Kai M. Siegbahn, the son of a Nobel physics laureate, himself won the Nobel Prize in physics for his development of electron spectroscopy for chemical analysis (ESCA). This reliable technique reveals many more details about the atomic and molecular structure of matter than was previously possible to determine. Siegbahn's electron spectroscopy soon became widely used around the world in scientific and industrial research labs.

Siegbahn was born to Karl M. G. Siegbahn and Karin Högbom Siegbahn on April 20, 1918, in Lund, Sweden. His father was a lecturer in physics at the University of Lund and the director of the Nobel Institute for Physics of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for nearly thirty years. The elder Siegbahn's discoveries and research in x-ray spectroscopy won him the 1924 Nobel Prize in physics. About growing up with such a role model, Kai Siegbahn was quoted in Newsweek as saying, "It's...