Dr. Melvin Calvin, professor of chemistry at the University of California who won the 1961 Nobel Prize award for chemistry, is the son of a Jewish immigrant, who came to this country from Lithuania 60 years ago, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency learned here today.
His father, Elias Kalvarisky, settled in Detroit where he later became the manager of an A&P food store; His widowed mother, Rose Calvin, now lives in Los Angeles. She visited Israel last year.
The Nobel prize winner was born in St. Paul, Minn, in 1911 and received his scientific training at the Michigan College of Mining and Technology and the University of California, where he began his academic career as an instructor in chemistry in 1937, when he was 26 years old. He was in Israel several years ago, visiting the Weizmann Institute and the Technion at Haifa.
Dr. Calvin is the second American Nobel prize winner announced this month; The other Dr. Robert Hofstadter, a Stanford University physicist, also is a Jewish scientist; Dr. Hofstadter shared the Nobel prize in physics with Dr. Rudolf Mossbauer of Germany.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
