October 22 should win the Nobel Prize for Coincidences, because not two, not three, not four, but five Nobel Prize winners share today as a birthday. To take them in chronological order:
Ivan Bunin was born in 1870 in Voronezh in the Russian Empire. He became a writer and was called the “heir to the tradition of realism in Russian literature established by Tolstoy and Chekhov.” He’s best known for the novel The Life of Arseniev and the short novels The Village and Dry Valley. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1933.
Clinton Davisson was born in Bloomington, Illinois in the US in 1881. He received his PhD in physics from Princeton in 1911 and worked as an a assistant professor at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. He also did work at the Western Electric Company in the predecessor division that eventually became Bell Labs. It was at Western Electric that he and his colleague Lester Germer conducted the Davisson-Germer experiment between 1923 and 1927. It’s a famous experiment that was one of the basic milestones confirming theories leading to quantum mechanics, and the reason why Davisson won the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Albert Szent-Györgyi was born in Budapest in the Kingdom of Hungary in 1893. When growing up he enjoyed some opportunities not afforded everyone because his father came from a noble family. Among these opportunities were early studies in medical labs, one of which was owned by his uncle. He was a university student when World War I started, and he was recruited as a medic. He left the war after being shot in the arm, and became a medical doctor in 1917. Instead of becoming a practicing physician, he concentrated on research, working at universities in Hungary, England, and the US. He was awarded the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries in the role of vitamins in the body. He offered all his prize money to Finland in connection with the Winter War, in which the Soviet Union invaded Finland and Hungarian volunteers joined the Finnish army.
George Beadle was born in 1903 in Wahoo, Nebraska in the US. His family were farmers, which Beadle intended to become as well until one of his teachers in high school convinced him to go to college. Studying biology became his passion, and he earned his PhD in 1931. He worked at the California Institute of Technology, the Institute de Biologie physico-chimique in Paris, and Harvard University, and won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1958 for work he’d begun in the 1930s regarding how genes regulate processes in cells.
Doris Lessing was born in Kermanshah, Iran, in 1919. She moved with her family to Southern Rhodesia (which is now Zimbabwe) when she was about 6, and she lived there until 1949. She worked as a telephone operator, and was married in 1938. The marriage ended in divorce after about five years, and Lessing remarried, but that also ended in divorce in 1949. By that time Lessing was thirty, had published short stories in magazines, but had not written novels. She wanted to, though, and moved to London in 1949 to pursue a writing career. She published her first novel, The Grass is Singing, in 1950, and her first that made her famous, The Golden Notebook, in 1962. She eventually published over 50 novels, using pen names for some of them. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007, when she was 88, which at the time made her the oldest winner of that award.
