The Molecule of More

THE MOLECULE OF MORE

by the Institute for Immigration Research at George Mason University,
between 1901 and 2013 the United States received 42 percent of all
Nobel Prizes awarded, the  highest of any  country in  the  world. More-
over, a disproportionate number of American Nobel laureates have
been immigrants. The top three countries they came from were Can-
ada (13%), Germany (11%), and the United Kingdom (11%).
The United States continues to attract immigrants from all over
the world, and the immigrant population continues to include a high
proportion of extraordinary individuals. Some of the most important
companies of the new economy were founded by immigrants, including
Google, Intel, PayPal, eBay, and Snapchat. As of 2005, 52 percent of
Silicon Valley start-ups had been founded by immigrant entrepreneurs,
a  remarkable figure in  light of the  fact  that  immigrants make up  only 
13 percent of the U.S. population. The country that provides America
with the greatest number of technology entrepreneurs is India.
In the book Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and
Will Define Our Future, the authors report that in 2006, foreign nation-
als living in the United States were listed as inventors or co-inventors
on  40  percent of all  international patent applications filed  by  the  U.S. 
government. Immigrants also  file  the  majority of patents by  leading 
technology companies: 60 percent of the total at Cisco, 64 percent at
General Electric, 65 percent at Merck, and 72 percent at Qualcomm.
Immigrants don’t just launch technology companies. From nail
salons, restaurants, and dry cleaners to the fastest-growing companies
in America, immigrants start a quarter of all new businesses in the
United States—about twice as many per capita as other Americans.
And looking at entrepreneurship broadly, we can come full circle and
find a direct link to dopamine.
A group of researchers led by Nicos Nicolaou of the Entrepreneur-
ship & Innovation Enterprise Research Centre at the Warwick Business
School recruited 1,335 people in the United Kingdom and asked them
to  fill  out  a  questionnaire on  entrepreneurship and  to  provide a  blood 
sample for DNA extraction. The average age of the volunteers was 55
years and 83 percent were women. Nicolaou found a dopamine gene
that came in two forms (alleles), identical except for one single building