The Nobel Chronicles

This handbook offers brief biographies of 229 Nobel Prize-winning scientists in Physiology or Medicine category awarded from 1901 to 2024. Of these stories 91 were previously published as a series under the title Nobel Chronicles in The Lancet, the prestigious British medical journal. Each chapter provides a succinct account of the scientific discovery that led to a Nobel Prize and its impact on the health and well-being of people around the world. The chapters also describe what triggered the scientists to undertake the prize-winning research studies and outline their research work that led to 1 their groundbreaking discoveries. Readers can judge whether the prize winners were worthy of their awards by conferring "...the greatest benefit on mankind," as the enigmatic and incomparable Mr. Alfred Nobel stipulated in his will as a condition for awarding the prizes bearing his name. TONSE NARAYANA KRISHNA RAJU, a pediatrician and a neonatologist, served as Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Illinois in Chicago for over three decades. He has written five books of fiction and two translations in Kannada, a classical Dravidian language from Karnataka, South India. His translations include the Kannada translation of the novel Thousand Cranes (Ankita Press, 2010) by the Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata, the winner of Nobel Prize in Literature; and an English translation of Kannada originals, Poems and a Novella by A. K. Ramanujan (Oxford University Press, 2006). A member of the American Osler Society, Dr. Raju has written and taught graduate and undergraduate students medical history topics throughout his career. His most recent publications include The Importance of Having a Brain: Tales from the History of Medicine (Expanded second edition, Boundless Book Publishers 2025) and Don't Stand in Front of a Palace or Behind a Horse: An Illustrated Book of South Indian Proverbs (Boundless Book Publishers 2025).