It has been a good year for British brains, which make up half the recipients of Nobel prizes in 2016 to date (the economics prize will be announced on Monday, while the literature prize comes later in the year).
British trio David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz received the 2016 physics prize, while Sir Fraser Stoddart shared in the chemistry prize, helping to boost the number of awards the UK has received in these categories to 23 and 24 respectively.
The highest proportion of UK winners is in the field of physiology or medicine, among them the Scottish-born John Macleod (1923) for his joint discovery of insulin and his fellow Scotsman Sir Alexander Fleming (1945), who shared the prize with two others after he accidentally discovered penicillin.
A total of 98 Britons are now on the list of Nobel prize winners, a tally second only to the US, which has had 258 Nobel laureates to date.
Indeed, such is the success of the US that it has had more Nobel prize winners than any other country in every category other than literature.
Germany has had 80 Nobel laureates, with 24 awards in both chemistry and physics. The most famous German winner is, of course, Albert Einstein, who was awarded in 1921 “for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect”.
