Nobel Australians

2017 Nobel Peace Prize

International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons ‘for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons’ [ICAN was launched in Melbourne in 2007]

2011 Nobel Prize in Physics

Professor Brian Schmidt AC FAA FRS along with two American researchers, Professor Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess, ‘for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae’

2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Professor Elizabeth Blackburn AC FAA FRS, with Professor Carol Greider and Professor Jack Szostak ‘for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase’

2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Professor Barry James Marshall AC FAA FRS and Dr Robin Warren AC FAA ‘for their discovery of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori and its role in gastritis and peptic ulcer disease’

2003 Nobel Prize in Literature

Professor John Maxwell Coetzee FAHA ‘who in innumerable guises portrays the surprising involvement of the outsider’

1996 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Professor Peter Charles Doherty AC FAA FRS shared with Rolf Martin Zinkernagel AC FAA ‘for their discoveries concerning the specificity of the cell mediated immune defence’

1975 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Professor Sir John Warcup Cornforth AC FAA FRS shared with Professor Vladimir Prelog FRS  ‘for their work on the stereochemistry of enzyme-catalyzed reactions’

1973 Nobel Prize in Literature

Patrick Victor Martindale White ‘for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature’

1970 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Sir Bernard Katz FRS shared with Professor Ulf von Euler and Julius Axelrod ‘for their discoveries concerning the humoral transmittors in the nerve terminals and the mechanism for their storage, release and inactivation’

1964 Nobel Prize in Physics

Professor Aleksandr Mikhailovich Prokhorov shared with Charles Hard Townes and Nicolay Gennadiyevich Basov ‘for fundamental work in the field of quantum electronics, which has led to the construction of oscillators and amplifiers based on the maser-laser principle’. Prokhorov was born in Australia but was educated and worked in the Soviet Union

1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Sir John Carew Eccles AC Kt FAA FRS shared with Sir Alan Lloyd Hodgkin OM KBE FRS and Sir Andrew Fielding Huxley OM PRS ‘for their discoveries concerning the ionic mechanisms involved in excitation and inhibition in the peripheral and central portions of the nerve cell membrane’

1960 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Sir (Frank) Macfarlane Burnet OM AK KBE FAA FRS shared with Sir Peter Brian Medawar OM CH FRS ‘for discovery of acquired immunological tolerance’

1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Sir Howard Walter Florey, later Baron Florey of Adelaide and Marston OM FRS shared with Sir Ernst Boris Chain FRS and Sir Alexander Fleming FRS ‘for the discovery of penicillin and its curative effect in various infectious diseases’

1915 Nobel Prize for Physics

Sir (William) Lawrence Bragg CH OBE MC FRS and Sir William Henry Bragg OM KBE FRS ‘for their services in the analysis of crystal structure by means of X-rays’

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