The Nobels, wealth of immigration

An American researcher has looked at the origin of Nobel Prize winners to show the contribution of immigrants to American society.

(Washington) A little less than a century ago, the United States drastically tightened its criteria for immigration from Europe. However, the children and grandchildren of immigrants who benefited, until 1924, from the open-door policy represent a third of American Nobel Prize winners for medicine.

Herself the granddaughter of impoverished Polish and Ukrainian immigrants (and Italian great-grandparents), biologist Lynn Caporale wanted to dig deeper into the subject. She presented the results of her research at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which took place in early March in Washington.

“I live in New York, where I constantly see the richness of immigration, at least on the cultural level. I became interested in it and decided to see how the costs and benefits of immigration could be calculated. Studying the Nobel Prizes seemed to me a good way to do this analysis. I was very surprised to see the magnitude of the impact of immigrants on American science, through this Nobel study. »

In 1890, 8% of foreign-born Americans were from Southern or Eastern Europe. In 1910, this proportion rose to 39%, in particular because of the pogroms affecting the Jews in Poland and Russia. An isolationist America was concerned about this and, in 1924, restricted immigration from these regions. The number of Italian immigrants then fell from 200,000 to only 4,000 per year.

“Immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were often poor, with very little formal education, and they spoke no English,” says Ms.^me Caporale, who had a career in the pharmaceutical industry before focusing on Nobel Prize winners from immigration.

The first Nobel generally went to Europeans. From the 1920s, Americans began to count for Nobel juries, but it was not until the 1940s and 1950s that the United States was on par with the Old Continent.

“And since then, the vast majority of Americans have won the Nobel Prizes,” said Ms.^me Corporal. And nearly a hundred American Nobel recipients, a quarter of the total, either arrived as children or have foreign-born parents or grandparents. In the case of the Nobel Prize in Medicine, it is one third. In a large majority of cases, they are descendants of the impoverished wave of European immigration from the 1890s to 1924, when 20 million foreigners immigrated to the United States. »

The lessons

According to M^me Corporal, this means that immigration fears are wrong about the contribution – or cost – of these newcomers to the United States.

There was no social safety net in the 1920s and 1930s, whereas now the poorest in the United States have access to programs like Medicaid or food assistance (food stamps). Is it possible that the immigrants of that time were more driven to surpass themselves because of the threat of poverty?

“I don’t think people who have left everything are people who sit around and complain about their fate, explains M^me Corporal in interview. I think the ideal government assistance for them is to connect them with available jobs. My personal experience is that the immigrants I meet today are not lazy, unlike many other people who sit on their sofas watching snarky TV commentators gossip about immigrants. »

M^me Caporale has published two books on the sidelines of his pharmaceutical career. The Implicit Genome celebrates the beauty of genes and their components, while Darwin in the Genome explains how natural selection uses genetic mutations.

The contribution of some American Nobel Prize winners from immigration commented by Lynn Caporale

• Stanley Cohen, medicine, 1986, grew up in New York in a family of Russian Jews. “No less than 12 anti-cancer drugs are derived from his discovery of epidermal growth factors. »
• Robert Lefkowitz, chemistry, 2012, grew up in New York in a family of Polish Jews: “The third of drugs approved by the FDA [agence réglementaire américaine] involve the G protein identified by Lefkowitz. »
• Joseph Goldstein, medicine, 1985: “The statins that revolutionized the treatment of cholesterol would not have seen the light of day without Goldstein’s work on cholesterol metabolism. »

The a b c of the Nobel

Alfred Nobel (1833-1896) is the inventor of dynamite. She allowed him to make a fortune. The Swedish chemist bequeathed his fortune to the foundation that bears his name, which since 1901 has honored great scientists, as well as a literary personality and another who has honored himself by working for peace. The jury for chemistry and physics is the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, while for medicine the choice is made by the Karolinska Institute, a Swedish medical university.