THE NOBEL LAUREATES - 1 - ANSWERS

1. A. Battle of Solferino

(An artistic presentation of "Battle of Solferino")

Up until the middle of the 19th century, there were no organized and well-established army nursing systems for casualties and no safe and protected institutions to accommodate and treat those who were wounded on the battlefield. In June 1859, the Swiss businessman Henry Dunant travelled to Italy to meet French emperor Napoleon III (nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte) with the intention of discussing difficulties in conducting business in Algeria, at that time occupied by France. When he arrived in the small Italian town of Solferino on the evening of 24 June, he witnessed the aftermath of the Battle of Solferino, an engagement in the Second Italian War of Independence. Henry Dunant was shocked by the terrible aftermath of the battle, the suffering of the wounded soldiers, and the near-total lack of medical attendance and basic care. He completely abandoned the original intent of his trip and for several days he devoted himself to helping with the treatment and care for the wounded with the help of local population.

Later he recorded his memories and experiences in the book "A Memory of Solferino" which inspired the creation of the "International Committee of the Red Cross" (ICRC) in 1863. The 1864 Geneva Convention was based on Dunant's idea for an independent organization to care for wounded soldiers.

In 1901, Henry Dunant received the first Nobel Peace Prize (together with Frederic Passy).

The "International Committee of the Red Cross" (ICRC) is based in Geneva, Switzerland and is one of the most widely recognized organizations in the world, having won three Nobel Peace Prizes in 1917, 1944, and 1963. The ICRC has external offices called Delegations in about eighty countries. Each delegation is under the responsibility of a Head of delegation who is the official representative of the ICRC in the country.

2. C. Mumbai

Joseph Rudyard Kipling (30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936), an English journalist, short-story writer, poet and novelist, was born in India (in Bombay, now Mumbai), which inspired much of his work. Kipling's major works of fiction include "The Jungle Book" (1894), "Kim" (1901), and many short stories, including "The Man Who Would Be King" (1888). His popular poems include "Mandalay" (1890), "Gunga Din" (1890), "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" (1919), "The White Man's Burden" (1899), and "If—" (1910).

(Kipling's poem "If—" written in the form of paternal advice to the poet's son, John)

His children's books are immensely popular and he is regarded as an innovator in the art of the short story writing. Kipling in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was among the United Kingdom's most popular writers and was awarded with the Nobel Prize in Literature, as the first English-language writer to receive the prize at the age of 41, its youngest recipient to date.

(Young Rudyard Kipling with his father John Lockwood Kipling)

Rudyard Kipling was born on 30 December 1865 in the campus of the newly founded J. J. School of Art (Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art) in Bombay where his father, John Lockwood Kipling, a sculptor and pottery designer, was the Principal and Professor of Architectural Sculpture.

Later Kipling wrote of Bombay:

"Mother of Cities to me,

For I was born in her gate,

Between the palms and the sea,

Where the world-end steamers wait."

3. B. Lawrence Bragg

Sir William Lawrence Bragg (31 March 1890 – 1 July 1971) was an Australian-born physicist and X-ray crystallographer, discoverer of Bragg's law of X-ray diffraction (1912), which is basic for the determination of crystal structure. He was joint recipient (with his father, William Henry Bragg) of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1915, "For their services in the analysis of crystal structure by means of X-ray"; an important step in the development of X-ray crystallography. Bragg was the director of the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, when the discovery of the structure of DNA was reported by James D. Watson and Francis Crick in February 1953.

(Lawrence Bragg with his father Henry Bragg)

Until 2014, he was the youngest ever Nobel laureate, having received the award at the age of 25 years before Malala Yousafzai won the Nobel Peace Prize at the age of 17.

4. A. Yemen

The 2011 Nobel Peace Prize was jointly awarded to three female political activists - Liberian President "Ellen Johnson Sirleaf", Liberian activist "Leymah Gbowee" and Yemeni politician "Tawakkul Karman" "for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work".

(Protest on the "Day of Rage" that Karman had called for in Sana'a, Yemen, from 3 February 2011)

Tawakkol Abdel-Salam Karman (born 7 February 1979) is a Yemeni journalist, politician and human rights activist. She leads the group "Women Journalists Without Chains," which she co-founded in 2005. She became the international public face of the 2011 Yemeni uprising that is part of the Arab Spring uprisings. In 2011, she was reportedly called the "Iron Woman" and "Mother of the Revolution" by some Yemenis. She became the first Yemeni, the first Arab woman and the second Muslim woman to win a Nobel Prize in 2011.

5. B. Karl Landsteiner

Karl Landsteiner (14 June 1868 – 26 June 1943), an Austrian biologist, physician and immunologist, distinguished the main blood groups in 1900, having developed the "modern system of classification of blood groups" from his identification of the presence of agglutinins in the blood, and identified, with Alexander S. Wiener, the "Rhesus factor", in 1937, thus enabling physicians to transfuse blood without endangering the patient's life. With Constantin Levaditi and Erwin Popper, he discovered the polio virus in 1909. In 1930, he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He was posthumously awarded the Lasker Award in 1946, and has been described as the "father of transfusion medicine".