In recent weeks, EL PAÍS contacted most of the Nobel Prize winners in Physics, Chemistry, and Medicine from the United States over the past 20 years with a questionnaire about Donald Trump’s policies on science, research, and health. The vast majority are established researchers — some even retired — who should not fear retaliation; but only a handful of them agreed to respond.

“Why am I sad?” writes Roald Hoffmann, winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. “We came to the U.S. when I was 11. Even as my parents could not work making full use of their training and talents, the country gave their child, me (and my sister, born here), a chance to get an education and to do wonderful research with talented coworkers from all over the world. If the Trump policies are carried through, the full flow of what I experienced will be very unlikely in the generation of my scientific grandchildren.”

Hoffmann was born in Poland in 1937 and bears the surname of his stepfather. His father, Hillel Safran, was a Polish Jew murdered by the Nazis in 1943 for organizing a rebellion in the concentration camp where he was imprisoned. Most of his family also perished in the Holocaust. In 1949, after several years living in refugee camps in Austria and Germany, Hoffmann, his mother and stepfather managed to emigrate to the United States.

This theoretical chemist won the Nobel Prize for clarifying how chemical reactions take place while he was a researcher at Cornell University, which, along with Harvard and other Ivy League institutions, is now facing Trump’s multimillion-dollar cuts. “Aside from the effect on science,” explains Hoffmann, “we are seeing democracy attacked from the top down, but more importantly, a general endorsement of bullying, incivility, and illegal action. Also, an erosion of many steady years of encouragement for minority populations and immigrants that we all valued.”