University of California faculty and alumni won five Nobel Prizes this week, highlighting the ongoing contributions of America’s #1 public research university and the central role of federal funding in advancing world-changing scientific inquiry.
Photo credit: Fred Ramsdell / Creative Commons
The next day, UC Berkeley emeritus professor John Clarke, UC Santa Barbara emeritus professor John Martinis and UC Santa Barbara professor Michel Devoret won the physics prize for experiments that underpin today’s most powerful quantum computers.
Photo credits, left to right: UC Berkeley, Jeff Liang/UC Santa Barbara, Harold Shapiro/Yale University
And on Wednesday, UC Berkeley professor Omar Yaghi shared the chemistry prize with scientists in Australia and Japan for creating a new kind of super-absorbent molecular architecture that can clean pollutants from the atmosphere or harvest drinking water from bone-dry desert air.
Photo credit: Elena Zhukova for UC Berkeley
For much of the past century, no other nation on earth has matched the U.S.’s strategic investment in science. That has done a lot to make America the most prosperous nation on Earth and led to longer and easier lives here and around the world. And it has made the U.S. a global magnet for brilliant, motivated young scientists from every corner of the globe.
“This whole history isn’t just about the money, but the ambition behind it,” said UC Santa Barbara science historian W. Patrick McCray. “The United States built big particle accelerators, big research vessels, big telescopes. Those were all attractive things for people in other countries to come here to get their degrees, and then maybe stay and start a company that builds U.S. prosperity.”
Competing for federal science funding “allowed us, and challenged us, to not just do rigorous science, but also creative science,” said Yaghi, who grew up in Jordan in a home without electricity before moving to the U.S. for college. As his audacious ideas took shape early in his career, Yaghi said federal grants “were absolutely key in enabling me to go off in my own direction, away from whatever was happening in chemistry in the mainstream. I wanted to do something completely different and these grants allowed me to do it. So federal grants played a major role in the initial discoveries that led to this amazing field.”
America’s scientific leadership faces unprecedented threats
And yet now the very system that has powered decades of world-changing scientific discovery, here at UC and in thousands of academic and government labs across the country, is at risk.
Throughout 2025, the federal government has canceled or delayed thousands of research grants to hundreds of U.S. universities. While funding for many of UC’s projects has been restored, the interruptions and uncertainty have plagued research that is poised to deliver vital new knowledge, including studies of aging, addiction, obesity, maternal and fetal health and Alzheimer’s disease. And the federal government is considering further cuts to science funding in its budget for the coming year. This year, the Trump administration sent a budget request to Congress calling for deep cuts to federal science agencies — in some cases by up to half.
“This is going to cripple science, and it is going to be disastrous if this continues,” said Clarke in an interview this week. Regardless of what Congress decides about the coming year’s budget, the disruptions that government and academic labs have already experienced will reverberate for a long time. “It may take a decade to get back to where we were, say, half a year ago,” he said.
Speak up for science
This year’s Nobel Prizes are a proud reminder of what America’s federally funded scientists can accomplish. But none of this year’s winners will tell you that their work is done — and right now, brilliant young scientists in university labs across the country are asking the next big questions in quantum computing, immunology, chemistry and countless other important fields.
That’s why the University of California is leading a movement of citizens, students and scientists in mobilizing to send a resounding message to America’s elected leaders: It’s time to reinvest in U.S. scientific leadership.
