Gary Becker was born in 1930 in Pennsylvania, USA. He studied economics at Princeton and Chicago universities.

Becker’s rigorous economic reasoning reveal the rational component involved in complex human behavior; by doing so, he has altered the understanding of human action in diverse areas such as discrimination, marriage, crime or drugs addiction.

In 1992, Gary Becker was awarded the Nobel prize in economics “for having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behavior and interaction, including non-market behavior”. Becker’s work has had a significant theoretical and practical impact in social sciences, especially sociology, criminology and demography.

Georges Charpak was born in 1924 in the little Jewish town of Sarny, Ukraine. He was 8 years old when his family emigrated to France. During the German occupation of France, Charpak joined a leftist group of resistance, was arrested in 1944 and deported to Dachau camp. He was liberated in 1945, being only 21. He started working in the “National Center for Scientific Research” in which he obtained his PhD. in experimental nuclear physics.

In 1957, Charpak published, at first, his ideas about detectors of particles; but his colleagues were not yet ready to exploit his proposals. In 1959, he joined the Leon Lederman team at CERN (The “European Organisation for Nuclear Research”) in Geneva to measure the magnetic moment of the muon. Since then, he didn’t leave this Center, forming his own team, pioneering in development of particles’ detectors.

In 1992, Georges Charpac was awarded the Nobel prize in physics “for his invention and development of particle detectors, in particular the multiwire proportional chamber”.

This invention made it possible to increase the data collection speed for registering charged particle trajectories and interactions. The development of detectors goes hand in hand with the general scientific progress. During the last two decades, various types of particle detectors based on Charpak’s original invention have been of decisive importance for many discoveries in physics, with various applications in medicine or biology.

Edmond Fischer was born in 1920 at Shanghai, China, and arrived to Switzerland at the age of 7. He studied chemistry and biology at Geneva and presented his doctoral thesis in 1947. In 1953 he joined the laboratory of Gerty and Carl Cori, at the University of Washington Seattle. There, he started his long scientific collaboration with Edwin Krebs.

In 1992, Edmond Fischer was awarded the Nobel prize for physiology and medicine, together with Edwin Krebs, “for their discoveries concerning reversible protein phosphorylation as a biological regulatory mechanism”.

Edwin Krebs was born in 1918 in Lansing Iowa, United States. He studied chemistry at the University of Illinois, and obtained his Medical Degree from the Washington University Saint-Louis in 1943.

Krebs worked for many years at the University of Washington Seattle, in the laboratory of Gerty and Carl Cori, where he started his long scientific collaboration with Edmond Fischer.

In 1992, Edwin Krebs was awarded the Nobel prize for physiology and medicine, together with Edmond Fischer, “for their discoveries concerning reversible protein phosphorylation as a biological regulatory mechanism”.

Rudolph Marcus was born in 1923 in Montreal, Canada. He received his doctorate from McGill University in 1946, and later moved to the United States. He also worked in England and China.

In 1992, Rudolph Marcus was awarded the Nobel prize for Chemistry “for his contributions to the theory of electron transfer reactions in chemical systems”.

Marcus’s work is related to the reduction of oxidation and it enables a deep understanding of many chemical processes such as photosynthesis, the electrical conductivity of polymers and corrosion. Itis conceivable that, in the futurem Marcus’s theory will support the discovery of a method of slowing down chemical reactions, which is impossible at present.