Hear Nobel Prize-winners speak! Listen to the sound samples on
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Harold Pinter (1930 - )
Literature 2005: find out more from Nobel Museum.
Listen On winning the Nobel Prize: date of recording 20.10.2005.
© The British Library Board
Harold Pinter was born in the London borough of Hackney. Initially an actor, his breakthrough as a dramatist came with The Caretaker (1959), followed by The Homecoming (1964). Pinter is perhaps the most significant figure in British drama in the second half of the 20th century. His theatre is pared down to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue, where people are at the mercy of each other. Since 1973, Pinter has won recognition as a fighter for human rights. Recorded before a live audience at the Royal Court Theatre.
Francis Harry Compton Crick (1916 - 2004)
Medicine 1962: find out more from Nobel Museum.
Listen Nobel Prize- winners [extract]: date of recording 13.11.1962.
This recording dates from the year when Francis Crick, Maurice
Wilkins and James Watson received the Nobel Prize in Physiology
or Medicine for their discovery of the structure of DNA. The story
began in 1953 when Crick and Watson announced in the Eagle pub in
Cambridge that they had found ‘the secret of life’.
By explaining DNA’s double helix structure they made one of
the most significant scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century
and laid the foundations for future work in genetics. Crick continued
to work in Cambridge on the genetic code until 1977.
Alexander Fleming (1881 - 1955)
Medicine 1945: find out more from Nobel Museum.
Listen Talk on antibiotics from 1900-1950 [extract]: date of recording 10.10.1950.
Alexander Fleming was trained as a doctor and specialised as a bacteriologist. His breakthrough occurred in 1928, when he found a mould growing on a culture dishes he had left out in his laboratory, inhibiting the spread of the Staphylococcus bacterium. Fleming recognised the importance of his discovery and named the ingredient ‘penicillin’, though it was not until the onset of the Second World War that Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain were able to produce penicillin in sufficient quantities for practical use.
William Butler Yeats (1865 - 1939)
Literature 1923: find out more from Nobel Museum.
Listen The Lake Isle of Innisfree: date of broadcast 10.04.1932.
Born in Dublin and brought up in Sligo and London, Yeats was one of those writers (along with J.M. Synge and Sean O'Casey) responsible for the establishment of the literary movement known as the ‘Celtic Revival’. W.B. Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923. In the 1930s he made a handful of BBC broadcasts, in which he reads a small number of his poems and talks generally on the subjects of rhythm and modern poetry.
Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
Physics 1921: find out more from Nobel Museum.
Listen The post-war world [extract]: date of broadcast 10.12.1945.
This speech was broadcast on the day of the presentation of the annual Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded in 1945 to Wolfgang Pauli for his work on the development of atomic theory. Einstein takes the opportunity to link the achievements of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, with the scientists who participated in the invention of the atomic bomb, first deployed at Hiroshima, Japan, in August earlier that year.
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