Charles John Pedersen (, Yasui Yoshio, October 3, 1904 – October 26, 1989) was an American organic chemist best known for describing methods of synthesizing crown ethers during his entire 42-year career as a chemist for DuPont at DuPont Experimental Station in Wilmington, Delaware, and at DuPont's Jackson Laboratory in Deepwater, New Jersey. Often associated with Reed McNeil Izatt, Pedersen also shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1987 with Donald J. Cram and Jean-Marie Lehn. He is the only Nobel Prize laureate born in Korea other than Peace Prize laureate Kim Dae-jung. Early life and education Born on October 3, 1904, in Busan, Korea, Charles J. Pedersen was the youngest of three children. His father, Brede Pedersen, was a Norwegian marine engineer who immigrated to Korea in order to join the Korean customs service after leaving home due to family issues. Later, he worked as a mechanical engineer at the Unsan County mines in present-day North Korea. His Japanese mother, Takino Yasui, immigrated from Japan to Korea with her family and established a successful line of work by trading soybeans and silkworms located close to the Unsan County mines, where the couple ultimately met. Although not much is mentioned about his elder brother, who died of a childhood disease before Pedersen was born, he had an older sister named Astrid, who was five years older than him. In Japan, he used the Japanese given name Yoshio (良男), which he spelled using the kanji for "good" and "man". According to Pedersen in a separate autobiographical account of his childhood, he had been born prior to the Russo-Japanese War and because his mother had still been grieving over the then-recent death of his older brother, he did not feel welcomed as a child. Despite living in what is now South Korea, because Pedersen lived in the vicinity of the American-owned Unsan County mines, which spanned approximately 500 square miles in area, he grew up speaking primarily English. At around 8 years old, Pedersen was sent by his family to study abroad in Nagasaki, Japan and then later transferred to St. Joseph College in Yokohama, Japan. After successfully completing his education at St. Joseph College, due to the close ties his family had with the Society of Mary (Marianists), Pedersen decided to attend college in America at the University of Dayton in Ohio. While spending his undergraduate life in 1922 studying chemical