Groningen discoveries take centre stage at Nobel Science exhibition

The Nobel Prize. Ben Feringa has just got one, and Frits Zernike of the University of Groningen (UG) is a previous recipient. But there are lots of other UG researchers who also conduct pioneering work and have made significant inventions and discoveries. The University Museum is holding a free-entry exhibition called Nobel Science dedicated to these world-class Groningen scientists.

Feringa and the Groningen tradition

Ben Feringa’s Nobel Prize is not a flash in the pan. Many scientists in the UG’s past have conducted research that could have won a Nobel Prize. Sometimes they were so far ahead of their time that others have been rewarded for discoveries that they had already made. ‘Nobel Science. Feringa, Zernike and the Groningen tradition’ will put these (often forgotten) researchers in the spotlight and alongside Feringa’s research.

From ‘tinkering headmaster’ to an artificial kidney made from a bomber

Nobel Science commemorates several forgotten researchers. Take J.L. Sirks, the ‘tinkering headmaster’, for example, who designed a microscope in 1893 along the same principles as those for which Zernike won the Nobel Prize in 1953. Or Hermanus Haga, who proved the wave character of X-rays in 1899, thirteen years before Max von Laue did so – and won a Nobel Prize. And what about Willem Kolff, who cobbled together the first artificial kidney from a bomber and a Model T Ford?

Nanomotor

There is of course plenty of attention for Ben Feringa. What exactly is his nanomotor research about? How can you create a molecule that you can’t even see? And what will be the future of the ‘Groningen tradition’, which links fundamental research to practical applications?

The exhibition ‘Nobel Science. Feringa, Zernike and the Groningen tradition’
will open on 26 January and run till 29 May, on Tuesdays to Sundays, 1-5 p.m.
Admission free
University Museum UG, Oude Kijk in ’t Jatstraat 7a, Groningen

More information

• Cato van der Vlugt , University Museum Communications, or Christien Boomsma, curator of the exhibition