"My son, the . . . ."

I've been listening to a series of lectures about the history of 20th-century science, which has now reached the career of Niels Bohr.  The lecturer claimed that Bohr was the only person ever to have won both a Nobel Prize and an Olympic Gold Medal.  Alas, the wonderful factoid is not quite true.  His brother Harald was on a team that took a silver medal in soccer, and apparently Niels sometimes played with the same team, but not in the Olympics.  Still, it suggests an impressive well-roundedness.  If nothing else, you have to imagine that Mrs. Bohr had plenty of tidbits to drop into conversations with her friends about what her sons were up to these days.

It turns out that Nobel laureates who won other prestigious prizes generally have received Nobel Peace Prizes or literary prizes rather than straight science prizes.  George Bernard Shaw, for instance, had to find room on his mantel for a Nobel Prize in literature as well as an Oscar (1938, Pygmalion, best adapted screenplay). Philip Noel-Baker, a British diplomat, won both the 1959 Nobel Peace Prize and a 1920 Olympic silver medal in track. Charles Gates Dawes, who was vice-president to Calvin Coolidge, won a 1925 Nobel Peace Prize after writing a tune in 1912 that ultimately was recorded as a number-one pop hit in the U.S., "It’s All In The Game.” George Smoot won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics after winning $1 million on TV's "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth-Grader," but that's not cross-training, strictly speaking.