What an irony is in the AP story that Matt Moore and Louise Nordstrom filed from Stockholm and that ran two days ago, summing up the red white and blue bunting draped so prominently on this year’s set of Nobel Prizes (which was written before the Economics Prize, to two more Americans). The Tracker is proud, and relieved too, to see the U.S. maintaining its claim as the most research-rich nation on Earth. Maybe not per capita, and I just say that because perhaps some smaller nations do better on that score, but I suspect we can even puff our chests a bit on that metric.

Moore and Nordstrom count, as of their writing, that 9 of the 11 winners in science categories plus diplomacy/peace are American. Period: American. But Elizabeth Blackburn in medicine is getting home-girl treatment in Australia. Fiberoptics guru in physics Charles Kao has both British and US citizenship – and was born and now resides in China. CCD-co inventor Willard Boyle is Canadian by birth, has dual citizenship, and lives in Nova Scotia. In chemistry, ribosome decipherer Venki Ramakrishnan  was born in India and, while he did much of this prize winning work here,  lives in Cambridge England – and attracted plenty of ink in the Indian media as one of theirs.

The irony is of course that among the literally All-American winners is President Obama, with a Peace Prize he must now further, one hopes, vindicate.  He also is a man targeted by a few of his less cerebrally competent co-All-Americans in this grand land as a closet Nigerian or otherwise undocumented alien. That takes some of the polish off any thought that Americans are, with all those shiny gold medals, particularly smart top to bottom.

For all that, the theme and hed on this story (US lead in danger? Nobels tell a different story) holds up quite well.

But yet….

Perhaps, one can apply the polar bear rule. Just because there are plenty of bears out there today does not mean they’re safe, given the shrinking sea ice. In that vein, there are some ominous signs. As an Old Blue (Cal alum), one might point to the column, Cracks in the Future,  by Bob Herbert that ran a week and a half ago in the NYTimes. It laments the huge chunks ripped from UC Berkeley by politicians looking everywhere to evade their reponsibilities in the custodianship of California’s finances. He mentions Nobel prizes, and calls the spectacle of UC, and Berkeley particularly, as an “ominous crack .. in American civilization.”

Still and again:  here’s to all the winners, including in particular those with US passports but also blessed with complicated roots and identities.

*UPDATE: See how, at CBC’s Quirks & Quarks radio show, host Bob McDonald handled gracefully the two Canadian winners of Nobel Prizes, who as he says are at least men “with a strong Canadian connection.”

- Charlie Petit

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 at 12:29 pm and is filed under Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.