American Leadership in Science, Measured in Nobel Prizes
The United States has won more Nobel prizes for physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, and economics since World War II than any other country, by a wide margin (it has been less dominant in literature and peace, two awards that are much more broadly distributed among nations). At least one American has won a prize each year since 1935 (excluding the years 1940 through 1942, when no prizes were given out). And the United States became dominant after a very slow start: no American won a science prize in the first six years of the prize’s existence.



The United States is also unique in the scale on which it attracts human capital: of the 314 laureates who won their Nobel prize while working in the U.S., 102 (or 32%) were foreign born, including 15 Germans, 12 Canadians, 10 British, six Russians and six Chinese (twice as many as have received the award while working in China). Compare that to Germany, where just 11 out of 65 Nobel laureates (or 17%) were born outside of Germany (or, while it still existed, Prussia). Or to Japan, which counts no foreigners at all among its nine Nobel laureates.

Note how abruptly scientific leaders can become followers: in the first decades of the 20th century, when Heidelberg and Freiburg were at the center of the academic universe, Germany won more Nobel prizes than any other country: 38 between 1901 and 1931, outpacing the U.S. by a factor of two and a half. But Nazism and the Second World War decimated Germany’s academic apparatus, and the U.S. recruited many of its best scientists. Between 1950 and 1980, Germany won just 16 Nobel prizes. The United States took 117.

A note about my methodology: I made this graphic by scraping data from nobelprize.org, which lists both birthplace and current affiliation (at the time of award) for most, but not all, recipients. In cases where the site lists current affiliation, I used that to locate laureates (a German-born professor working at the University of Chicago when he won the prize would thus be listed under the United States). That’s consistent with the spirit of my argument: other countries may produce future laureates, but they end up in the U.S. by the time they win. In cases where affiliations were not listed (mostly for literature and peace prizes), I used birth country to place the laureate in the graphic. The lines from United States through Russia represent the seven countries with the most Nobel laureates, in order. I added Japan and China to the graphic, skipping some countries with more prizes, because they exhibit interesting acceleration trends.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonbruner/2011/10/05/nobel-prizes-and-american-leadership-in-science-infographic/