He grew up in a family of Palestinian refugees in Jordan. His one-room home, filled with eight siblings, their parents and cows, lacked electricity and running water. Early on, a schoolbook’s depiction of atomic building blocks caught his eye. When he was 15, his father, a butcher, sent him to study in the US.
Now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Omar Yaghi, 60, was recently honoured at a ceremony in Stockholm with a Nobel Prize in chemistry.
Yaghi’s story is not unusual. Of the six American winners of science Nobels this year, three were born outside the US. In this century, the emigre fraction of US Nobels in physics, chemistry and medicine now stands at 40 per cent.
The nation’s long history of scientific feats, exemplified by Nobels, helped build a number of trillion-dollar companies in Silicon Valley as well as the world’s most dynamic economy and its wealth of social benefits, economists say.
Some experts warn that the policies of the Trump administration have put that bounty in jeopardy. By putting “America First”, they say, an era of US prosperity could come to an end as the pipeline for legal immigrants, foreign students and visiting researchers dries up.
Yaghi voiced that concern, too, before flying to Stockholm. President Donald Trump’s policies, he said in an interview, endanger the US ecosystem of scientific excellence.
Lisa Gilman, director of George Mason University’s Institute for Immigration Research in Massachusetts in the US, described the “America First” approach as a path to national decline. “These policies are literally blocking the talent pipeline,” she said. “If this continues, we’re going to lose our standing as the world leader in science and innovation.”
For the better part of a century, the US’s traditional vigour and openness made it a magnet for immigrants who at some point in their careers — often many decades after their arrival — won Nobels.
Katalin Kariko, born in Hungary in 1955, grew up in a small home that had no running water, no refrigerator and no television set. Curious about science, she studied hard and moved to the US in her 20s. For decades, she never found a permanent job in academia but instead worked on its fringes. In 2005, Kariko and Dr Drew Weissman made a discovery that turned out to be a potent counter punch to deadly viruses. Their finding led to one of the most effective Covid-19 vaccines. In 2023, they won a Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.
Leo Esaki was a 1973 laureate from Japan; Ivar Giaever, a 1973 laureate from Norway; Herbert Kroemer, a 2000 laureate from Germany; and Willard S. Boyle, a 2009 laureate from Canada. All worked in the US at the time they were awarded Nobel Prizes.
These thinkers cast light on quantum mechanics — the laws that rule the subatomic realm. They found that tiny particles known as electrons could jump from one material to another, that layers of dissimilar materials could improve the targeting of such jumps and that semiconductors could detect particles of light. This final stride led not only to digital cameras but also to supersensitive detectors for spy satellites and space telescopes.
The chips enriched not only Silicon Valley but distant industries: the tiny circuits went into cars, jets, cellphones, toys, TV sets, video games, medical devices and a surprising range of other products. Globally, experts estimate the gains at trillions of dollars and millions of jobs.
Yaghi’s bright idea was more abstract but, like those of his numerous fellow laureates, conjured visions of commercial spinoffs.
Yaghi and his team created metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs. Made of metal atoms, these can hold organic molecules associated with life.
His structures can, for instance, harvest water from desert air. In 2018, Yaghi’s students tested a version of a water harvester that used an MOF in California’s Mojave Desert, producing nearly three cups of pure, drinkable water each day. The device is now nearing commercialisation.
Sharing in the Nobel Prize in physics this year were John M. Martinis and two US immigrants: Michel H. Devoret from France and John Clarke from England. Their experiments four decades ago are seen as advancing the emerging fields of quantum cryptography, quantum computers and quantum sensors.
Officials in Trump’s administration argue that science in the US can excel without immigrants. Stephen Miller, architect of the Trump administration’s immigration policy, argued in a social media post that a time of decreased US immigration in the middle of the 20th century coincided with “unquestioned global scientific dominance”.
Historians disagree. They note, for instance, that a wave of immigrants helped the nuclear age zoom ahead. At least five won Nobel Prizes while working at American institutions.
Felix Bloch was a 1952 laureate from Switzerland; Emilio Segrè, a 1959 laureate from Italy; Maria Goeppert Mayer, a 1963 laureate from Germany; Eugene Wigner, a 1963 laureate from Hungary; and Hans Bethe, a 1967 laureate from Germany.
These immigrants cast light on the inner structure of the nucleus, its forces, its reactivities and new ways to harness its colossal energies.
“This kind of thing is a gift and not something we should take for granted,” said Doug Rand, an official in the Obama and Biden administrations who now runs a philanthropic fund that helps immigrants find jobs. “We should make things easier, not harder.”
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