At first glance, this year's crop of Nobel prizes came out quite nicely for the United States. Americans, after all, swept the prizes in medicine, physics, chemistry and economics. But a closer look suggests room for improvement. Americans dominate in the "easy" sciences—fields where it is comparatively less difficult to establish consensus—but lag in the arguably more complex realms of advancing culture and establishing peace.
The Nobel for Medicine went to Andrew Fire of Stanford and Craig Zire of University of Massachusetts for their work on RNA interference; the Nobel for Physics went to John Mather of NASA and George Smoot of UC, Berkeley, for "their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation"; the Nobel for Chemistry went to Roger Kornberg of Stanford "for his studies of the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription" and Columbia University professor Edmund Phelps won the Nobel in Economics for his work on the relationship between employment and inflation.
In fields where it is more difficult to establish consensus, by contrast, the two winners were from non-western developing countries. Orhan Pamuk of Turkey won the Nobel for Literature, for "discover(ing) new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures." And the Nobel Peace Prize went to Muhammed Yunus, the Bangladeshi architect of micro-credit programs for his "efforts to create economic and social development from below."
Decoding the forces driving cultural differences or alleviating poverty, it turns out, is far more difficult than, say, advancing our understanding of the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription. The last Americans to be recognized by the Nobel Foundation in these "hard" subjects were Peace laureate Jimmy Carter in 2002 and Literature winner Toni Morrison in 1993.
Louis Goodman is Professor and Dean of the School of International Service at the American University.
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