A prize for the foreign‐born

There are no simple yardsticks to measure the contribution of foreign-born scientists to the biomedical research enterprise in America. Ideally, we should be able to take a listing of all papers in the life sciences originating from laboratories located in the U.S. and published in the last twenty or thirty years, and then let a computer figure out what percentage of the authors listed on these publications was born outside the U.S. Of course, this is not a realistic option because publications do not reveal the places of their authors’ births. To get some objective measure of the contribution of foreign-born scientists to U.S. biomedical research, we analyzed the list of all Nobel Prizes in Medicine and Physiology awarded between 1901 and 2005 (1, 2). The total number of winners and co-winners of this prize from the U.S. is 87. (Parenthetically, there is a much higher proportion of Americans among the winners after 1950 than in the first half of the 20th century: we counted a total 11 U.S. winners between 1901 and1949, and 76 between 1950 and 2005. This is undoubtedly a reflection of the growing importance of the U.S. biomedical research enterprise after World War II.) For the purpose of our analysis, it is noteworthy that at least 27 of the 87 American Nobel Prize winners—over thirty percent—were born outside the U.S.! This count includes individuals who were not U.S nationals but lived permanently in this country at the time they had produced the work for which they received the Nobel Prize (e.g., the immunologist Susumu Tonegawa, who is usually considered Japanese, the Italian biologist, Rita Levi-Montalcini, and Swedish-born Torsten Wiesel). Not included in the count are Nobel Prize winners who had moved to this country after completion of the work for which they were honored. The latter category includes Albert Szent-Györgyi, the Hungarian-born discoverer of vitamin C, who had received the Prize in 1937, but moved to the U.S. in 1947. Other examples are Sir Paul Nurse, the British 2001 Nobel Prize recipient who has recently become President of The Rockefeller University in New York City, and the immunologist Peter Doherty, co-recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize for work done in Australia in the early 1970s, who subsequently moved to the U.S. With the latter individuals included, more than one in three Nobel Prize