Poland contributed many names to the list of Nobel Prize winners in arts and sciences. The following list of 19 distinguished individuals connected to Poland by birth, language, or residence, was published in PAHA Newsletters in 2010.
http://www.polishamericanstudies.org/newsletters.html
How many Poles have won the Nobel Prize? This depends on how you count. The full list of
everyone with Polish ancestors and those born in wha tis now or was Poland includes 16 names and
17 Nobel Prizes: Poles, Americans, Canadians, French citizens, an Israeli and a Swiss. They won five
Nobel Prizes in Literature, four in Physics,three in Physiology or Medicine, three Peace Prizes, and two Nobel Prizes in Chemistry. A shortlist of Poles from Poland would include: Henryk Sienkiewicz,
Władysław Reymont, Lech Wałęsa,Wisława Szymborska and Czesław Miłosz (though he defined
himself as and both a Pole and a Lithuanian, from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania). A longer list of
scientists who became double (or triple) citizens of several countries would consist of: Maria Skłodowska‐Curie (French),
Tadeusz Reichstein (Swiss), Georges Charpak (French), Andrew Schally, Frank Wilczek and Jack W.
Szostak (Canadian‐American). Isidor Rabi, Isaac Bashevis Singer (who wrote in Yiddish), Roald Hoffmann, and Joseph Rotblat were both American and
Jewish, with more or less distant roots in Poland. Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, was born
in Poland and served in the Polish Army under Gen. Anders, but spent most of his life in Israel. Another Israeli Prime Minister, Shimon Peres was also born in Poland and fluent in Polish.
LIST OF NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS
1. Marie (Maria) Skłodowska‐Curie,Nobel Prize for Physics, 1903,Nobel Prize for Chemistry,
1911: Known to many as Madame Curie, Maria was born on November 7, 1867 in Warsaw. She left
Poland for Parisin 1891 to study sciences,following in the footsteps of her sister Bronisława. She was
the first female professor at the University of Paris,funded the Curie Institutes in Paris and Warsaw.
She worked with her husband Pierre Curie, with whom she shared a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903
(alongside Henri Becuqerel). Maria Skłodowska‐Curie created the theory and name of radioactivity,
discovered techniques for isolating radioactive isotopes and is credited with the discovery and
naming of two new elements, polonium and radium. She also pioneered the treatment of cancer
using radioactive isotopes. She is the first person honored by two Nobel Prizes.Her 1911 award was
given “in recognition of her services to the advancement of chemistry by the discovery of the
elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and
compounds of this remarkable element."
2. Henryk Sienkiewicz, Nobel Prize in Literature, 1905: Born on May 5, 1845 (as Henryk Adam
Aleksander Pius), on his family estate in Wola Okrzejska, Podlasie, a part of the Russian Empire,
Sienkiewicz belonged to impoverished gentry family and became a journalist and novelist. A prolific
author of historical fiction, Sienkiewicz wrote over 60 volumes of novels,stories, essays, and
travelogues.
His adventures in California with a group of emigrants headed by Helena Modrzejewska
gave rise to his first successful travel reportage and his recognition as a journalist.He received the
Nobel Prize for his “outstanding merits as an epic writer.” Sienkiewicz’s historical fiction like the
Trilogy and the Teutonic Knights contributed to the national fervor in Poland and paved the road to
regaining independence. He died on November 15, 1916.
3.Władysław Reymont, Nobel Prize in Literature, 1924: Born on May 7, 1867 in a village of
Kobiele Wielkie near Radomsko, Reymont (b. Rejment, he formally changed his name) was largely
self‐taught. A certificate as a journeyman tailor was his only proof of formal education.He first tried
to establish himself as an actor,repeatedly running away from home to join travelling theater groups,
but having failed in that,turned to writing full‐time, and started publishing short stories and novels.
His prolific literary output consists of 30 volumes. The Nobel Prize recognized the merits of his
naturalistic novel Chłopi (The Peasants). Reymont died on December 5, 1925.
4. Isidor Isaac Rabi,Nobel Prize in Physics, 1944: Born on 29 July 1898 in Rymanów, Galicia, a part
of Austro‐Hungarian Empire now in Poland, Rabi came to the U.S. the next year and is known as an
American physicist of Jewish descent. He graduated from Cornell University (B.A.) and Columbia University (Ph.D., 1927). After graduation, he stayed at Columbia,
specializing in nuclear physics.His discovery of the magnetic resonance detection method was
recognized by the Nobel Committee in 1944. His research had practical results in the creation of
radar, laser, and atomic clock. He died on 11 January 1988 in New York.
5. Tadeusz Reichstein,Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1950: Born on July 20, 1897 in
Włocławek, in central Poland,then a part of the Russian Empire, he moved with his family to Kiev,
Jena and to Zurich, Switzerland, where he became a Swiss citizen and embarked on his career.
Associated with the University of Basel, Reichstein is recognized for his invention of a method of
synthesizing Vitamine. His prize,shared with two scientists,rewarded his work on the hormones of
the adrenal cortex and the discovery of the cortisone.He died on August 1, 1996 in Basel.
6. Andrzej "Andrew" Viktor Schally,Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1977: Born on
November 30, 1926, in Wilno, the capital of Lithuania (then in Poland, now Vilnius in Lithuania),
Schally is a son of Brigadier Kazimerz Schally, chief of cabinet for President Ignacy Mościcki. Schally
was educated in theU.K. and received his doctorate from McGill, Canada (1957). In his Nobel Prize
autobiography, he described himself as being of “Polish, Austro‐Hungarian, French and Swedish
ancestry” and he became an American citizen in 1962. As an endocrinologist he worked at Tulane
University and is now at Miami VA Medical Center in Florida.His prize was shared by Roger Guillemin
(“for their discoveries concerning peptide hormone production in the brain”) and Rosalyn Yalow.
7. Isaac Bashevis Singer,Nobel Prize in Literature, 1978: Born on November 21, 1902, in the
village of Leoncin near Warsaw, in the Russian Empire, Singer came from a prominent Hassidic family;
hisfather was a rabbi and they lived in Jewish quarters in Radzymin, Warsaw, and Biłgoraj. Singer’s
religious studies were not finished and in 1935 he emigrated to the U.S., where he worked as a
journalist and established his literary career.He wrote novels and short stories in Yiddish to save the
e
language from oblivion, and helped translate his works into English. Singer died on July 24, 1991.
8. Menachem Begin, Nobel Peace Prize, 1978: Born as Mieczysław Biegun on August 16, 1913 in
Brest‐Litovsk (Brześć Litewski), Poland, in a Jewish family, and educated at the Mizrachi Hebrew
School and the Polish Gymnasium (High School).He studied law at the University of Warsaw (1935)
and was involved in nationalist Zionist movements. In 1940 he was arrested by the Soviets and spent
a year in a gulag in Siberia, before being released under the Stalin/Sikorski agreement, and joining
the Anders Army that took him to Palestine. Since 1943, he was active in Palestine and then Israel as
a leader and politician. While serving as the sixth Prime Minister of the State of Israel, he negotiated a
peace treaty with Egypt,for which he shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Anwar Sadat.
9. Czesław Miłosz, Nobel Prize in Literature, 1980: Born on June 39, 1911 in the village of Seteniai
in Central Lithuania, a part of the Russian Empire, Milosz came from a Polish noble family. He refused
to identify himself as either a Pole or a Lithuanian – and both nations claimed him, but his choice of
language, Polish,made him a Polish poet. In 1951, while working as a cultural attaché in the Polish
Embassy in Paris, he claimed political asylum, and in 1960 he emigrated to the U.S., where he was a
professor at the University of California, Berkeley from 1968 to 1998. After retiring, he returned to
Poland,settling in Kraków,the magnet for poets, where he died on August 14, 2004.
10. Roald Hoffmann,Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1981: Born on July 18, 1937 in Złoczów (now in
Ukraine), Hoffmann came from a Jewish family and the majority of his relatives perished in the
Holocaust. He and his mother survived and Hoffmann later funded a monument to the victims in his
hometown.He emigrated first to England and then to the U.S., where he studied at Columbia
University (B.A.) and Harvard (M.A. and Ph.D. in Chemistry).Hoffmann teaches at Cornell University,
Ithaca. The Nobel Prize (shared with Kenichi Fukui) recognized his contributions to chemistry including work on reaction mechanisms and the discovery of the
“isolobal principle” in organo‐metallic chemistry.He is also a published poet, author of a play and
broadcasts about arts and science.He is named after a Norwegian discoverer, Roald Amundsen.
11. Lech Wałęsa,Nobel Peace Prize, 1983: Born on 29 September 1943, in Popowo, Wałęsa was
an electrician by training and aGdańsk shipyard worker by avocation, before becoming the leader
and spokesman of Solidarity,the firstfree‐trade union formed in an Eastern Block country in 1980.
The rise ofthe Solidaritymovement was a decisive step in the fall ofthe communistsystemand the
Soviet empire.Walesa later became a politician and served asthe President of Poland (1990‐1995).
12.Georges Charpak,Nobel Prize in Physics, 1992: Born on August 1, 1924 in a village Dąbrowica,
now inUkraine, hemoved to France as a child. Spending his entire career as a nuclear physicist, he
wast he inventor of particle detectors for which he received the Nobel Prize as a sole winner. During
the war, Charpak was active in the resistance, captured and imprisoned at Dachau.He became a
French citizen in 1948 and received his doctorate in nuclear physics in 1954 from College de France,
later working in the lab of Frederic Joliot‐Curie. He is an advocate for peaceful uses of nuclear power.
13.Joseph (Józef) Rotblat, Nobel Peace Prize, 1995: Born on November 4, 1908 in Warsaw,
Rotblat came from an affluent Jewish family and became a nuclear physicist, with a doctorate from
the University of Warsaw (1938).
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A specialist in nuclear fission, he worked with James Chadwick (who
had won a Nobel Prize for discovering the neutron) at Liverpool University and together they joined
the Manhattan Project. Rotblat left the Project due to his anti‐war views and returned to England
where he continued his research on nuclear fallout.His discoveries led to banning aerial nuclear
bomb tests and he became one of the most vocal opponents of the nuclear arms race, serving as the
president of the influential Pugwash Conferences. The Nobel Peace Prize recognized him and the
Pugwash Conferences for this work.He died in Paris on August 31, 2005.
14. Wisława Szymborska,Nobel Prize in Literature, 1996. Born on July 2 1923 in Kornik, since 1931 she
lived in Krakow. After spending the war years in Germany as a forced laborer,she attended
Jagiellonian University, but never graduated. She is known as a poet, essayist and translator. Since
1945 she published a relatively small, but highly regarded body of about 250 poems, while working as
a poetry editor for the weekly Życie Literackie. She wrote in Polish and her poetry is widely available in translation. She died in Krakow on February 1, 2012.
15. Frank Wilczek,Nobel Prize in Physics, 2004: Born in 1951 in the U.S. Wilczek’s family came
from Poland (paternal line) and from Italy (maternal line). In his Nobel Prize autobiography he
stated, “my grandparents emigrated from Europe in the aftermath of World War I, as young
teenagers; on my father's side they came from Poland and on my mother's side from Italy, near
Naples. My grandparents arrived with nothing, and no knowledge of English.”He was educated in
public schools in Queens,NY, and graduated from the University of Chicago and Princeton where he
selected physics for his career, now working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Nobel
Prize was shared with his former mentor David J.Gross and H.David Politzer, “for the discovery of
asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction."
16. Jack William Szostak,Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, 2009: Born on November 9,
1952, in London, and raised in Canada (in Montreal and Ottawa), Szostak is a biologist and professor
of genetics at Harvard Medical School.He also works for Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
He shared the Nobel Prize with Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol W.Greider, "for the discovery of how
chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase."
He also constructed the
world's first yeast artificial chromosome (YAC) that helped map the location of genes and contributed to the development of the Human Genome Project.
Based on the biographies on the website of NobelPrize.org and two different award listings by Wikipedia. Quotations from Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes, published by Nobel Foundation, Stockholm, 2000‐2009. http://www.polishamericanstudies.org/pdf/2010-spring-newsletter.pdf
ADDITIONAL NAMES (in PAHA Newsletter, Fall 2010)
(added by Monika Glowacka Musial)
17. Albert Michelson (1852–1931) was born into a Jewish family in Strzelno, Provinz Posen in the Kingdom of Prussia, now Poland. He moved to the United States with his parents when he was two years old. Michelson is mostly known for his measurements of the speed of light with the ground breaking precision, using an interferometer of his own design. The famous Michelson‐Morley experiment showed that light travels at a constants peed regardless the system of reference. The surprising result, at
that time considered by Michelson as a failure,
had a great impact on formulation of the
Lorentz transformation and, indirectly, of the
special theory of relativity. Michelson received
the Nobel Prize in 1907 as the first American
scientist.
18. Leonid Hurwicz was born in 1917 in Moscow to
a Polish‐Jewish family, displaced by World War
I. Soon after his birth and right before the
October Revolution,the family returned to
Warsaw. Hurwicz received his degree in law in
1938 from the University of Warsaw were he
discovered his future vocation while taking the
obligatory class in economy.He emigrated to
the United States in 1940. Hurwicz is best
known for his contribution to the mechanism
design theory which is used for explaining
interactions among individuals, institutions and
markets. As one of the first researchers to
apply the game theory in economy, he
proposed the most efficient formula for an
organization to reach a desired outcome,taking
into account individuals' knowledge and self‐
interest, which may be hidden or private.
http://www.polishamericanstudies.org/pdf/2011-fall-newsletter.pdf
EVEN MORE NAMES
(added in May 2013 by Witold Sokolowski)
19. Shimon Peres, born Szymon Perski in August 1923 in Wiszniewo (Vilnius region, now Lithuania). He left Poland in 1934 and emigrated to Israel, where he has served as the ninth President of Israel since 2007. An official in the Department of Defense since 1952, he was first elected to political office in 1959. An oldest head of state in office, he was twice the Prime Minister of Israel. In 1994, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, shared with Ytzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, for peace talks between the Israeli and the Palestinians that led to the Oslo Peace Accords.
20. Robert J. Lefkowitz, American chemist, recipient of 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1/2) , born on 15 April 1943 in New York in a family with Polish heritage. He studied chemistry and trained to become a doctor at Columbia University. Since 1973 he has worked at Duke University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Durham, North Carolina. Robert Lefkowitz is married with five children. His project: Communication between the cells in your body are managed by substances called hormones. Each cell has a small receiver known as a receptor, which is able to receive hormones. In order to track these receptors, in 1968 Robert Lefkowitz attached a radioactive isotope of iodine to the hormone adrenaline. By tracking the radiation emitted by the isotope, he succeeded in finding a receptor for adrenaline and studied how it functions. It was later discovered that there is an entire family of receptors that look and act in similar ways - "G-protein-coupled receptors". Approximately half of all medications used today make use of this kind of receptor.
AWARDED IN 2019
21. Olga Tokarczuk born 29 January 1962, a Polish writer, activist, and public intellectual; awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature (she shared this honor with German writer, Peter Handke), and previously recognized by the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her novel
Flights (translated by Jennifer Croft). She trained as a psychologist at the University of Warsaw and published a collection of poems, several novels, as well as other books with shorter prose works. The novel
Flights won the Nike Award, Poland's top literary prize, in 2008. She attended the 2010 Edinburgh Book Festival to discuss her book P
rimeval and Other Times and other work. With her novel
Księgi Jakubowe (The Books of Jacob), Tokarczuk won the Nike Award again in 2015. In the same year, Tokarczuk received the German-Polish International Bridge Prize, a recognition extended to persons especially accomplished in the promotion of peace, democratic development and mutual understanding among the people and nations of Europe. Tokarczuk is a leftist, a vegetarian, and feminist.
Photo by Harald Krichel from Wikimedia Commons, 2019.
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Illustrations from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.
