Once a year, Nobel Laureates meet in the historical town of Lindau in Lake Constance to present lectures and discuss with graduate students. It is a unique, traditional meeting brought into being by the late Count Lennart Bernadotte in 1951 after the turmoil of World War II, with a view to bringing German university trainees back into the international community of scientific research. The book presents brief reports on more than 130 lectures and 15 panel discussions held by altogether a hundred individual Nobel Prize winners in Physics, Chemistry, or Medicine, which they presented on scientific topics of their own choice during the ten Lindau Meetings from 1996 to 2005. The reports were taken down in writing by an experienced observer of scientific meetings, interested in grasping the messages communicated by the Laureates. In the second part of the book, the author briefly describes how every Laureate has contributed through his discovery or pioneering studies to the advancement of knowledge in prominent areas of current scientific research. This review sets out the context of the scientific topics chosen by the Laureates for their lectures.

Wolfgang Hebel was born in Duisburg, Germany, in 1934. He is married to Eleonore Schilling, and they have two children and four grandchildren. Following his studies of thermodynamics and nuclear engineering at the Technical University Darmstadt, Germany, he worked with the LURGI Companies in Frankfurt/Main from 1959-1963. Joining EURATOM in 1963, he was delegated to the Nuclear Research Centre (CEN-SCK) at Mol, Belgium, for 17 years. From 1981-1996, he was scientific coordinator with the Research Directorate of the European Commission in Brussels, first, in charge of nuclear waste management, and later, for ten years, responsible for the preparation of new EU research initiatives in fundamental research. Following his retirement in 1996, he lives in Tervuren near Brussels. Wolfgang Hebel has published more than 30 scientific reports and studies, initially on nuclear research, and later on specific trends in fundamental research, in particular regarding molecular biology and the molecular processes of life. Most recently, for more than twenty years, he has attended numerous advanced research meetings in the European region, including the yearly Nobel Laureate Meetings in Lindau, Germany.