In 1902 he secured a position as an examiner in the Swiss patent office in Bern. In 1903 he married Mileva Maric, who had been his classmate at the polytechnic. They had two sons but eventually divorced. Einstein later remarried.

Van der Meer, Simon (1925- ), Dutch physicist and co-winner of the 1984 Nobel Prize for physics for his contributions to the discovery of several subatomic particles whose existence had been predicted but not confirmed. This discovery added further evidence to the theory proposed by Albert Einstein that all forces in nature are related and helped explain the nuclear reactions that occur in the sun. Van der Meer shared the Nobel Prize with his colleague Italian physicist Carlo Rubbia.

Born in The Hague, the Netherlands, Van der Meer obtained an engineering degree in 1952 from the Technische Hogeschool in Delft. After working for several years in the electronics industry, he joined the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland, where he spent most of his career.

Curie, Marie (1867-1934), Polish-born French chemist who, with her husband Pierre Curie, was an early investigator of radioactivity. Radioactivity is the spontaneous decay of certain elements into other elements and energy. The Curies shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in physics with French physicist Antoine Henri Becquerel for fundamental research on radioactivity. Marie Curie went on to study the chemistry and medical applications of radium. She was awarded the 1911 Nobel Prize in chemistry in recognition of her work in discovering radium and polonium and in isolating radium

Krebs, Edwin G. (1918- ), American biochemist and Nobel Prize winner, born in Lansing, Iowa. Krebs received an M.D. degree from the University of Washington in 1943. He continued to work for the university, and it was there that he began his 40-year collaboration with American biochemist Edmond H. Fischer, with whom he shared the 1992 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.
In the 1950s Krebs and Fischer studied the way cells break down glycogen into the sugar glucose, which the cells use as fuel (the body stores energy in glycogen, and the cells break it down to glucose as needed). The two scientists knew that an enzyme, phosphorylase, was important to the process. Krebs had studied its role in muscle metabolism in mammals, and Fischer had studied the enzyme's role in plant metabolism.