Figure 5: Medicine Nobel Prizes 1901-2009:
Evolution of cumulative national shares by citizenship at the time of the award.
The vertical width of a nation's colored
band at each year measures its percentage of all Medicine Prizes
up to that year (image height = 100%).
Germany took the lead in 1901;
the UK caught up in 1902,
Denmark in 1903,
Russia in 1904;
then Germany alone led until
1953 (not as long as in the birth-based ranking, due to
brain drain effects);
then the US took over.
From Evolution of National Nobel Prize Shares in the 20th Century,
Jürgen Schmidhuber, 2010. PDF. HTML.