Just watching an old episode of The West Wing wherein it is mentioned that Jed Bartlett was a Nobel Prize winner in Economics before running for President.
In real life, excluding Peace Prize winners, have there been any Nobel winners who have subsequently had a successful policitcal career? Pardon my [can’t think of the word, it’s not Xenophobia], but I would like to have the answers in two seperate categories – “United States” and “Rest of the World”.
PS – What’s that word?
JohnW77707
Well Linus Pauling got the Nobel in chemistry in 1954, and then picked up the peace prize in 62 for his disarmament work. If you don’t intend to limit your criteria for political success to whether or not the guy became a senator, I’d say that the nuclear test ban treaty was a mighty big feather in Pauling’s cap.
Ethnocentrism, maybe?
Harold Varmus (Physiology and Medicine, 1989) became the head of the National Institute of Health, which (among other things) decides who gets most of the billions of dollars the government allots to biomedical research annually. That’s still a scientist job, but it’s certainly quite political.
Francois Mauriac became the French Minister of Culture after winning the literature prize. Also in France, Frederic Joliot, who shared the 1935 chemistry prize with his wife, became a significant figure on the Left during and after WWII.
And I suppose it depends what you mean by “subsequently had a successful political career”; Churchill was Prime Minister and Yeats was an Irish Senator when they received their Nobels.