Tonia Janofsky, age 13, of Buffalo, N.Y., for her question:
WHO WAS ALBERT SCHWEITZER?
Albert Schweitzer has been called one of the greatest Christians of the modern age. He was a brilliant German philosopher, physician, musician, clergyman, missionary and writer on theology.
Schweitzer's accomplishments in any one of the many fields in which he specialized could be regarded as a full life's work for one ordinary man. But Schweitzer was not an ordinary man.
Early in his career, Schweitzer based his philosophy on what he called "reverence for life" and on a deep feeling of obligation to serve his fellow man through thought and action. His many years of work as a humanitarian won for him the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize.
Schweitzer was born in 1875 and educated in both German and French. At the age of 21 he decided to spend his next nine years in science, music and preaching, and then to devote the rest of his life to serving humanity directly.
Before he was 30 year old, Schweitzer became principal of St. Thomas Theological College at the University of Strasbourg. He was inspired to become a medical missionary and studied medicine from 1905 to 1913 at the university.
Schweitzer decided to raise money for a hospital at Lambarene in French Equatorial Africa, which is now Gabon. He raised some of the money by giving concerts for the Paris Bach Society, an organization which he had helped to found.
In 1913, Schweitzer started his long years of service at Lambarene. His first consulting room at his jungle hospital was a chicken coop.
Over the years Schweitzer built a large hospital and a medical station where thousands of Africans were treated yearly. He designed all of the buildings himself. He used his $33,000 Nobel prize money to expand the hospital and to set up a leper colony.
Schweitzer visited the United States in 1949 to speak at the Goethe Bicentennial Convocation at Aspen, Colorado.
In 1923, Schweitzer completed the first two volumes in his monumental work, "The Philosophy of Civilization." These books are "The Decay and Restoration of Civilization" and "Civilization and Ethics."
His other works include "The Quest of the Historical Jesus," which was published in 1906, "Out of My Life and Thought," which he wrote in 1931, and the 1939 book "From My African Notebook."
In 1955, Queen Elizabeth II conferred Great Britain's highest civilian award, the Order of Merit, on Schweitzer.
In 1957, Schweitzer went on record as opposing further atomic weapons tests because of the danger of radioactive fallout to mankind.
Schweitzer died in 1965 at the age of 90.