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French bacteriologist Charles Henri Nicolle (1866-1936), who saved innumerable lives by discovering that typhus was transmitted by lice, was deafened at age 18. He became the first deaf Nobel laureate (Physiology or Medicine) in 1928.
Sir Charles Scott Sherrington (1857-1952), the distinguished British neuroscientist who won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1932, was a late-deafened physician. He can be considered the second deaf Nobel laureate.
Sir John Warcup Cornforth (b. 1917), a native Australian who has lived in England most of his life, did important research and made discoveries in organic chemistry (particularly the molecular structures of steroids and cholesterol). Progressively deafened since early adolescence, he became the third deaf Nobel laureate (in Chemistry), in 1975.
Dr. Andrew Manning, a native of New Zealand studying carbon-dioxide and oxygen (“greenhouse gases”) in the biosphere, most recently at the University of East Anglia, was one of 28 scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore, Jr. Unlike the other deaf laureates, Dr. Manning has close ties with the Deaf community.
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Two noteworthy examples: Astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868-1921) made a momentous discovery in the course of her work at the Harvard College Observatory: that a star’s apparent brightness and periodicity (fluctuations in brightness) gave clues to its distance from Earth. This discovery made it possible to calculate the distance between Earth and galaxies. She was nominated for a Nobel Prize in 1925 by Gösta Mittag-Leffler, a distinguished Swedish mathematician, who was unaware that she had died of cancer 5 years previously. Since Nobel Prizes are never awarded posthumously, Leavitt wasn’t eligible for the honor.
Oliver Heaviside (1850-1925), the shy, self-taught, eccentric British electro-physicist, was nominated for a Nobel Prize by Norwegian physicist-meteorologist Vilhelm Bjerknes in 1912. Unfortunately, he was bypassed.
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