universities consistently perform extremely well in all global rankings of academic institutions. Foreign graduate students flock to the United States. In 2015, more than half the computer science, engineering, mathematics, and statistics graduate students were international students. Most of these students return to the countries of their birth upon completing their graduate studies, but a significant number of the very best stay in the United States and become naturalized citizens. In a disturbing trend, the NSF reports that the number of international graduate students coming to the United States dropped by 22,000 (5.5 percent) in 2017.[18] Inside Higher Education reports that the high cost of US higher education, visa denials and delays, the political and social environment in the United States, and increasing competition from other countries are responsible for this decrease.[19] Had the proposed tax on graduate fellowships passed Congress (it barely failed in 2017), the decrease would surely have been greater than just 5.5 percent. In 2018, the number of international students dropped again, especially in universities in the central parts of the United States and at lesser ranked universities. The numbers of students coming from Canada and Mexico also declined.[20]
What will this drop in international STEM graduate students, often the best from their countries, mean to science research? This change in demographics does not bode well for science in the United States. We need to be careful we don’t lose touch with this very important talent pool. Not only do immigrants contribute to an inordinately high number of Nobel awards, but they also bring new ways of thinking to their research labs. They come from other cultures and have learned their science in different educational systems, which place different emphases on rote learning, historic understanding, and interdisciplinary research. They often bring an alternative and important perspective that a homogeneous scientific community cannot match.
Women in Science
Between 1901 and 2019, there were 213 Nobel awardees in physics, 184 in chemistry, and 219 in medicine. Over that period women were only awarded 3 Nobel Prizes in physics, 5 in chemistry, and 12 in medicine.
Donna Strickland was awarded the 2018 Nobel physics prize with her PhD mentor, Gérard Mourou. Strickland was the first woman to be awarded a physics prize in 55 years. At the University of Rochester, Strickland and Mourou together developed the most intense and shortest laser pulses ever produced in a laboratory. Mourou had the idea, and Strickland made it work. Besides being an impressive scientific advance, their technique has resulted in high-intensity lasers that have been used in millions of corrective eye surgeries.[21] Ironically, Donna Strickland wears glasses and refuses to get the laser eye surgery that her research made possible: “I have great faith in lasers, but no one’s putting one near my eye.”[22]
Many women could have, and probably should have, been awarded a Nobel Prize in physics. The Guardian published a 2018 article titled “Five Women Who Missed Out on the Nobel Prize.”[23] Lise Meitner, who laid the groundwork for understanding nuclear fission, is my favorite of these. An element, meitnerium, was named for her posthumously. She is the only woman to have earned such an honor (curium is named after both Marie and Pierre Curie). But no Nobel. Both Lise Meitner and Jocelyn Bell, who discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967, missed the Nobels while their male collaborators, Otto Hahn (1944) and Anthony Hewish (1974), were each honored with an award. Lene Hau, a physicist at Harvard University, is another woman mentioned in the Guardian article. In 1999, her team was able to slow a beam of light to 17 meters per second, which she topped in 2001 by stopping a beam of light completely. This work has implications for quantum computing and quantum encryption. Hau’s work is fairly recent, so she may yet get a Nobel Prize.
There can be no denying that just three women in 213 physics Nobel laureates is a disproportionately low number and that many distinguished and immensely qualified female physicists must have been overlooked. But is this a big deal? Yes, of course it is. It is grossly unfair to the women who didn’t get the award and sends the wrong message to young people, funding agencies, editorial boards, and others about who does noteworthy science. Perhaps much more important, it is indicative of many biases and inequities that plague women and minorities in science.
In 2008, I served as a consultant for the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ deliberations about the chemistry award; as a result, my wife and I were invited to attend the Nobel ceremonies. We stayed in the Grand Hotel with all the awardees. We got to see how scientists, excellent but unknown outside their fields, suddenly became superstars. They were interviewed on radio and television and hobnobbed with Swedish royalty. The events of Nobel week were shown live on Swedish television, and the newspapers were atwitter about the clothes worn by the Swedish princesses at the awards ceremony. Nobel laureates immediately become role models who are invited to give seminars all around the world. In an interview with Nature magazine, Donna Strickland, was asked how her life had changed since being informed that she had won the award. She said, “Oh, completely! This is just completely crazy, you know; I got to talk to the Prime Minister of Canada for the first time ever. He was very nice about it. I said, ‘This must be how your life is like all the time.’ And he replied, ‘No, I don’t always get to speak to a Nobel laureate.’”[24] Her answer shows the stature the prize imparts and why women Nobel laureates are such important role models.
Because only 3 percent of the science awardees have been women and there have been no black winners, there are very few role models for the new generation. The entertainment industry is no help; media depictions of male scientists and engineers outnumber those of women by a ratio of 14 to 1.[25] Frances Arnold, winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize for chemistry, had a guest appearance on The Big Bang Theory. She was the first woman scientist to make a guest appearance in 12 seasons of the show. If we want to solve our climate change problems, cure Alzheimer’s, expand our economies, and so forth, we can’t afford to completely ignore a large proportion of the population. In the words of Virginia Valian, who has spent the past 25 years studying the structural and psychological reasons for the paucity of women in the upper reaches of science, “If we want talent, we have to welcome it and nurture it, in all its diversity.”[26]
Nomination to receive a Nobel Prize in science or medicine is by invitation only. Each year, thousands of members of academies, university professors, scientists, previous Nobel laureates, members of parliamentary assemblies, and others are asked to submit candidates for the Nobel Prizes for the coming year. The names of the nominees and other information about the nominations cannot be revealed until 50 years later.[27] Despite this confidentiality, we know that nominations tend to favor scientists working at elite research institutions, famous scientists who are good at self-promotion and are well known to their peers. Predictably, these tend to be older, established white males. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, for chemistry and physics, and the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute, for medicine, are in charge of selecting the Nobel winners from the nominations. They are aware that they have a “white male problem,” and starting with the 2019 nominations they have asked nominators to consider diversity in gender, geography, and topic in their future nominations. It didn’t work. There were no female awardees in physics, chemistry, or medicine at the December 2019 Nobel award ceremonies.
“The Leaky Pipeline”
The disproportionately low number of female Nobel laureates in the sciences and the absence of black science laureates is an extreme example of the “leaky pipeline” in science. The NSF coined the phrase for this phenomenon in the 1980s. It comes from a report in which the NSF also predicted an upcoming shortage of scientists and engineers that would grow to over 500,000 by 2006. The shortage never materialized, but the metaphor stuck. It presents a vivid visual image of women and people of color entering the sciences but then “leaking out of the pipeline” at greater rates than white males as they progress along their educational and career paths. This pipeline should lead to awards and board memberships in science, the ultimate being the Nobel Prizes, but the number of women and people
