The Nobel Brain Drain: Where Nobel Laureates Were Born and Where They Were Working When They Won, 1901 to 2026

I compare the birthplaces of Nobel laureates with their affiliations at the time of the award, using the official Nobel Prize API for people, prizes and affiliations and Wikidata for coordinates. Of 760 prizes in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine and economic sciences from 1901 to 2026 with both a present-day birth country and an affiliation, 237 (31%) went to people working outside their birth country, a share that has stayed between 24% and 38% in every decade. The United States is the only large net gainer: 402 prizes were won by people working there and 271 by people born there, a net gain of 131; 34% of its prizes went to people born abroad, and it received 57% of all prizes won outside the laureate's birth country. Germany took 31% of prizes up to 1932 and 7% since 1933; 10% of German-born laureates up to 1932 were working abroad, against 49% since. Japan rose from 5 science laureates in the twentieth century to 22 since 2000, most of them working in Japan. Nine of the ten institutions with most prizes are American. Women won 3.8% of prizes to people before 1960 and 20% in the 2020s so far. Affiliation at the award is not always where the winning work was done, and birth country is not nationality; I report both caveats with the results. Interactive version: https://maps.tristanhotham.com/nobel-brain-drain/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/nobel-brain-drain. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/31/nobel-brain-drain/. Data: Nobel Prize API v2.1 (Nobel Prize Outreach; the downloaded file carries no licence statement, see the terms of use on nobelprize.org); Wikidata (CC0); Wikipedia, List of Nobel laureates by university affiliation (CC BY-SA 4.0, used only as a cross-check); Natural Earth (public domain).