How free the sciences are is measurable. A 2012 article by Jon Bruner, who long served as an editor and data analyst at Forbes and O’Reilly, has lost none of its poignancy in light of the current science budget cuts under the Trump administration and its war on universities, foreign students, environmental agencies and medical research.
In an infographic, he broke down the Nobel Prizes by category and year, as well as the country in which the respective winners were located when they received the call from Oslo and Stockholm. Of the 314 U.S.-based Nobel Prize winners, 102 (32 percent) were not born in the United States. Since 1935 (with the exception of the years 1940-1942, when no prizes were awarded), at least one American has always won a Nobel Prize. Americans dominate the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine and economics.
What is interesting here are the changes over time, which are very clear for Germany. Before 1935, Germany (and Austria) dominated the Nobel Prize ranks until the USA began to dominate when the National Socialists came to power. And this was thanks to the expelled and refugee scientists who found a new home in the USA and, above all, generous funding for science, as well as the freedom to determine their own fields of research. Between 1935 and 1953, there was not a single Nobel Prize winner in physics working in Germany, and there was also a dry spell in medicine between 1939 and 1956.
The Nazis’ racism, hatred of Jews and hostility towards science not only meant the loss of top scientists and artists, but also had a direct impact on the course of the war. The number of European scientists involved in the development of the atomic bomb turned out to be decisive for the outcome of the Second World War.
Hostility to science leads to an economic and military weakness that is difficult to make up for.
A study from 2018, conducted by Prof. Claudius Gros from the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Goethe University, shows the trends over the years. On the timeline, you can see the curves for selected countries and how many Nobel Prize winners per year this country has received. Citizenship was used as a criterion. Germany’s dominance in the fields of chemistry, physics and medicine decreases from more than 1.6 Nobel Prizes per year at the beginning of the First World War and then levels off at just under 0.25 Nobel Prizes per year from the 1960s onwards.
What is interesting is the slump that the United Kingdom suffers from 1975 onwards. From an average of one Nobel Prize winner per year to a tenth in just a short period of time is dramatic. Under the government of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, funding for basic research was drastically cut from 1979 onwards because the government felt it was of little importance to industry and the economy. Eight years later, however, the Thatcher government realized its mistake and began to promote basic research again. However, the reverberations lasted longer. Once the research structures had been destroyed, the loss of trust in the government by the research community and the laborious rebuilding process proved to be veritable obstacles.
Over 20 percent of Nobel Prize winners have been Jewish, even though they make up only 0.2 percent of the world’s population. Jews make the greatest contribution to STEM subjects worldwide.
The current approach of the US government under Trump is showing the first signs of a reversal. American and foreign scientists are either leaving the country voluntarily or are being forced to do so. The tightening or even complete halt to the issuing of student and research visas is also having a cooling effect on the influx of scientists from all over the world. In addition, many research funds have been cut, especially in the fields of social sciences, climate research and medicine. The widespread redundancies in many of these authorities are also having a negative impact, as is the appointment of ministerial posts to staff who are not only unqualified but also ideologically cloaked and simply moronic, who believe in conspiracy theories and are hostile to science. And the deliberate withholding of research funding from top universities such as Harvard, which resembles a personal battle by the government against such institutions, does not make the situation in the sciences any better.
If the historical events in Nazi Germany and under the Thatcher government in the UK are anything to go by, the Trump administration’s hostility to science will not only have an impact on the number of Nobel Prizes awarded to the USA in the coming years, it will also weaken the country economically and militarily. To the detriment of the USA itself and the world.