Gunnar Oquist, Permanent Secretary of the Royal Academy of Science, left, and Per Carlson, Chairman of the Nobel Committee, announce the Nobel Prize winners in physics in Stockholm, Tues., Oct. 3, 2006. Americans John C. Mather and George F. Smoot won the physics prize for work that helped shed more light on the beginning of the universe and the origin of galaxies and stars. Credit: AP Photo/Bertil Ericson
Last week, Uncle Sam stormed Sweden and, to paraphrase a classic piece of viral Internet media, decreed: All your Nobels are belong to us. For the first time since 1983, all the 2006 Nobel laureates in science are Americans. The Nobel sweep—in which American researchers claimed the medicine, physics, and chemistry prizes—highlights a striking juxtaposition in American science: While the U.S. towers over its global peers at the highest levels of science, in terms of elementary and secondary education, we're lagging far behind. With a corroded pipeline of homegrown talent, many of the country's scientific elite worry that this could be one of the last American Nobel three-peats.
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On Monday, Oct. 2, Stanford University's Andrew Z. Fire and Craig C. Mello of the University of Massachusetts won the physiology or medicine prize for their work on RNA interference. They discovered that a strand of double-stranded RNA corresponding to a certain gene can enter a cell and, once there, silence the corresponding gene. The mechanism, called RNA interference, is useful for controlling viruses, which can be disabled by interference, and gene expression: A recent study proved that in animals, a gene known for causing high cholesterol could be silenced via RNA interference.
Tuesday, Oct. 3, John C. Mather of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and George F. Smoot of the University of California, Berkeley took home the physics prize for their work measuring cosmic background radiation, a relic of the Big Bang. Using a NASA satellite, the pair measured the temperature distribution of the electromagnetic radiation emitted just after the beginnings of the universe. They also detected small variations in temperature in the cosmic background, confirming that galaxies and stars would have been able to form in the infant universe.
Then, on Wednesday, Stanford's Roger Kornberg, whose father won a physiology or medicine Nobel in 1959, snagged the chemistry award for his detailed description of transcription in eukaryotes, organisms whose cells have nuclei. Kornberg created a crystallographic picture of the process, in which DNA is transcribed into RNA for transport out of the nucleus. This process is disrupted in both cancer and heart disease.
"How fitting that Alfred Nobel made his fortune in dynamite," Stephen Colbert remarked on "The Colbert Report" Wednesday night, "because America is blowing every other country out of the water!"
The U.S. can claim a total of 232 science Nobelists, out of the 513 recognized since the prizes were first bestowed in 1901. Since 1950, the U.S. has truly dominated the field, racking up 202 science Nobels.
"Nobel Prizes are not entirely new to America," said Norman Augustine, the retired CEO of Lockheed Martin, who chaired a 2005 National Academies of Sciences report that helped alert the U.S. government to America's dwindling competitive edge in the sciences. "But the trends are all in the wrong direction."
Over the past 10 months or so, a steady stream of distressing numbers and facts has created alarm about the future of American science: A recent study found that out of 39 countries surveyed, American 15-year-olds placed 27th in math literacy. In a measure of science literacy among high school seniors, the U.S. placed 42nd out of 44 countries. According to a 2002 poll by the National Science Foundation (NSF), only half of the American public knows that dinosaurs and humans never coexisted or that atoms are larger than electrons.