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American science to soon face its largest brain drain in history
- msie 1y agoThis exodus will be known as "Trump's Gift."
- mensetmanusman 1y agoThis is good for the world. Hyper concentration of talent reduces diversity.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoDiversity of what (identity or thought), who, and/or where? Silicon Valley, the population of ordinary people residing there, 10 years ago (2015), heaved diversity. In corporate employment, it took decades to break through gender and race ceilings in industry to various degrees, but it largely happened, mostly, for better or worse. Bringing together people, capital, opportunity, and academia creates a vibrant ecosystem that mutually reinforces further gains in a "virtuous" cycle. What doesn't create much is having only a few people spread out without a support system. It takes encouraging a mix of many open minded people within a smaller physical or digital proximity in order to get the w00w00 effect. That can't really happen when people are told they're not welcome.
- gertlex 1y ago> Silicon Valley, the population of ordinary people residing there, 10 years ago (2015), heaved diversity. In corporate employment, it took decades to break through gender and race ceilings in industry to various degrees, but it largely happened, mostly, for better or worse. What's the meaning of "heaved diversity" here? I think I agree with the rest of your comment, about the concentration of varied talent being important.
- supportengineer 1y agoAre you arguing that prior to 2015 there was no diversity in Silicon Valley?
- tyre 1y agoCounterpoint: concentration of talent is incredibly valuable for humankind.
- behringer 1y agoThey're concentrating in China. It's just that the US won't be that location of talent.
- mensetmanusman 1y agoGood, China needs talent not wasted on optimizing a police state.
- hayst4ck 1y agoThe economic concept of economies of scale dictates that the more researchers there are in one location, the more efficiently they are likely able to research.
- mensetmanusman 1y agoIt also destabilizes areas with brain drain resulting in economic destruction and mass migration (one of the factors destroying Europe).
- andsoitis 1y ago> Many of the most valuable scientific organizations in the world, including NOAA, NASA, the NSF, the CDC, the EPA, and the FDA, I don’t dismiss the premise of the article and I think it is a shame how these organizations are being impacted, but I don’t know that these are the best exemplars of cutting edge science being shut down that will lead to America’s downfall from its scientific perch.
- ideashower 1y agoIsn't it true though that they, altogether, fund America's exemplars of cutting edge science? Like, isn't that the point?
- apical_dendrite 1y agoI'm not sure why NIH is left off this list, since it's probably the most important scientific organization in the world. Between them NIH and NSF fund a huge proportion of the cutting edge science that is done in the US, either directly or by funding the training and early career work of researchers. They fund a lot of the foundational work that doesn't get a lot of resources from the private sector. 99% of new drugs approved between 2010 and 2019 relied on NIH funding.
- analog31 1y agoIt was probably an omission. Fill it in, and it makes sense. I believe the NIH is larger than the NSF. In addition to funding research, these agencies also fund education, both directly and indirectly.
- Loughla 1y agoCorrect. One of the guys in my cohort in post graduate work was funded by a grant from the NIH.
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- givemeethekeys 1y agoAre institutions elsewhere massively increasing funding and positions? Aren't all the non-bankruptible tuition fees providing plenty of funding already? Where's that money going? The football team?
- the_snooze 1y agoI don't know where that money is going, but from my own experience, research at universities really isn't supported by tuition money. At least in STEM, PhD students are paid for by grants and contracts that their advisors secured from sources like NSF, DARPA, NIH, NSA, etc. Those are the people actually execute the research. You might want to say tuition should support research, but the reality is that it doesn't.
- ribosometronome 1y agoWhy would we want tuition to support research?
- sevensor 1y agoIf we assume science still has new things to tell the world, who better for researchers to share their discoveries with than the next generation? That’s the argument, anyway. In practice, it’s a crapshoot. Many researchers are dreadful educators due to incentives, training, and disposition. Every now and then you’ll run across a researcher who is also a great educator, but there’s no institutional force that pushes them in the right direction.
- bobthepanda 1y agoThat explains why you would want researchers to teach students, but not why students (who generally have little to no income to speak of and are already struggling with university costs in the US) should directly pay for research
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- wslh 1y agoI don't clearly see how a massive exodus of American scientists moving abroad could happen. While I understand that young scientists might find it easier to relocate, the decision becomes significantly far more complicated for couples, even when both partners are scientists. For other countries or regions to become truly competitive, they would also need to increase their investment in science significantly [1]. [1] https://www.wipo.int/web/global-innovation-index/w/blogs/2024/end-of-year-edition https://www.wipo.int/web/global-innovation-index/w/blogs/202...
- standardUser 1y agoOther nations are indeed taking deliberate steps to seize the reins from the US, particularly China and Europe.
- apical_dendrite 1y agoChina will scoop up some researchers, but likely there will just be fewer people entering the profession in the US because there will just be less funding and opportunities for graduate students, postdocs, and early career researchers.
- shihab 1y agoPeople don’t understand that other countries (primary suppliers of stem graduate students) do have lots of research positions, it’s just they don’t usually get first rate talent because USA is far more attractive for those people. Now they will
- stonogo 1y agoWhich is happening: See https://www.science.org.au/news-and-events/news-and-media-releases/are-you-a-top-us-based-scientist-wanting-to-relocate-to-australia https://www.science.org.au/news-and-events/news-and-media-re... and https://www.univ-amu.fr/en/public/actualites/safe-place-science-aix-marseille-universite-ready-welcome-american-scientists https://www.univ-amu.fr/en/public/actualites/safe-place-scie... for current examples. But other countries don't need to increase funding to become competitive, since we are decreasing funding. All they have to do is nothing.
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- bgwalter 1y ago[flagged]
- apical_dendrite 1y ago> How many of those were hired due to diversity programs? This is an incredibly obnoxious and uninformed comment. NASA does not hire incompetent people because of "diversity". > The parallel with Hitler really does not apply. The US won't be sending scientists working on nuclear weapons, stealth aircraft or profitable endeavors like GPUs. Also an uninformed comment. The physicists that came to the US and UK and then worked on weapons programs were not for the most part working on weapons programs in Germany. They were just able to transfer those skills into the Manhattan Project, radar, or other programs.
- the_snooze 1y agoIt's also a very shortsighted view. R&D isn't just a bunch of eggheads grinding out a cleary-defined end like, say, nuclear weapons and making it happen. It's thousands of unseen shots on goal, most of which miss, but you get a handful of high-leverage innovations out of it. What this pullback in US scientific funding does is reduce the number of those shots on goal. It undoes what the US prioritized from World War II onwards: that scientific innovation is foremost a strategic asset, not strictly a moneymaking venture. You saw that on display with the recent B-2 sorties over Iran: those could not have happened if not for highly specialized researchers slowly contributing to that body of work over decades.
- bgwalter 1y ago?
- apical_dendrite 1y agoI don't even know what you mean by "let those kind of people go". If they can't get funding, they won't become scientists in the first place. If they lose funding, the US can't just prevent them from moving overseas. It's (still) a free country! And a large proportion of them are foreign-born anyway. Geoff Hinton couldn't get a job doing AI research in his native UK, so he moved to the US, where there were a lot more opportunities. At that time, neural networks weren't seen as particularly promising. Decades later, it paid off big. That's the kind of thing that will happen less and less (or work in reverse, with US researchers taking jobs overseas) since there will be far fewer funding opportunities.
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- Herring 1y agoAmericans getting a crash course in how white supremacy destroys itself. Did you know: Slavery was so profitable, it sprouted more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi River valley than anywhere in the nation. Look at them now. https://www.history.com/articles/slavery-profitable-southern-economy https://www.history.com/articles/slavery-profitable-southern...
- msgodel 1y agoSlavery was terrible for the economy and the debate at the time was actually surprisingly similar to the illegal immigrant labor debate today
- krapp 1y agoWhat? White supremacy isn't anywhere close to destroying itself. The power base just shifted from the plantation owners to CEOs.
- Nevermark 1y agoThe parallel isn’t perfect. But the deep irrationality driving artificial opportunistic ideological divides (this time less raw white supremacy, but still a lot of xenophobia, party loyalty propaganda, cult of personality, and fear and backlash with respect to minorities), drives sub-cultures like lemmings, off the cliff of reality. Taking the rest of us with them. Obvious even as it becomes unstoppable.
- Herring 1y agoYeah and the infrastructure of economic/political exclusion is initially just used against that "horrible" group X, but eventually expands to the majority of the population. This is because greed is basically an endless hole. They get to threaten the wider population "toe the line or you'll end up like them". A lot of times the effects are invisible. I doubt everyday Mississippians even think about how slavers stole their future from them. Americans barely ever think about the trillions of dollars that the Iraq war wasted/stole.
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- JSR_FDED 1y agoThe value destruction is mind blowing. The fact that it’s deliberate I just can’t wrap my head around.
- msgodel 1y ago[flagged]
- IAmGraydon 1y agoPlease…elaborate. How were they “weaponized against most of the country”?
- VectorLock 1y agoWeaponized against what?
- rybosome 1y agoI cannot for the life of me think of what you are referring to. If it’s COVID-related mandates like vaccines and lockdowns, then surely it’s obvious that NASA had nothing to do with that? There is no single issue that I can see linking all of these science organizations together. Even if it’s about budget, there are bigger targets.
- SailingCactus33 1y agoThey went off mission. Here is a NASA example that might help linking it together: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11457489/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11457489/
- dahart 1y agoI’m confused by this comment, do you want to elaborate? Only the thirteenth author has an association with NASA at all, and that author lists two associations. This paper is primarily from U. Maryland and MIT. Why do you feel like this paper reflects to any significant degree on NASA’s mission? What is NASA’s mission in your mind? What is the point of what they’re doing if not to use science and the knowledge resulting from practicing science to benefit humanity? NASA’s web pages, for one, do happen to say exactly that in multiple ways. Is there some congressional funding agreement you’re aware of that limits or prevents NASA from engaging in certain scientific topics? Also what problem do have with this paper? It seems like it’s saying something that’s widely known and non-controversial. It maybe adds new kinds of data and support to the thing we already knew, but it’s largely a meta review of many other papers that also demonstrate what we already know, that it’s common for poorer people to live in worse conditions than richer people.
- dotnet00 1y agoThis has definitely been my feeling too as a fresh postdoc. For a while it has been feeling more and more like the US isn't worth the effort and stress. Sure, I make more money here, but is it worth dealing with nonsensical immigration policies, haphazard funding cuts, crumbling infrastructure, completely random rulemaking, and demoralized colleagues facing severe and nonsensical budget cuts when various other countries with a good standard of living and competitive research labs make immigration very easy for skilled people like scientists? It isn't specifically a Trump thing, but he's certainly proving to be the straw that broke the camel's back, and it's likely I'll go elsewhere once my postdoc appointment ends. I can imagine that the decision is even easier for people from countries like China. Why deal with the stress of the government suddenly deciding that you aren't allowed to work at your institution anymore regardless of track record or background, (many chinese colleagues have been worried about the proposed legislation and it comes up often), when you can work at a similarly cutting edge institution back home? You just have to determine if the US being less authoritarian on certain things is valuable enough to put up with the awful treatment through the long immigration process.
- senectus1 1y agoI see Trump as being a socially acceptable widening of this sort of behavior. AI is just an enabling of the the imagination of the now widened bracket of behavior. As has been often remarked on. this is a really shit timeline to exist in.
- illiac786 1y agoI keep my sanity by imagining how it could be much worse. But I have to admit, all my “much worse timelines” feel more and more like the future of this timeline…
- illiac786 1y agoI mostly agree, except on Trump being a straw. He is more like the truck full of shit. Not saying it wasn’t bad before already, but he made a significant (negative) difference.
- arctics 1y agoAll the scientists who came to the US in 1930s were mostly Jewish for obvious reasons. After victory in WW2, we had Operation Paperclip when we brought thousands of Nazi affiliated scientists to work for us, the whole premise that scientists fled Nazi Germany is very shaky. I just don't believe so many people don't know the history...
- nandomrumber 1y agoThe US had Jewish scientists and Nazi affiliated scientists come over, and proceeded to become the singular global superpower. That’s a massive accomplishment, and kinda proves that a whole bunch of people there were victims of circumstance, a do or die situation. Never underestimate the ability of a small percentage of malevolent people to upend society.
- arctics 1y agoYes, just pointing out that this article implies that Nazi Germany was the reason many scientists moved to the US which isn't the case, many moved when the war was over and they lost.
- rtkwe 1y agoI'd put more of the post war explosion on being the only industrialized nation that wasn't actively bombed. Yeah we managed a lot with that brain power but the backbome of that was still incredible position of being essentially untouched economically by the war and having no competition.
- goldforever 1y ago[dead]