Nobel prize in Physics goes to Science alumnus Willard Boyle

For the second time this week, the Faculty of Science is proud to congratulate a McGill Science alumnus on winning a Nobel Prize. This time, it’s Willard Boyle, : BSc’47, MSc’48, PhD’50, who is sharing the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for his part in the invention of the charge-coupled device, a light detector that initiated the digital camera revolution. Boyle, who shares the prize with Charles Kao and George Smith, was born in Amherst, Nova Scotia but grew up in a remote logging town in Quebec, where he was home-schooled by his mother.

Although he is best-known for his charge-coupled device, a key component in digital cameras, optical scanners and the Hubble space telescope, Boyle was also on the scientific team that helped NASA select the site for the first Apollo landing on the moon. On Monday, it was announced that McGill Science alumnus Jack Szostak (BSc’72) won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Medicine for his part in the discovery of how the body protects chromosomes housing vital genetic code.

Boyle is the eighth researcher associated with McGill’s Faculty of Science to have won a Nobel Prize. The others are:

Professors

Ernest Rutherford (Chemistry, 1908)
Frederick Soddy (Chemistry, 1921)

Graduates

Andrew Victor Schally (Medicine, 1977)
Val Fitch (Physics, 1980)
David Hubel (Medicine, 1981)
Rudolph Marcus (Chemistry, 1993)
Jack Szostak (Medicine, 2009)