Canadian Nobel laureates

As Willard Boyle celebrates becoming the most recent Canadian Nobel Prize winner, Global News takes a look at other home grown scientists and leaders who have won the prestigious award.

Brockhouse

Bertram Brockhouse, born in Lethbridge, Alberta, began working at the Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories north of Ottawa in 1950.

At Chalk River, Brockhouse invented the use of neutron scattering to study the structure of matter, for which he would later win a Nobel Prize in physics.

He worked his way up to become the head of the Neutron Physics Branch at the facility in 1960, before moving on to the faculty of physics at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1962.

Brockhouse was awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize in physics for the development of neutron spectroscopy, which has led to advances in many areas including the analysis of material failures.

He passed away in October 2003.

Polanyi

John Polanyi is another Canadian Nobel Prize winner, this time in the area of chemistry.

Polanyi was born in Berlin, and grew up in Manchester, England, where he would obtain his PhD in chemistry in 1952 from Manchester University.

He was a researcher at the National Research Council Laboratories in Ottawa and at Princeton University before becoming a faculty member at the University of Toronto, researching the motions of molecules in chemical reactions.

Polanyi was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1986, for his work using chemi-luminescence to study the molecular basis of chemical reactions.

His work has led to the development of new kinds of chemical lasers.

Pearson

Lester Pearson, Canada’s 14th prime minister, oversaw the introduction of the Canada Pension Plan, a national system of universal health care, and the Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism.

But it would be his creation of the UN peacekeeping force during the 1956 Suez Crisis that would win him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957. This major achievement also earned him the leadership of the Liberal Party in 1958.

Pearson, born in Newtonbrook, Ontario in 1897, enlisted to fight in the First World War and served in the medical corps, then with the Royal Flying Corps.

In 1928, he was recruited into the newly formed Department of External Affairs and played an essential role in the creation of the UN and NATO.

An Egyptian blockage of the Suez Canal in 1956 threatened to develop into a world war. Britain, France and Israel attacked Egypt as a means of taking control of the canal.

It was Pearson who stepped in to solve the crisis by getting all sides to agree to the creation of a neutral UN force to maintain peace in the region.

Banting and McDonald

The 1923 Nobel Prize in medicine was shared between Frederick Banting and John Macleod.

Banting was born in Alliston, Ontario in 1891 and attended medical school at the University of Toronto. In 1921, Macloed introduced Banting to a medical student named Charles Best.

Along with Best, Banting studied insulin for human use.

Macleod, born in Scotland in 1876, joined the faculty of the University of Toronto in 1918, where did research in the area of carbohydrate metabolism and diabetes.

In 1922, Macloed, Banting and Best announced the discovery of insulin, which would soon bring a new way of life to millions of diabetes sufferers.

After Banting and Macleod were awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine the following year, Banting expressed his disappointment at the exclusion of Best.

He shared his prize money with Best, and did Macleod with his research partner, James Bertram Collip.

The Nobel Prize was Canada’s first, bringing Canadian scientific research to the world stage.

Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow was born in Lachine, Quebec and raised in Chicago. He completed a degree in sociology and anthropology at Northwestern University in 1937 before serving in the Merchant Marine during the Second World War.

He published his first novel, Dangling Man, in 1944. It would be the first of many works including The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Seize The Day (1956), Herzog (1964), Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), Humboldt’s Gift (1975), and Ravelstein (2000).

His novel Humboldt’s Gift was awarded the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and won the Nobel Prize for literature the same year.

Bellow, who had high-profile feuds with literary figures Norman Mailer and Truman Capote, often put characters from his personal life into his work.

Bellow taught at the University of Chicago and Boston University. He died in 2005.

Richard Taylor

Richard Taylor, a native of Medicine Hat, Alberta, studied physics at Stanford University and worked at the High Energy Physics Laboratory building a linear nuclear accelerator.

In the 1960s, Taylor performed experiments in electron scattering. From 1967 to 1973, Taylor teamed up with MIT researchers using accelerators to take protons and neutrons apart, proving the existence of quarks, one of the fundamental building blocks of matter.

Taylor shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in physics with MIT researchers Henry Kendall and Jerome Friedman, for their discovery.