“In a world where it is so easy to neglect, deny, corrupt and suppress the truth, the scientist may find his discipline severe.” – Sir John Cornforth
Sir John Cornforth (1917-2013) was an Australian-British chemist. When he was 10 years old, Cornforth was diagnosed with otosclerosis, a disease of the middle ear that causes progressive hearing loss. Unfortunately, going completely deaf by the age of 20 led him to change career paths from law to chemistry. Cornforth struggled with hearing loss through his undergraduate career, making it more and more difficult to understand lectures. Nevertheless, he earned his B.S. in chemistry at the University of Sydney, where he primarily studied organic chemistry. Further, he pursued graduate studies in organic chemistry at Oxford, earning a doctorate in the field (1941). Soon after this, Cornforth significantly contributed towards the work on penicillin. In 1946, he began working at the National Institute for Medical Research, where he worked on synthesizing sterols, including cholesterol. For all his work in organic synthesis, he won a share of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1975, alongside co-recipient Vladimir Prelog. Further, he was knighted in 1977 and honored with an honorary Doctor of Science from his alma mater, the University of Sydney.