Indian Nobel Prize Winners Indian Nobel Laureates Set

Indian Nobel Prize Winners

Indian Nobel Laureates - Set 1 - 1/6 2069 1. Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel had drafted a will in 1895 where he reserved a large part of his estate to establish Nobel Prizes after concerns of how the world would remember him. 2. He wanted the awards to be given to individuals (based on their achievements), annually, despite their nationality. He died in 1896. 3. It took nearly five years for the committee to set up, and the first set of awards for Physiology or Medicine, Chemistry, Literature, Physics and Peace were awarded in 1901. 4. After 67 years, Sweden's central bank with donation from the Nobel Foundation, established the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 1968. 5. India's association with the Nobel Prize goes back, across centuries and latitudes. Poet, writer and thinker Rabindranth Tagore brought glory to the country when he became the first Indian to win the Nobel Prize for the country.

Indian Nobel Laureates - Set 1 - 2/6 Rabindranath Tagore 2070 1. Rabindranath Tagore was the first Indian to get a Nobel Prize in 1913, and in his area of expertise - Literature. 2. He won the award for "his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West". 3. While he originally wrote in Bengali, Tagore reached out to a wider audience in the West with his translation of poetry that conveyed 'the peace of the soul in harmony with nature'. 4. The Swedish academy, on its website, says that 'Tagore's writing is deeply rooted in both Indian and Western learning traditions'. 5. Born in 1861, the Calcutta-born writer was well known for fiction in the form of poetry, songs, stories, dramas, and it included portrayals of people's lives, literary criticism, philosophy and social issues.

Indian Nobel Laureates - Set 1 - 3/6 Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman 2071 1. India's first physicist to win a Nobel Physics Prize in 1930 "for his work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of the effect named after him" was Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman. 2. Born in 1888, the Tiruchirappalli-born scientist's discovery helped other researchers analyse different types of material using his scattering of light phenomenon. 3. In 1928, Venkata Raman found out that light spreads in different directions when light meets particles that are smaller than its wavelength. 4. He further established that a small portion of the scattered light acquires other wavelengths than that of the original light because some of the incoming photons' energy can be transferred to a molecule, giving it a higher level of energy. 5. When he received the award, he was working with the Calcutta University. At 82, he passed away in Bangalore.

Indian Nobel Laureates - Set 1 - 4/6 Har Gobind Khorana 2072 1. Har Gobind Khorana's work on electron diffraction got him the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. 2. He shared the award with Robert W Holley and Marshall W Nirenberg "for their interpretation of the genetic code and its function in protein synthesis". 3. In the 1950 s, it was established that genetic information is transferred from DNA to RNA, to protein. 4. In order to crack the genetic code, Marshall Nirenberg discovered the first piece of the puzzle. The remaining part of the study was carried out in the following year. 5. Born in 1922, the Raipur-based built different RNA chains with the help of enzymes. 6. During his research, Khorana was a part of the Wisconsin University in Madison. He spent his last years in Concord, Massachusetts, and passed away in 2011.

Indian Nobel Laureates - Set 1 - 5/6 Mother Teresa 2073 1. Mother Teresa was the first woman with close Indian ties to get the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize. 2. While she was born in Macedonia to parents of Albanian descent, she was sent to Calcutta to be a teacher after she entered a nunnery. 3. Also known as Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, she had a calling at the age of 12. After coming to India, she decided to serve the poor as she lived amongst them. 4. After founding Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta, she, along with her helpers, built homes for orphans, nursing homes for lepers and hospices for the terminally ill. Her organisation provided aid in other parts of the world. 5. She became the spokesperson for the Vatican. Her canonisation took place in 2003, and Pope Francis declared her a saint in 2016.

Indian Nobel Laureates - Set 1 - 6/6 2074 Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar 1. Subramanyan Chandrasekhar made India proud in 1983 when he bagged the Nobel Prize in Physics "for theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars". He shared the award with another physicist William Alfred Fowler. 2. Chandrasekhar was born in 1910 when Lahore (now in Pakistan) was a part of India. During the affiliation at the time of the award, he was a part of Chicago University in Illinois. 3. It is common knowledge that stars form clouds of gas and dust in the universe. When gravity pulls these clouds, energy is released in the form of heat. With the rising temperature, the atomic nuclei inside the stars start reacting. 4. Chandrasekhar started working on his theories of the process stars subsequently undergo in 1930 s.

Indian Nobel Laureates - Set 2 - 1/5 Amartya Sen 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 2075 Economist Amartya Sen was the sole winner of the 1998 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences, which was introduced by the Nobel Prize Committee in memory of Alfred Nobel, "for his contributions to welfare economics". During his award, he was with Trinity College, Cambridge in United Kingdom. He researched on fundamental problems in welfare economics, important resources in a community, and ways to divide them. Sen's research focused on the value of values in collective decision-making, and ways in which welfare and poverty can be measured. The Swedish academy, on its website, wrote that Sen's efforts stem from his interest in questions of distribution and, in particular, the lot of society's poorest members. Sen also included famines in his studies to create a deeper understanding of the economic reasons behind them and poverty. In 1933, Sen was born in Santiniketan, West Bengal, and studied in Dhaka (now in Bangladesh) where his father was a professor of chemistry. After completing his studies from Kolkata and Cambridge University, he got his Ph. D in 1959.

Indian Nobel Laureates - Set 2 - 2/5 2076 Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul 1. Author VS Naipaul won the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature "for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel people to see the presence of suppressed histories". 2. While he was born in Trinidad in 1932, he belongs to an Indian descent. 3. According to the Nobel Prize website, the author's descendant had moved to India to work as indentured labourers in cocoa plantations of Trinidad. 4. He later moved to UK after receiving an Oxford scholarship, and became a citizen of that country. 5. Before this Nobel, Naipaul was felicitated with the 1971 Booker Prize for his novel 'In a Free State', and Trinidad and Tobago's highest honour - Trinity Cross - in 1989. Britain also awarded his with knighthood in 1990.

Indian Nobel Laureates - Set 2 - 3/5 Venkatraman Ramakrishnan 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 2077 Tamil Nadu-born Venkatraman Ramakrishnan received the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome". He shared the award with Thomas A Steitz and Ada E Yonath. Born in 1952, he was working with MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge when he received the honour. Vital functions of an organism are managed by complex protein molecules produced in cells' ribosomes. Ribosome is a molecular machine that is found in living cells' cytoplasm which synthesises proteins. Among other applications, Nobel Prize website mentioned that Ramakrishnan's research has been vital in production of antibiotics. He grew up in a family of academics. While his father, CV Ramakrishnan, got his postdoctoral fellowship in Madison, Wisconsin, his mother, R Rajalakshmi, obtained a Mc. Gill University fellowship to do Ph. D in psychology, which she finished in 18 months.

Indian Nobel Laureates - Set 2 - 4/5 Kailash Satyarthi 2078 1. Kailash Satyarthi, along with Malala Yousafzai, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 "for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people, and for the right of all children to education. " 2. Born in 1954, he taught children in Vidisha, a small town in Madhya Pradesh, where he grew up. 3. He had acquired his degree in electrical engineering, but decided to be a teacher. 4. In 1980, he left teaching and founded 'Bachpan Bachao Andolan', an organisation that worked towards freeing children from slave-like conditions. 5. He has been active for the fight against child labour and children's rights to education in a wide range of other organisations.

Indian Nobel Laureates - Set 2 - 5/5 Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 2079 Mumbai-born economist Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee made the country proud as he became the 10 th Indian, and sixth laureate with the Calcutta Chromosome, to win a Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences on Monday. He shared the prestigious global award with his economist-wife, Esther Duflo, and another US-based economist, Michael Kremer. The Swedish academy announced 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel for the economists’ experimental approach to alleviating global poverty. Born in 1961, the half-Bengali, half-Konkani economist lived his early life in West Bengal, and studied from the University of Calcutta. Later, he receieved his post-graduation degree in Economics from New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University in 1983. He went on to obtain a Ph. D in Economics from the Harvard University in 1988. He is the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.