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Canada’s notable Nobel winners

Queen's University professor and Japan's Takaaki Kajita win for discovery showing neutrinos have mass

Arthur McDonald, the Canadian co-winner of this year’s 2015 Nobel Prize for Physics, says a “very friendly collaboration” resulted in getting him to the top of the science podium.

The professor emeritus at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., shares the prize with Japanese scientist Takaaki Kajita (They are being singled out for their contributions to experiments that show neutrinos changing identities.)

Their work has “changed our understanding of the innermost workings of matter and can prove crucial to our view of the universe,“ the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in announcing the award early Tuesday.

McDonald, who is also the director of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (also known as SNOLAB) said in a news conference that their discoveries involved a “tremendous amount of work … among scientists from Canada, the United States, Britain and Portugal.”

Neutrinos are created in reactions between cosmic radiation and the Earth’s atmosphere. Others are produced in nuclear reactions inside the sun. Every second, thousands of billions of neutrinos are streaming through our bodies.

The breakthrough came when scientists were able to see that neutrinos could change from one type to another as they journeyed from the sun to the Earth.

McDonald isn’t new to the award realm. The 72-year-old native of Sydney, N.S., was also made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2006.

After earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Dalhousie University, he obtained his Ph.D. in physics from California Institute of Technology in 1969 and then worked for Atomic Energy of Canada until 1982, when he moved to Princeton University for seven years.

He has been at Queen’s since 1989 and was made a professor emeritus in 2013. Though retired from teaching, he is still involved in research.

McDonald isn’t the only Canadian to have won the prestigious Nobel award. Below are some of the notable Nobel winners from Canada:

Alice Munro became the first Canadian woman to capture the prize, garnering one for literature in 2013. Munro was acclaimed as a “master of the contemporary short story” and lauded for her “finely tuned storytelling, characterized by clarity and psychological realism.”

Sometimes called Canada’s Chekhov for her spare and brutal depictions of life in small towns, Munro has 14 short story collections to her name. She has won the top prize in short fiction three times: the O. Henry Award for "Passion” (2006), “What Do You Want To Know For” (2008) and “Corrie” (2012).

Born in Wyndham, Ont., in 1931, she first studied journalism at the University of Western Ontario before dropping out to marry her first husband and having three children. She reignited her interest in writing again when they opened a bookstore in 1963.

Her many accolades include The Man Booker International Prize in 2009 for her body of work and two Giller Prizes for “The Love of a Good Woman” in 1998 and “Runaway in 2004. She also won the Governor General’s Literary Award three times: “Dance of the Happy Shades” (1968), “Who Do You Think You Are” (1978) and “The Progress of Love (1986). Her short story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” was adapted into the 2006 award-winning film “Away From Her,” directed by Sarah Polley.

Bertram Brockhouse shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physics with Clifford G. Schull. They were honoured for their “pioneering contributions to the development of neutron scattering techniques for studies of condensed matter.”

The award recognized Brockhouse’s development of neutron spectroscopy and Shull’s work on neutron diffraction technique.

Born in Lethbridge, Alta., in 1918, Brockhouse grew up in poverty during his early years, sometimes selling newspapers on the streets of Vancouver. In the latter half of the 1940s, he managed to get a B.A. and then pursued a master’s in physics at the University of Toronto. His pioneering work began in the 1950s in Atomic Energy of Canada’s Chalk River Nuclear Laboratory. He would later become a professor at McMaster University in Hamilton from 1962 until he retired in 1984. The Canadian Association of Physicists and the Division of Condensed Matter and Materials Physics created the Brockhouse Medal in 1999 to recognize outstanding experimental or theoretical contributions to condensed matter and materials physics.

Sidney Altman shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1989 jointly with Thomas R. Cech “for their discovery of catalytic properties of RNA. ” They discovered an enzyme called RNase P which was made of two parts: one strand made of RNA (ribonucleic acid) and one of protein.

It was the RNA that provided the catalytic process — providing key evidence of how life might have formed millions of years ago without the presence or protein. It also provides a way for scientists to figure out how to inhibit some viruses by cutting up their RNA.

Born to working-class migrants in 1933 in Montreal, Altman would go on to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he formed an interest in molecular biology. He ended up at Harvard University where he continued research into DNA nuclease and soon joined the team led by Sydney Brenner and Francis Crick at the famous Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England.

Crick was the co-discoverer of DNA (DeoxyriboNucleic Acid), the molecule that encodes the genetic information informing cells how to function and grow. That work led Altman to an assistant professorship at Yale in 1971. After becoming chair of his department, he became Dean of Yale in 1985 for four years.

John Polanyi nabbed the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1986, sharing it with Americans Dudley Herschenbach and Yuan T. Lee for their development of a new field of chemistry research known as reaction dynamics, which according to the Nobel Committee “provided a more detailed understanding of how chemical reactions take place.”

Born in Berlin, Polanyi’s family migrated to Canada after the Second World War. He would go on to earn his PhD in chemistry at Manchester University in 1952 and then later became a research associate at Canada’s National Research Council and a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University.

He joined the University of Toronto in 1956 as a lecturer. He has served on the Prime Minister of Canada’s Advisory Board on Science and Technology, the Premier’s Council of Ontario, as Foreign Honorary Advisor to the Institute for Molecular Sciences, Japan, and as Honorary Advisor to the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, Germany.

He was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1974, and a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1979. Polanyi has been busy, publishing almost 100 articles on science policy, on the control of armaments and the impact of science on society.

Gerhard Herzberg won his Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1971 "for his contributions to the knowledge of electronic structure and geometry of molecules, particularly free radicals.”

Herzberg was a science superstar from his early 20s in his native Germany. In 1928, the 24-year-old finished his Doctor of Engineering Physics degree and published 12 papers in atomic and molecular physics. He then got a postdoctoral fellowship at one of the top physics centres of the time, the University of Göttingen, working under Max Born and James Franck, who were doing groundbreaking work in quantum mechanics.

In 1934, Herzberg arrived in Saskatoon along with his wife at the invitation of the University of Saskatoon where he spent 10 years. It was a way out as they were escaping Nazi Germany. Herzberg’s wife was Jewish.

In the late 1940s, the National Research Council (NRC) invited Herzberg to assemble a group of young scientists specializing in experimental techniques for studying the microwave, infrared, visible and vacuum ultraviolet regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. Under his leadership, the NRC became a world leader in spectroscopy.

Lester B Pearson is the creator of the United Nations Peacekeeping force, which won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957. In 1956, Israel invaded the Egyptian Sinai. Britain and France reacted by landing paratroopers along the Suez Canal. What resulted was a tense global stalemate that shut down the primary shipping lane from October 1956 until March 1957.

As Canada’s foreign minister, Pearson proposed the United Nations Emergency Force as a resolution. It worked. He would go on to become Canada’s 14th prime minister from 1963-68.

Born to a Methodist minister in 1897 in Ontario, Pearson grew up to study history at the University of Toronto, graduating in 1919. After a stint teaching at the university, he joined the Ministry of External Affairs in the 1920s and his diplomatic career sped off.

In 1935 he was sent to London as first secretary in the Canadian High Commission and in 1945, he was named Canadian ambassador to the United States and attended the founding conference of the United Nations (UN) at San Francisco.

Pearson got Canada to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949. By then, he was Minister of External Relations and would lead Canada into the Korean War as a contributor to the UN army. In 1952, he served as president of the UN General Assembly. After serving as Canada’s prime minister, Pearson left a lasting legacy that included the Canada Pension Plan, universal health care and a new flag.