California Gold: The Nobel Tradition at UC Berkeley

Permanent Exhibit
The Helen Kennedy Cahill Reference Center, The Bancroft Library

Nobel gold has been "mined" by twenty members of the Berkeley faculty and twenty-four alumni. Four of these are alumni and faculty. Fifty-five Nobel medals have been awarded to faculty and researchers affiliated with eight UC campuses and laboratories, twenty-two of these since 1995.

Berkeley’s Nobel tradition reflects the distinguished culture of creativity flourishing in the Bay Area, where dozens of laureates have been affiliated with the three major universities and with industry, government, and independent laboratories. UC Berkeley is particularly notable for the large number of chemistry, physics and, more recently, economic laureates, and for the very first Nobel laureate from a public university, Ernest O. Lawrence.

The Bancroft Library has also developed its own Nobel tradition, collecting the papers of fourteen Nobel Laureates, including two who were not Berkeleyans: Emil Fischer (Chemistry, 1902) and Otto Stern (Physics, 1943).

Featured in this exhibit are the Nobel medals of William F. Giauque (Chemistry, 1949) and Gerard Debreu (Economics, 1983).  Also on display are facsimiles of photographs and letters drawn from The Bancroft Library's Nobel Laureates collections.