The readiness of Nobel prizewinners to hold forth on almost any subject is jokingly referred to as Nobel’s disease, but an unusual reticence has prevailed in recent months. As the biggest crisis in US scientific funding in living memory has unfolded, laureates have mostly been quiet.
That was often the case at the annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, held earlier this month: the largest gathering of Nobel laureates since Donald Trump took office in January. “I’m sorry…I just don’t want to go there,” explained one US-based laureate when asked by 糖心Vlog about the likely impact of Trump’s plans to
“I can’t comment on Trump – my colleague was deported from the US after making some critical social media comments. I can’t make myself a target,” explained a Europe-based laureate.
That reticence, even among people with the exalted stature of Nobel prizewinners, is understandable. Trump is famously vindictive towards those who cross him, and his administration has incarcerated and deported international students and postdocs who have made critical comments about Trump or about the crackdown on pro-Palestinian protests on US campuses during the previous academic year. And Trump’s attempts to cancel Harvard University’s grants and ability to enrol international students illustrate that prestige is no guarantee at all of lenient treatment.
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Indeed, of the US-based delegates among the hundreds of early-career chemists gathered on the shores of Lake Constance on the Swiss-German border to meet with the 35 laureates in attendance, many had tales of foreign-born colleagues who had turned down the all-expenses-paid trip to Europe because they feared they would be unable to return home?owing to the scrutiny that US immigration officials are paying to historical social media postings.
“I’m really embarrassed by the US right now, and apologetic,” explained one American delegate, adding: “I’m also furious.”
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One question on which some Nobelists were willing to break cover, however, was a simple one: will Trump’s actions lead to fewer future Nobel prizes for US-based scientists?
Apart from fomenting a nationalistic and repressive political atmosphere, Trump’s second administration has also undertaken a series of actions that have a very direct negative bearing on universities, academics and students.
For instance, the executive’s budget request to Congress would slash the spending power of the National Science Foundation (NSF) by 57 per cent and of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by 40 per cent. The administration has already slashed those agencies’ headcounts and cancelled swathes of existing research projects and clinical trials on subjects it dislikes, such as climate change. And it has cut all federal research funding allocated to several leading institutions, including Harvard University.
In addition, the government has incarcerated and deported of people whose social media posts it disapproves of, including and , and US embassies have as the administration gears up to screen the social media history of all applicants.
Frances Arnold, who won the Nobel Prize?in?Chemistry in 2018 and was chair of Joe Biden’s science and technology advisory council for four years, did not need much persuading to comment. “If you look at who has won the Nobel prize in the US, a large fraction of them come from overseas. These scientists come to make their careers in America, but we are chasing these people away,” the professor of chemical engineering at the California Institute of Technology told THE. “Why chase away brilliant young people whose countries have invested huge amounts in their education? Many brilliant Chinese students are not applying to us any more and great European universities will welcome them instead.”
The contribution of immigrant scientists to the US’ historical dominance of the Nobel prizes is indisputable. According to (NFAP), immigrants accounted for 115 of the 319 (36 per cent) Nobel prizes won by US-based scientists in chemistry, medicine and physics between 1901 and 2023 – and 40 per cent of those awarded since 2000. In 2021, for instance, in those categories were immigrants. And immigrants also have been awarded (24 out of 78) of the Nobel prizes won by Americans in economics, including 28 per cent since 2000.
Given the typical 20-year lag between a Nobel-worthy discovery and the awarding of the prize, however, it will be tricky to work out whether the actions of the 45th?president damage the country’s Nobel-winning prowess until long after he has left office, Arnold observed. However, “The loss we experience will be felt much sooner – the new companies that immigrants might have founded won’t be there, and the new technologies and drugs they’d have invented won’t be there either. Of course, it’s hard to miss what isn’t there, but there will be an impact,” she said.
Others agreed. “Many Nobel prizewinners based in America are immigrants, so if you [as a country] become less attractive for young scientists to come and do research, the chances of winning a Nobel go down,” said Johan Deisenhofer, a German biochemist who to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 1988 – the year he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Asked if he would advise young scientists to move to America in the current climate, Deisenhofer advised that “it would be wise to wait a little. But it’s difficult for scientists at this stage of their career to sit and wait.”
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In David MacMillan’s view, many young scientists have probably decided already that the US is not for them. “It’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to come to America given what they’re seeing on the news,” reflected the Glasgow-born chemistry laureate, who moved to Los Angeles for his PhD at the University of California, Irvine.
“The way the world perceived America when I was 20 was so different – we saw the sunshine and glamour on TV, plus exciting things like American football. It was mesmerising,” said MacMillan, who is now professor of chemistry at Princeton University. ?“My generation’s take was America was the place to go – that the American dream was real and, with some luck, I could be its poster child.”
Asked whether he would have moved to America in the current climate, MacMillan responded that the most apposite question was “whether I’d have attempted to apply at all. I wrote 19 letters to US universities asking about PhD study and, luckily, one of them responded. Would I have written 19 letters today?”
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Still, he is optimistic that the US can put things right. “One of the great qualities of America is problem-solving – if things are going in the wrong direction, people find a way to put things back on the right track,” he said.
Of course, political climate is not the only issue that young scientists consider when deciding where to establish their careers, and some laureates are not convinced that, by itself, it will be a veto on heading stateside.
“I’ve just heard a professor from California complaining his institution pays postdocs only $80,000 (?59,200) a year. Even discounting the cost-of-living premium there, it’s massively more than in the UK,” reflected University of Cambridge biochemist John Walker, who won the chemistry prize in 1997. “UK science funding is no great shakes, so I’m sceptical that we’ll see American scientists – or top scientists from elsewhere – flooding the coasts of Britain,” he said.
But others think that a financial perspective overlooks the severity of what’s happening in America. “From personal experience, I know it can take 20 years to build a world-class lab but [only] two years to tear it down,” said one Nobel laureate, who wanted to remain anonymous. “America has perfected the art of bringing together the best people and giving them the right infrastructure – now they are defunding science and spending their research money on exploding SpaceX rockets in hope of going to Mars,” he added. “If the US continues down this path, it will be somewhere between a Third?World country and a developing nation in 20 years.”
Other predictions about America’s social trajectory are even bleaker. “Half the population is armed to the teeth and once the economic miracle promised by Trump is exposed as a lie, I can see things turning ugly,” said one Nobelist, who did not want to put his prediction of impending civil war on the record.
Even the most relentlessly positive Nobelist is finding his optimism challenged. “I always say the present moment is the golden age of science,” explained Martin Chalfie, the Chicago-born Columbia University professor who won the chemistry prize in 2008. “But if clinical trials stall and research can’t continue, there are consequences,” he warned. “If this bill to reduce funding to the NIH that is currently going through is passed, that will cause major problems.”
The same was true for the NSF, he added. “We’re very much in a state of flux but seeing grants terminated for National Science Foundation researchers is a very grim situation,” he said, condemning what he sees as “research being held hostage to politics” in the case of Columbia, whose federal research funding has been despite its in March to far-reaching government demands to address alleged antisemitism on campus; the suspension is aimed at enforcing the government’s demand that Columbia pay significant compensation to Jewish students and staff for alleged civil rights violations during last year’s pro-Gaza campus encampment.
Another US-born laureate, Steven Chu, is also struggling to see any points of light in the current situation. “If this persecution of US universities continues for 10 years, we might see something similar to the Cultural Revolution in China,” said Chu, whose MIT-educated parents after 1946, when Mao Zedong took power. Noting the persecution of intellectuals in Mao’s China that peaked in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Stanford University professor, who won the Nobel Prize?in Physics in 1997 and later served as Barack Obama’s energy secretary, reflected that, following Mao’s death in 1976, it took China 50 years to “establish itself as a force in science”.
Indeed, several Nobelists noted that the rise of China and other countries as scientific powers was already threatening the US’ Nobel dominance even before Trump came along.
“The rest of the world is catching up very quickly, with China, in particular, establishing themselves as important scientific players,” said Greg Winter, the Cambridge-based biotech researcher and entrepreneur, who won the chemistry Nobel in 2018. “Any effect [from Trump] will take 20 to 30 years and it might have happened anyway.”
Industry’s growing willingness to lavish huge salaries on research talent will also have a detrimental effect, said Jack Dongarra, winner of the 2021 Turing Prize, often described as computer science’s Nobel. “We’re seeing tremendous interest from industry in taking young academics in our field and using them for developing artificial intelligence,” said Dongarra, emeritus professor of computer science at the University of Tennessee. “With fewer resources to go around, my concern is the trend will continue towards commercial applications of research, rather than more open science where Nobels have come from,” he said.
But Dongarra also recognised the major potential impact on the science talent pipeline of Trump’s slashing of the science budget – not merely on overseas scientists’ decisions about whether to relocate to the US but on American scientists’ decisions about whether to emigrate.
“Universities need young people willing to go into science – if budgets are cut in half, they won’t be there. Maybe some will stay in the US to make their career, but I can see many going to Europe,” he said.
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Of course, none of these warnings are likely to persuade the US president to change direction. Yet it is a grim irony that an individual who professes to want to make America great, and who is reportedly obsessed with winning a Nobel prize of his own (the peace one), is making it so much harder for US-based scientists to attain the ultimate mark of greatness.
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