ABSTRACT
By 1975 there were five sets of laureate parents and offspring on the N obel roster. That year, Aage Bohr won the N obel Prize in Physics; his father, N iels, had done so fifty-three years earlier, the year Aage
was born. In addition to the Bohrs, there are three other father-son pairs. The first father and son to win N obels were English physicists: J. J. T hom son, who received his prize in 1906 for work on the conduc tion of electricity through gases, and G. P. Thom son, who received his in 1937 for work on the diffraction of electrons by crystals. The next pair, also English physicists, are the only father-and-son team ever to have shared a N obel prize: W. H . Bragg and W. L. Bragg, having been jointly recognized in 1915 for their basic studies of crystal structure by m eans of X-rays. The third pair emerged in 1970 with an award to the Swedish physiologist U lf von Euler for his work on the chemistry of transmission of nerve impulses. H is Germ an-born father, H ans von Euler-Chelpin, received the prize in 1929 for his research on the chemistry of fermentative enzym es. V on Euler, it turns out, com es by his N obel inheritance in two ways: not only as the son of a N obelist father but also, by the principle of socioheredity, as the godson of Svante Arrhenius, laureate in chemistry for 1903.
