Nobel Announcement 2007

This week is a busy one at the Nobel Foundation. Each day, winners of different categories of Nobel Prizes are announced. Their names will be down in history. On top of the great banquet dinner that they get to attend in Stockholm (except the Peace Prize in Oslo) they will also receive a gold medal, a diploma and cash grant of a cool approximate of one million euro per category (which is to be shared when there’s more than one winner per category, and not always evenly).

 

 

I had had the pleasure of meeting two Nobel Laureates in the past year. Both winners of the category of Physiology or Medicine.

One, a really famous man, never afraid to speak his mind, always controversial, almost arrogant, and not quite whom I built him up to be. I couldn’t even make up my mind if I like him or not after meeting him. I was initially in awe, then I got to know him a little more in person. I may have became disillusioned since.

The other, also a well known man although not quite the level of the other Laureate, pretty easy to relate to, down to earth, and modest to boot. I warmed to him when he told me that it’s alright to feel uncertainty during the course of my study. He had been through something similar, and things still worked out for him in the end.

So there, two Nobel Laureates, of comparable field of contribution, but two very different geniuses. Maybe I should meet more of them in order to see if I can generalise them in one way or another. *wink*