Were Born Elsewhere and Worked in Canada

John James Richard Macleod – The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1923 – shared with Frederick Grant Banting for the discovery of insulin.

Macleod was born on September 6, 1876 at Cluny, near Dunkeld, Perthshire, Scotland. In 1918 he was elected Professor of Physiology at the University of Toronto, Canada. Here he was Director of the Physiological Laboratory and Associate Dean of the Faculty of Medicine.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1923/macleod-bio.html

Gerhard Herzberg – The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1971 – for his contributions to the knowledge of electronic structure and geometry of molecules, particularly free radicals.

Herzberg was born in Hamburg, Germany. In August 1935 he left Germany as a refugee and took up a guest professorship at the University of Saskatchewan. From 1945 to 1948 Herzberg was professor of spectroscopy at the University of Chicago. He returned to Canada in 1948 and was made Principal Research Officer then Director of the Division of Physics at the National Research Council

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1971/herzberg-bio.html

John C. Polanyi – The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1986 – for contributions concerning the dynamics of chemical elementary processes – shared with Dudley R. Herschbach and Yuan T. Lee.

Polanyi was born in 1929 in Berlin, Germany, of Hungarian parents. His University training was at Manchester University, England, where he obtained his B.Sc. in 1949, and his Ph.D. in 1952.

In 1952 he moved to Canada.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1986/polanyi-bio.html

Michael Smith – The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1993 – for contributions to the developments of methods within DNA-based chemistry – shared with Kary B. Mullis.

Smith was born in 1932 in Blackpool, England and moved to Vancouver, British Columbia in 1956.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1993/smith-autobio.html