Guessing the number of Canadians who have won the Nobel Prize for scientific discoveries might well be a question for the TV game show Jeopardy, but the answer would be open to debate, for at least three of the eight recipients were born in other countries and four of the five native-born winners were recognized for research accomplished in the United States.

Six scientists have won outright or jointly won, a Nobel Prize for chemistry and two have won for physics. Three of the chemistry winners were born elsewhere: Gerhard Herzberg, born in Germany, left in 1935 because his wife was Jewish; John Polanyi, a University of Toronto professor, was also born in Germany; and Michael Smith, now at the University of British Columbia, is a native of Blackpool, England.

The first Canadian-born chemist to with the Nobel Prize was Henry Taube, from the mixed-farming community of Neudorf, Saskatchewan, for studies accomplished at three American universities. The other two, natives of Montreal, were Rudolph Marcus and Sidney Altman.

Two Alberta-born scientists have won the Nobel Prize for physics: Bertram Brockhouse in 1994 for discoveries made 40 years earlier at Chalk River, Ontario, and Richard Taylor for researching subatomic particles called "quarks." He was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize with two Americans in 1990.

Gerhard Herzberg

After Dr. Herzberg came to Canada as a 31-year-old accomplished scientist, he remained at the University of Saskatchewan for a decade, becoming a Canadian citizen in 1945. Following a three-year stint at the University of Chicago's Yerkes Observatory, he was hired as principal research officer for the Division of Physics at the National Research Council (NRC) in Ottawa. He became director a year later and, in 1955, director of the Division of Pure Physics.
 

Gerhard Herzberg left Germany for Canada in 1935. A highlight of his near 50-year career at Ottawa's National Research Council was winning the 1971 Nobel Prize for chemistry for research work in the spectroscopic analysis of free molecules. [Photo, courtesy National Research Council/Harry Turner]

By then his interest had shifted to the more difficult spectroscopic analysis of free radicals (atoms or molecules with at least one unpaired electron). This research led to his Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1971.

Herzberg was president of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics from 1957 to 196. He has won numerous worldwide honours from universities and scientific-societies, including honorary doctoral degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge Universities. When the Nobel Laureate reached retirement age in 1969, the NRC made him a Distinguished Research Scientist so that he could continue his research at the lab (renamed the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in 1976 as a further honour to him). At the age of 92 he is still working there....
 

John Polanyi

The study of molecular reaction also led to John Polanyi's winning the 1986 Nobel Prize for chemistry, awarded jointly with two americans. John was born in Berlin in 1929. His parents were Hungarian, and his father, a distinguished theologian and philosopher, moved to England as a world-famous science professor in 1933 to teach chemistry at the University of Manchester. John entered that university as a student in 1946, and after receiving his PH.D. there in 1952, spent two years at the NRC in Ottawa as a postdorctoral fellow before taking further studies at Princeton University in 1954.
 

Professor John Charles Polanyi, of the University of Toronto, whose scientific career began at Ottawa's National Research Council, celebrates with colleagues and friends the rewarding  news that he had just co-won the 1986 Nobel Prize for chemistry for his research work on infrared chemiluminescence. [Photo, courtesy The Toronto Star/B.Weil]

Joining the faculty of the University of Toronto in 1954, the future Nobel Laureate began his 30-year investigation into chemical reactions. The research that eventually involved the analysis of infrared emissions from a newly formed molecule became instrumental in the development of the laser and led ultimately to his shared Nobel Prize.

When the John Polanyi Chair in Chemistry was established in 1994 at the University of Toronto, ten other Nobel Prize winners attended the ceremonies including Gerhard Herzberg and Michael Smith, the 1993 winner of the Nobel Prize for chemistry.
 

Michael Smith

Professor Smith, head of the Biotechnology Laboratory at the University of British Columbia, attributes much of his success to "luck" though others who have worked with him talk of his organizational skill and aver that he is a workaholic and perfectionist.

When he was young in Blackpool, England, a top-notch chemistry teacher "turned him on" to science. After attending the University of Manchester, he came to Canada in 1956 to do postdoctoral studies at UBC.
 

Professor Michael Smith came to Canada in 1956 to pursue postdoctoral studies at the University of British Columbia. He jointly won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1993 for developing ways to create mutations in DNA. [Photo, courtesy The University of British Columbia]

Selected to head the chemistry lab at the Vancover-based Fisheries Research Board of Canada, Smith combined his new job with teaching graduate students, a sideline frowned upon by his superior at the Board. In 1966 that problem was solved with "another bit of luck" when the Medical Research Council of Canada made him a "career investigator" with an annual grant of $100,00.

Smith's Nobel Prize was jointly awarded for developing a way to create mutations in DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). His findings have empowered research scientists today to change DNA chemically, and thereby create a mutation, affording researchers, moreover, an opportunity to discover precisely how cancer and virus genes work.

Shortly after receiving his $500,000 award, Smith announced that half of it was being donated for schizophrenia research at the University of Toronto.
 

Rudolf Marcus

In 1992, Montreal-born Rudolph Marcus was attending a scientific conference in Toronto when notified that he had won the Nobel Prize. Marcus later recalled his mother's promise years earlier that he "would go to McGill someday." He did graduate from McGill with a Ph.D. in 1946 and began working on "front line research" at Ottawa's National Research Council. There he developed a keen interest in theoretical chemistry. With no postdoctorate studies available in Canada, he left Canada for the University of North Carolina.
 

After graduating with a Ph.D. from McGill University in 1946, Montreal-born Rudolph Marcus commenced a research career at Ottawa's National Research Council. Postdoctoral research led to studies in the United States. His theories on "electronic transfer" at the California Institute of Technology won him a Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1992. [Photo, courtesy The Toronto Star/Tony Bock]

While later teaching at Brooklyn's Polytechnical Institute in 1951, he began reading "everything that was available in electrostatics." This led to his theories on electronic transfer cited in his Nobel award. At the California Institute of Technology, his research intensified and although a number of administrative posts were offered, he declined them all because "I've not wanted anything to interfere with my love of problems and research."

In order to maintain professional status in California, Marcus became an American citizen in 1958. When this legal requirement was changed in the 1970s he applied for dual citizenship, but Canadian law ironically required he had to live in Canada for five years before he could apply. Because he was unable to attain dual citizenship, the 1992 prize for chemistry is shown as won by a U.S. citizen.
 

Henry Taube

Much the same occurred to Henry Taube whose education started in a Saskatchewan one-room school. After obtaining a B.Sc. in 1935 and a M.Sc. two years later at the University of Saskatchewan, he moved to the University of California for additional graduate work and became involved in inorganic chemistry studies. Unable to find employment at home, he joined the faculty at Cornell University in 1941, moving, in 1946, to the University of Chicago. On becoming professor at Stanford University in 1961, he "Saw the field of inorganic chemistry wide open to him for studies in depth."
 

Educated in a one-room school before he earned his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees at the University of Saskatchewan, Henry Taube moved to the United States for further studies at the University of California in the late 1930s. Noted for his work on the mechanisms of electronic transfer reaction, Taube today is an esteemed faculty member at Stanford University. Viewed here receiving the 1983 Nobel Prize for chemistry from Sweden's King Karl Gustaf, Taube is the first Canadian-born scientist to be so acknowledged. [Photo, courtesy Stanford University via Henry Taube]

His research there which led to his 1983 Nobel Prize in chemistry concentrated on the transfer of electrons in metals which, according to a biographical sketch in Nobel Laureates,
"paved the way not only for our present understanding of the structure and reactivity of classical coordination complexes but has also been the basis for discussion for the behaviour of metal ions in biological systems."

Today, the Nobel Laureate is the author of more than 300 papers. Moreover, mainly because of the infectious enthusiasm and creative approach to chemistry that Taube has passed on to his colleagues, nearly half of some 200 graduates and associates of Taube's "school" have become professors and scientists at leading U.S. and foreign universities.
 

Sidney Altman

Sidney Altman jointly won the Nobel Prize in 1989 for a fundamental biochemical discovery that some RNA molecules could themselves act as catalysts of biochemical reactions or enzymes. It is described as a major breakthrough in understanding the roll in cells of RNA, which had previously been thought to act only as a carrier of genetic information.
 

A Montrealer, Sidney Altman was a physics major at Boston's Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Developing a life-long interest in laboratory research upon completing doctoral studies at the University of Colorado, Altman pursued further studies in RNA enzyme research at both Harvard and Cambridge universities. While chairman of the biology department at Yale University, Prof. Altman jointly won the1989 Nobel Prize for chemistry. Viewed here in 1990 at the Ontario Science Centre, the Nobel Laureate assists a budding science student. [Photo, courtesy The Toronto Star/Jim Wilkes]

Born in 1939, the son of Russian and Polish immigrants who ran a small grocery store in Montreal, Altman was a bookish child fascinated by atoms and modern nuclear physics. He enrolled as a physics major at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) but, while he showed an interest in laboratory research and was a keen student, his overall grades were not particularly outstanding until his senior year.

Obtaining a B.Sc. from MIT in 1960, Altman went to Columbia University. While attending Columbia, he worked as a science and poetry editor for Collier Publishing. He left Columbia early, however, and obtained a job screen writing at Canada's National Film Board but never showed up for work when assigned to write a script for a military training film. After a brief fling at translating a French novel into English, he went to Boulder, Colorado, as a science writer and student at a summer institute in physics.

Eventually, after joining the biophysics department of the University of Colorado Medical School in Denver, he continued his studies and obtained a Ph.D. in biophysics. Postdoctoral studies followed at Harvard and Cambridge University where the former hockey player at MIT began his research on the RNA enzyme. In 1971, the future Nobel Laureate returned to the U.S. as an assistant professor at Yale University, becoming professor in 1980, chairman of biology in 1983, and dean of Yale College in 1985.
 

Richard Taylor

Richard Taylor became the first Canadian Nobel Laureate in physics for proving that photons and neurons are not fundamental particles but are made up of smaller components called "quarks", named so by Murray Gell-Mann, an American scientist who, in the early 1860s, theorized the existence of subatomic particles and adopted the word "quarks" from James Joyce's novel, Finnigan's Wake.
 

Richard Taylor became the first Canadian to win a Nobel Prize for physics, jointly awarded to him in 1990. He was born in Medicine Hat, Alberta, completing both his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees at the University of Alberta. The future Nobel Laureate then went to California's Stanford University, completing his doctorate in 1962.  With colleagues elsewhere, his research proved that protons and neutrons are not fundamental particles but are made up of smaller components called "quarks." [Photo, courtesy Stanford University Library via Richard Taylor]

A native of Medicine Hat, Alberta, Taylor obtained both a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in physics at the University of Alberta before moving to Stanford University in 1952 for doctoral studies. By 1954 he was working at Stanford's High Energy Physics Laboratory, with its newly installed linear accelerator.

Later, after a three-year stint in France, Taylor returned to the U.S., receiving his doctorate from Stanford in 1962. He participated in the design of a new, much larger linear accelerator being built at Stanford. Over the next decade he helped build associated equipment for experiments using the accelerator. He became a faculty member at Stanford in 1968. Taylor, who has never taken out American citizenship, was awarded the 1990 Nobel Prize in physics along with two MIT scientists for confirming Gell-Mann's theories. They also saw some effects of the "gluons" - electrically neutral particles that bind the quarks together.
 

Bertram Brockhouse

The high-speed accelerator used by Taylor and his colleagues was a far cry from the equipment used by Bertram Brockhouse while working at Chalk River, Ontario, in the 1950's, but his work there at proving "what atmos do" made him the 1994 recipient of the Nobel Prize for physics, shared with Clifford Shull of MIT who was also doing atomic research in the 1950s.
 

Ten years after he retired as professor of physics at McMaster University, at Hamilton, Ontario, and some 42 years after his groundbreaking research at the Chalk River nuclear laboratories in northern Ontario, Bertram Brockhouse shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1994. [Photo, courtesy McMaster University Times]

Born in Lethbridge, Alberta, in 1918, Brockhouse attended high school in British Columbia, worked as a radio repairman and graduating in mathematics and physics from the University of British Columbia in 1947. He took his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Toronto and was invited to do "neutron scattering experiments" at the NRC's Atomic Energy of Canada.

There, Dr. Brockhouse invented an instrument that enabled him to bombard solid materials with slow-moving neutrons produces in the reactor and that, in time, "allowed him to calculate the strength of the forces that bind atoms together." At about the same time, Shull, the co-owner, was carrying out experiments in which neutrons where deflected to provide a picture of the position of atmos, but their discoveries, though known in the scientific community, went virtually unnoticed elsewhere.

In 1962, Dr. Brockhouse, the chairman of the department, had "a cadre of young scientists second to none in Canada." Dr. Brockhouse had been retired for ten years and "was surprised when he heard the news on his telephone answering machine at home." Dr. Johns, however, said the award "comes as no surprise since they [the scientific community] had been waiting for decades for this to happen."
 

While scientists have won most of the Nobel prizes awarded to Canadians, four other Canadians have been recipients and have won international acclaim. Lester B. Pearson won the prize for peace in 1957, while serving as Canada's Secretary of State, and three men won for discoveries in medicine. Dr. Frederick Banting was Canada's first winner, in 1923, for co-discovering insulin, followed by Dr. Charles Huggins of Halifax, who won it in 1966, for research at the University of Chicago on the hormonal treatment of prostate cancer, and Dr. David H. Hubel, born in Windsor, Ontario, and a graduate of McGill, who worked at the Montreal Neurological Institute before moving to the United States. He shared the 1981 Nobel prize for research in neurobiology conducted at Harvard University.

Mel James