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Har Gobind Khorana

Har Gobind Khorana, scientist (born 9 January 1922 in Raipur, India; died 9 November 2011 in Concord, Massachusetts). His mother was illiterate and his family impoverished. His first class was in the open on the edge of the Rajasthan Desert. Khorana's brilliance was obvious early and, with scholarships, he earned degrees in organic chemistry at Punjab University. He obtained a PhD at Liverpool (1948) and then spent three years studying proteins and nucleic acids at Cambridge. In spite of his ability, his race precluded him from appointment as a professor in Britain. In search of an outstanding young scientist, Gordon Shrum, a physicist from the University of British Columbia, hired Khorana to do organic chemistry at the British Columbia Research Council in Vancouver in 1952.

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James Bertram Collip

James Bertram Collip, biochemist, educator, co-discoverer of insulin (born 20 November 1892 in Belleville, ON; died 19 June 1965 in London, ON). Collip is perhaps best recognized for his work into endocrinological research. He was one of the first to isolate the parathyroid hormone. He also contributed to the discovery of insulin in 1922.

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Walter Kohn

Walter Kohn, theoretical physicist, professor, Nobel laureate in chemistry (born 9 March 1923 in Vienna, Austria; died 19 April 2016, Santa Barbara, United States). A refugee in England at the outbreak of the Second World War, Kohn was arrested in 1940 as an “enemy alien” and sent to Canada, where he was held in detention camps until 1942 (see Canada and the Holocaust). After his release, he studied mathematics and physics at the University of Toronto and Harvard University. He taught for many years at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and later at the University of California, San Diego and was the founding director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Kohn was at the forefront of solid-state physics and quantum chemistry during his scientific career. For his work on “density functional theory” he was named co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1998.

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Louis Siminovitch

Louis Siminovitch, CC, OC, OOnt, FRS, FRSC, molecular biologist (born 1 May 1920 in Montreal, QC; died 6 April 2021 in Toronto, ON). Siminovitch served on various national and provincial research and educational organizations. As a founder of the field, his research centered on somatic cell genetics and on the molecular biology of mammalian cells. (See also Genetics.) He has had a major influence on the careers of numerous Canadian molecular biologists, including James Till and Ernest McCulloch with their groundbreaking stem cell research.

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Leo Yaffe

Leo Yaffe, OC, FRSC, educator, nuclear scientist, university administrator (born 6 July 1916 in Devil's Lake, North Dakota; died 26 May 1997 in Montreal, QC). Yaffe was an authority in nuclear chemistry and throughout his career he advocated for the peaceful use of atomic energy (see Nuclear Energy). He has been the recipient of many honours and awards.