Africa and the Nobel Prizes Why do the continent's sons excel outside of it?

The winners of the 2026 Nobel Prizes in Science were announced this week, with the prizes in Medicine, Physics and Chemistry going to 6 scientists from the United States, Germany , France and Japan, none of whom are African.

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However, Kluge was born in Lithuania and moved to South Africa with his parents when he was three, according to Britannica. As for Baoundi, Nature Middle East describes him as being of Tunisian origin, born in Paris , and having spent his early childhood in France and then Tunisia, before completing his studies and research in the United States.

Most of these researchers conducted their research outside the continent. Zewail, who was born in Damanhur, received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Alexandria University, then his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in 1974. Two years later, he joined the California Institute of Technology, and won the prize for developing a fast laser technique that allows monitoring the movement of atoms during chemical reactions, according to Britannica.

Brenner studied at the University of the Witwatersrand, then Oxford, and spent 20 years at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, where he used a nematode worm as a model for studying animal development.

He trained in London, then moved to Harvard University in 1922, and later to the Rockefeller Foundation laboratories in New York in 1930, where he continued his Nobel Prize-winning research on yellow fever. Alboundy is currently employed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology .

Tanoudji, along with his colleagues at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, developed laser-assisted atomic cooling techniques. Harouch's family left Morocco in 1956 at the end of the French occupation, and he later worked at the same school.

Cormac began his research in X-ray computed tomography (the scientific basis of "scanner" devices) at the University of Cape Town and Groote Schuur Hospital in early 1956, before moving the following year to Tufts University in the United States.