WHO MADE THE GRADE AS A NOBEL WINNER...

Scientist Sir Peter Ratcliffe is among the latest Nobel prize winners. Marion McMullen looks at some of the other Brits who have won

1 BRITISH scientist Sir Peter Ratcliffe, left, aged 65, and American professors William Kaelin Jr and Gregg L Semenza, have been jointly awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for discovering how the body’s cells sense and react to oxygen levels. They will each share the £736,000 cash prize and their work paves the way for new strategies to fight anaemia, cancer and other diseases.

2 SCOTTISH bacteriologist Sir Alexander Fleming, below right, developed the mould that led to penicillin. It saw him awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1945 and he shared the prize with Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain for their work on penicillin. Fleming once declared: “Penicillin cures, but wine makes people happy.”

3 THE Jungle Book author Rudyard Kipling, right, was 41 when he became the first English language writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. He wrote novels, poems, and short stories, mostly set in India and Burma during British rule. His ashes are now at rest at Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner in London.

4 PHILOSOPHER, mathematician, prolific writer and controversial figure Bertrand Russell, below, received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. He was a leading figure in the campaign for of nuclear disarmament and once explained that “science is what you know, philosophy is what you don’t know”.

5 DOROTHY HODGKIN is the only British woman to ever win a Nobel Prize for the sciences. The pioneering female Fellow of the Royal Society was awarded the prize for chemistry in 1964 for her work on protein crystallography. An asteroid was also named Hodgkin in her honour in 1984 and she has also featured on British postage stamps... twice.

6 PLAYWRIGHT Harold Pinter, below, found fame with productions like The Birthday Party and The Caretaker and wrote the screenplays of movies like The Servant, Sleuth and The Go-Between. The Londoner’s work was honoured with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005 and it was followed with the French Legion d’honneur two years later.

7 PHILIP NOELBAKER is the only person to have won both an Olympic medal and a Nobel Prize. The Labour politician and nuclear disarmament campaigner, who later became Baron NoelBaker, won a silver medal in the 1500m race at the 1920 Olympics and added the Nobel Peace Prize in 1959. He co-founded the World Disarmament Campaign in 1979.

8 WRITER of The Forsyte Saga, John Galsworthy, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932, but was too ill to attend the presentation ceremony and died of a brain tumour seven weeks later at the age of 65. He requested in his will that his ashes be scattered from a plane over the South Downs.

9 NEW Zealand-born British physicist Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron of Nelson, below, is known as the father of nuclear physics. His work led to him being awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908 and he went on to split the atom in 1917. He once said: “All science is either physics or stamp collecting.”

10 SIR JOHN POPLE shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Walter Korn in 1998 for work in developing computational methods in quantum chemistry. He said at time of the award: “No member of my family was involved in any scientific or technical activity. Indeed, I was the first to attend a university.”