born : 1911
birth place
 San Francisco, Calif.

Radio distance and direction indicator Alvarez was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1968. He helped design a ground-controlled radar system for aircraft landings and with his son developed the meteorite theory of dinosaur extinction. (1978)

died: 1988

Astronaut
Born: 10/8/1959
Birthplace: Lima, Peru

Astronaut Carlos Noriega had a distinguished career as a Marine Corps pilot before venturing millions of miles beyond planet Earth. A mission specialist and computer scientist, Lieutentant Colonel Noriega has visited Mir and helped to assemble the International Space Station.

 In 1910 he was appointed Professor of Physiology in the University’s School of Veterinary Medicine. During this, he had been doing hospital practice and, in 1913, became Chief Physician at the Alvear Hospital. In addition, he was in charge of the Laboratory of Experimental Physiology and Pathology in the National Department of Hygiene from 1915 to 1919. In 1919 he became a Professor of Physiology in the Medical School at Buenos Aires University. He organized the Institute of Physiology at the Medical School, making it a center with an international reputation. He remained a Professor and Director of the Institute until 1943. This year the Government then in power removed him from his post because of his opinion that there should be effective democracy in the country. Although receiving many invitations from abroad, he continued his work in an institute that he organized with the support of funds contributed by the Sauberan Foundation and other bodies. It was the Instituto de Biología y Medicina Experimental (Institute of Biology and Experimental Medicine) where he remains Director. In 1955 a new Government reinstated him in the University. 

 He has worked in almost every field of physiology, having a unique interest in the endocrine glands.

 Dr. Houssay is the author of over 500 papers and several books. He has won many prizes ranging from the National Academy of Sciences, Buenos Aires, in 1923, to the Dale Medal of the Society of Endocrinology (London) in 1960.

 He holds honorary degrees from twenty-five universities and is a member of the Argentine National Academy of Medicine, the Academy of Letters, the National Academy of Sciences of Buenos Aires, the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences of Buenos Aires, and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He is an honorary professor of 15 universities, a foreign associate of 11 academies or learned societies, member (honorary or correspondent) of 38 Academies, 16 Societies of Biology, 11 of Endocrinology, 7 of Physiology, and 5 of Cardiology. He has a lot of awards from the governments of a lot of countries. One of which was the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1947. He married Dr. Maria Angelica Catan, a chemist, and they have three sons, Alberto, Hector, and Raul. Bernardo Houssay died on September 21, 1971, in Argentina.

Source: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1947/houssay/facts/

From 1913 to the end of 1925, Alvarez practiced internal medicine in San Francisco and conducted research at the University of California, Berkeley. He lived at 3837 Clay Street raising his family. In 1934 he became Professor of Medicine at the University of Minnesota (Mayo Foundation) and later served as Consultant in Medicine Emeritus.

His father was Luis F. Alvarez, who worked as a physician in California and Hawaii and developed a method for the better diagnosis of macular leprosy. His sister was California artist and oil painter Mabel Alvarez.

Alvarez was married to the former Harriet Skidmore Smythe^[1] and the couple had four children: Gladys, Luis, Robert and Bernice. Luis later became a Nobel Prize-winning physicist.

His grandson is Walter Alvarez, a Professor of Geology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Beginning after his retirement in 1951, Alvarez began writing a medical column which soon became syndicated throughout North America in hundreds of daily and weekly newspapers. The Walter C. Alvarez Memorial Award is named in his honor and is presented to a member or nonmember of the American Medical Writers Association to honor excellence in communicating health care developments and concepts to the public. He is most notable for his enlightened approach to homosexuality and his efforts to educate the medical profession and the broader public about the topic. He is regarded as an ally of the homophile movement in the 1950s-1970s.

Alvarez' syndrome, a syndrome of hysterical or neurotic abdominal bloating without any excess of gas in the digestive tract,^[2] and Alvarez-waves, painless uterine contractions occurring during the length of pregnancy,^[3] are named after him.

Alvarez was the first to investigate electric activity of a stomach and, thereby, became the founder of a new diagnostic gastroenterology branch — electrogastrography.^[4]

Alvarez was a deacon in a Congregational church.^[5] He died in California in 1978.^[6]

His personal papers are held by Lane's Archives and Special Collections.^[7]

Proud of his Jewish heritage and always up for adventure and activism, Milstein fondly recalled his "most unusual and romantic honeymoon" with his wife, Celia, whom he met at a political meeting in Buenos Aires. After they completed their undergraduate studies, the two spent 1953 hitchhiking around Europe and working for several months on kibbutzim in Israel.

Following his mother's death of a heart attack at the age of 70, Milstein learned that he had inherited her cardiovascular condition and dramatically changed his lifestyle in middle age, sticking to a regimen of strict diets and long, daily walks for the last twenty-five years of his life. On March 24, 2002, he died in Cambridge, England, at the age of 74.

After receiving his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1936, Alvarez went to work for Ernest Lawrence at the Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. Alvarez devised a set of experiments to observe K-electron capture in radioactive nuclei, predicted by the beta decay theory but never before observed. He produced tritium using the cyclotron and measured its lifetime. In collaboration with Felix Bloch, he measured the magnetic moment of the neutron.

In 1940, Alvarez joined the MIT Radiation Laboratory, where he contributed to a number of World War II radar projects, from early improvements to Identification friend or foe (IFF) radar beacons, now called transponders, to a system known as VIXEN for preventing enemy submarines from realizing that they had been found by the new airborne microwave radars. The radar system for which Alvarez is best known and which has played a major role in aviation, most particularly in the post war Berlin airlift, was Ground Controlled Approach (GCA). Alvarez spent a few months at the University of Chicago working on nuclear reactors for Enrico Fermi before coming to Los Alamos to work for Robert Oppenheimer on the Manhattan project. Alvarez worked on the design of explosive lenses, and the development of exploding-bridgewire detonators. As a member of Project Alberta, he observed the Trinity nuclear test from a B-29 Superfortress, and later the bombing of Hiroshima from the B-29 The Great Artiste.

After the war Alvarez was involved in the design of a liquid hydrogen bubble chamber that allowed his team to take millions of photographs of particle interactions, develop complex computer systems to measure and analyze these interactions, and discover entire families of new particles and resonance states. This work resulted in his being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1968. He was involved in a project to x-ray the Egyptian pyramids to search for unknown chambers. With his son, geologist Walter Alvarez, he developed the Alvarez hypothesis which proposes that the extinction event that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs was the result of an asteroid impact.

Hernández was assigned to the crew of Space Shuttle mission STS-128. He also served as chief of the Materials and Processes branch of Johnson Space Center. Hernández previously developed equipment for full-field digital mammography at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

In October 2011, Hernández, at the urging of President Barack Obama, ran for Congress as a Democrat in California's newly redrawn 10th congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives.^[3] He won the Democratic nomination, but lost the 2012 general election to freshman incumbent Representative Jeff Denham.

Hernández is the subject of the 2023 biopic A Million Miles Away in which he is portrayed by Michael Peña.^[4][5]


Hernández was born in French Camp, California, but calls Stockton, California, his hometown. His family is originally from La Piedad, Michoacán, Mexico.^[6][7] In an August 25, 2009, conversation with President Felipe Calderón of Mexico, Hernández stated that as a child, he lived half the year in La Piedad and half in the United States.^[7] As a child, Hernández worked alongside his family and other farmworkers throughout the fields of California, harvesting crops and moving from one town to another. He attended many schools and didn't learn to speak English until he was 12.^[8][9] His first memory of space is about adjusting the television in order to watch the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.^[10]

José Hernández participated in Upward Bound during high school, a Federal TRIO program that prepares students for college. He graduated from Franklin High School in Stockton. While in college, he was involved in the Mathematics, Engineering, Science Achievement (MESA) program, an academic preparation program that provides support to students from educationally disadvantaged backgrounds so they can attain four-year degrees in science, technology, engineering or math (STEM) fields.

He earned a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of the Pacific in 1984. In 1986, Hernández earned an M.S. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara