The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2000

There was little in my early life to indicate that an interest in biology would become the passion of my academic career. In fact, there was little to suggest I would have an academic career. Rather, my early life was importantly shaped by my experiences in Vienna and I spent many years later coming to grips with the circumstances and place of my birth. I was born in Vienna on November 7, 1929, eleven years after the multiethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire fell apart following its defeat in World War I. Although Austria had been radically reduced in size (from 54 million to only 7 million inhabitants) and in political significance, its capital, the Vienna of my youth, was still intellectually vibrant, one of the great cultural centers of the world. A city of one and a half million people, it was home to Sigmund Freud, Karl Kraus, Robert Musil, Arthur Schnitzler, and for a while Arnold Schoenberg. The music of Gustav Mahler and of the earlier 19th Century Vienna school resonated throughout the city, as did the bold expressionist images of Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele. Even as it thrived culturally, however, Vienna in the 1930s was the capital city of an oppressive, authoritarian political system. I was too young to appreciate its cultural richness, but I sensed later, from the perspective of a more carefree adolescence in the United States, the oppressive conditions in Vienna that affected my early youth. Even prior to the Anschluss in 1938, anti-Semitism was a chronic feature of Viennese life. Jews, who made u