In the parent case he's talking about 'academic' families, instead of biological families (academic meaning that the 'parent' is the academic advisor of the 'child'). Of course, having several members of the same family all receive Nobel prizes is quite exceptional (and I believe unique to the Curie family).

I really like the German word for PhD advisor, Doktorvater (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doktorvater), which reflects this "family" aspect so well. I wonder if other languages have similar nice terms for this concept. BTW, Wikipedia says Doktormutter is also sometimes used.

Sorry, didn't know about that. And yes, the Currie family is exceptional but according the the Wikipedia link there are several husband/wife or father/son combos that received the same prize.

Hate to be the spelling nazi here, but it's the second time you misspell Curie as Currie.

Wow sorry about that, thanks for the correction. I'm going to defend myself by saying I'm at work and I just reply quickly between two tickets.

My usual excuse is that English is my "first language".

Wow, that list was much larger than I expected, it seems that P(nobel | nobel in family) is orders of magnitude larger than P(nobel). It would be interesting to do a similar analysis for other prizes, e.g. Fields Medal, to see if a similar effect of motivation in the family exists in other domains.