America's Nobel success is the story of immigrants

If it were not for Bob Dylan – the singer, songwriter and now Nobel laureate – 2016 would have become the first year since 1999 without a Nobel winner born in the United States.

Since World War II, the U.S. has dominated the four research Nobels (in medicine, chemistry, physics and economics).

U.S. academic institutions attract, welcome, embrace and ultimately benefit from the best intellectual talent from all corners of the world.

[...] many other countries are trying hard, though less successfully, to replicate the U.S. experience.

Writing about his journey from his native Egypt to U.S. academia, Zewail describes how he was embraced by all the universities he was part of – whether as a student at University of Pennsylvania, as a postdoc at University of California, Berkeley or as a professor at California Institute of Technology.

Michelson’s parents had immigrated to the United States from Strzelno in then Prussia, now Poland, when he was only two years old.

Since its inception in 1901, the Nobel Prizes and the Prize in Economic Sciences have been awarded 579 times to 911 people and organizations.

[...] if it were to be a category of its own, immigrants to the U.S. who won the Nobel, would would come second only to the U.S.-born laureates group.

The point is the global movement of intellect and ideas is often necessary and perhaps central to the creation of knowledge and production of great research.