“It’s a dream come true,” said Lu-Jing Hou, who studies dusty plasmas at China’s Dalian University of Technology. That sentiment was echoed by many of the more than 500 graduate students who converged with 16 Nobel Prize winners on the resort town of Lindau, Germany, for a week in June. It was the 54th Meeting of Nobel Laureates, which rotates every three years among the fields of physiology or medicine, chemistry, and physics. Hou added that he was “amazed at how easy it is to see students from all over the world.”
The first gathering of laureates in Lindau took place in 1951 with the express intent of rebuilding scientific bridges in central Europe after World War II. Since the second meeting, students have been invited to attend, mainly as a reward for outstanding academic performance. The originators were two Lindau physicians and a local member of the Swedish royal...
