In Stockholm on Tuesday, the United States will once again lay claim to a bumper crop of Nobel Prizes. Of the 11 laureates in the natural sciences and economics, nine hail from American universities. As the winner of the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, I will proudly represent the one public institution in that group: UC Berkeley.

Why should it matter that public universities are underrepresented in Nobels compared with private institutions? Public institutions educate 70 percent of our college and university students, yet suffer from greatly diminished support from state governments, particularly in California, not to mention dwindling investment in federal funding for scientific research.

The race to space initiated by Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy led to a substantially increased federal investment in science and science education in the 1960s. In California, Gov. Pat Brown and UC President Clark Kerr created a master plan for higher education that included the construction of new campuses large enough for the children of working- and middle-class families to enjoy the nation's finest educational opportunities.

I was a direct beneficiary of that investment. As a freshman at UCLA in 1966, I learned about molecular chemistry from Willard Libby, the Nobelist who invented carbon-14 dating of ancient biological materials. I worked a summer job and earned enough to cover my fees, room and board and books for the full year. My father paid next to nothing to send five children through college. At least 80 percent of the University of California budget at that time was covered by the state, compared to a meager 10 percent today.

Our great public universities continue to educate the majority of our nation's future scholars, scientists and engineers, but the nature of that education has regrettably evolved from a public good to a private commodity, funded to an alarming extent by burdensome personal debt. Where will the resources come from to invest in science and research so those students can continue to have a first-class education on par with what they would receive at a private institution?

The United States flourishes due to a unique mix of public and private universities that are the envy of the world. I have remained a faculty member here at UC Berkeley for more than 37 years, in part because public universities are the most effective engine of social mobility in our society. Nobel Prizes reflect only a small aspect of an imbalance between the publics and privates, but the disparate investment favoring the privates is real and represents a challenge to the health of our nation's scientific and democratic enterprise.

How many other Nobelists might we have in our ranks? By fixing the imbalance between public and private funding, we might just find out.

Randy Schekman will be honored Tuesday for his discoveries of basic cellular processes by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institutet.