American Scientists Claim Majority Of This Year’s Nobel Prizes

The Nobel prizes in the sciences have been awarded for 2021, and this year’s recipients in the three fields recognized by the award - Physics, Chemistry, and Physiology/Medicine - once again reflect the prominence of U.S. universities. Of the seven winners, four are currently affiliated with an institute or university in the U.S.

In his 1895 will, Alfred Nobel, the Swedish polymath and inventor of dynamite, bequeathed the majority of his estate to create five prizes (the three cited above plus one in literature and one for peace), recognizing “those, who during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.” The first awards were conferred in 1901. A sixth award, not technically a Nobel, was established in 1968; it’s the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

In 2020, the Nobel Foundation’s Board of Directors increased the Nobel Prize amount to 10 million kroner (equal to a bit more than $1.1 million) per prize category.

Between 1901 and 2021, over 600 awards have been awarded to more than 900 individuals. The awards are international, so there has always been an interest in the academic affiliations of the Nobelists because those associations shed light on which academic institutions have helped cultivate these groundbreaking discoveries.

The Prize in Physiology/Medicine

On Monday, the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institute awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for their discoveries concerning temperature and touch receptors. Their work has led to increased understanding of how our nervous system senses heat, cold, and mechanical stimuli. It has implications for the treatment of many disease conditions, such as chronic pain.

• David Julius earned his B.S. from MIT and his Ph.D. in 1984 from the University of California. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University, in New York before joining the University of California, San Francisco in 1989, where he is now professor and chair of the Department of Physiology and holds the Morris Herzstein Chair in Molecular Biology and Medicine. Julius is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Science and has won numerous honors and awards, including the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience (2020), the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2019), and the Canada Gairdner International Award (2017).
• Ardem Patapoutian earned his B.S. in molecular biology from UCLA in 1990 and his Ph.D. in 1996 from the California Institute of Technology. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco. Since 2000, he has been at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California where he now holds the rank of professor. He has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator since 2014.

The Prize in Physics

The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded Tuesday to three scientists "for groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex systems." One half of the award was given jointly to Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann "for the physical modelling of Earth's climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming" and the other half went to Giorgio Parisi "for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales."

• Syukuro Manabe earned his doctoral degree from the University of Tokyo. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Manabe is now senior meteorologist in the Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at Princeton University.
• Klaus Hasselmann, a leading oceanographer, received his Ph.D. in 1957 from the University of Göttingen, Germany. He has held appointments at a number of research institutions in the U.S., including Scripps and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. He is now a professor emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany.
• Giorgio Parisi, received his Ph.D. in 1970 from Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. A highly decorated physicist, Parisi Giorgio Parisi initially worked as a researcher at the INFN Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati and in 1981, became professor of theoretical physics at the University of Rome II, Tor Vergata. He is now professor of quantum theories at the University of Rome I, La Sapienza.

The Prize in Chemistry

The 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded Wednesday to Benjamin List and David W.C. MacMillan. The two were recognized for devising a new method to build molecules, a task that requires catalysts, the substances that control chemical reactions without themselves becoming part of the final product.

Traditional catalysis has relied on the use of metals and enzymes. List and MacMillan, working independently, developed a new kind of catalysis, called organocatalysis, which uses small, organic molecules that allows the process to be cheaper and better for the environment than the traditional methods.

• Benjamin List is a German chemist who serves as Director of the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research. He studied at the Free University of Berlin and earned his doctorate at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. Between 1993 and 2003, he was at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. In 2003 he moved to Max Planck.
• David W. C. MacMillan was born in Scotland.  He earned his B.Sc. from the University of Glasgow in 1991 and his Ph.D. from the University of California-Irvine in 1996. He joined the faculty at Princeton University in 2006, where he served as chair of the chemistry department from 2010 to 2015. He holds the title at Princeton of James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Chemistry.

The Influence of American Scientists and Universities

A Wikipedia entry on the topic of which universities had the most individual laureate affiliations through 2020 showed that eight of the top 10 were U.S. institutions (in order: Harvard, Cambridge, University of California Berkeley, University of Chicago, MIT, Columbia, Stanford, California Institute of Technology, Oxford, and Princeton). Among the universities ranked 11-20, U.S. institutions make up half of them.

The average American should care a great deal about the preeminence of our universities in the history of the Nobel prizes. To start with, they confirm the fact that American research universities are still collectively the best in the world. The discoveries made by scientists at U.S. universities have changed our lives. They’ve made the world safer, healthier, and more prosperous.

But more than that, the Nobel’s annual celebration of world-class research reaffirms the importance of science, which in our current political climate, needs all the respect and support it can get. Anti-intellectualism, dismissal of expertise, and the favoring of fads and foolishness are surging in America, most tragically revealed by the millions of American who continue to ignore and even belittle the scientific consensus about Covid-19 and the effectiveness of vaccines.

The Nobel prize is a reminder of the importance of science and the brilliant men and women who do the work. It’s to our nation’s lasting benefit that so much of that excellent research continues to take place at American universities despite the forces of ignorance that are arrayed against it.