President Donald Trump will not have a personal meeting with American Nobel Prize laureates before they get their prizes in December, according to Stat News.
A White House spokesman cited the president’s two-week trip to Hawaii and Asia as why Trump will not host a meeting with the prize winners in person. The White House will send Michael Kratsios, Trump’s top appointee in the Office of Science and Technology, to meet the recipients instead, according to the report.
The White House has hosted an event in honor of Nobel recipients almost every year since 2001, the report said.
Former president George W. Bush attended the event every year except 2006, when Vice President Dick Cheney greeted the prize recipients instead. Former president Barack Obama hosting a meeting each year of his presidency except for 2009, when the president himself was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, the Stat News report said.
Two American Nobel Prize winners told Stat News that they would not have attended an event with Trump if invited. "I will not put my foot into the White House as long as Trump, Pence, or Ryan, (i.e., the possible succession of impeachments) will occupy it," said Joachim Frank, a chemistry Nobel Prize recipient, referring to Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis.
"I cannot speak for the others; don’t know them personally yet, but I strongly believe that as thinking, intelligent people they will have a similar attitude as I," Frank added, according to the Stat News report.
Americans who were awarded Nobel Prizes in 2017, in addition to Frank, are physicists Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish, and Kip Thorne; geneticists Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash, and Michael W. Young, and economist Richard Thaler, according to the Nobel Prize website.
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