Goodbye, American Science

Many people don’t realize it, but a hundred years ago America was something of a scientific backwater. Oh, sure, we had the occasional Nobel laureate, but the center of science was in Europe, particularly Germany. Then in the early 1930’s the Nazis decided that “purity” – of political ideas, of blood – was more important than truth, making life uncomfortable at best and deadly at worst for their scientists. So hundreds of them fled, many of them ending up in the U.S. And – voila! – American science came of age and hasn’t looked back.

If we're not careful, scientists are going to pack up & leave the U.S. Credit: Microsoft Designer

Until now. Now, I fear we’re going to suffer what Germany did, a brain drain that will bode well for some other country’s scientific fortunes.

Once of the first chilling announcements from the Trump Administration was that it was freezing NIH grants in order to ensure they were in compliance with Trump’s executive order banning DEI-related efforts. That froze some $1.5b in grant funding.

Piling on, the Administration announced that NIH grants would limit indirect costs to 15%. Sounds reasonable, you might say, but the vast machinery of U.S. biomedical research uses these “indirect” costs to fund the infrastructure that makes the research possible. Numerous state Attorney Generals immediately filed a lawsuit to block the cuts, claiming:

This research funding covers expenses that facilitate critical components of biomedical research, such as lab, faculty, infrastructure and utility costs. Without it, lifesaving and life-extending research, including clinical trials, would be significantly compromised. These cuts would have a devastating impact on universities around the country, many of which are at the forefront of groundbreaking research efforts – while also training future generations of researchers and innovators.

Oh, and on top of all this, as many as 1,500 NIH employees are in line to be laid-off.  

Credit: M. Scott Brauer for The Chronicle of Higher Education

Katie Witkiewitz, a professor at the University of New Mexico, lamented to The New York Times: “The N.I.H. just seems to be frozen. The people on the ground doing the work of the science are going to be the first to go, and that devastation may happen with just a delay of funding.”

Universities are similarly frozen, not sure when or how much money they can expect. The University of Pittsburgh has paused all Ph.D. admission, until it can better understand its funding future. One has to suspect it won’t be the only such program to do so, and we may never know how many would-be Ph.D. students will simply decide a future in U.S. science is too bleak to risk.

The effects of all this will be long lasting. Bita Moghaddam, a behavioral scientist at Oregon Health & Science University, warned The Washington Post: “Things aren’t going to get slowed down for six months — they may get slowed down for years.”

“The discoveries that aren’t made — you can’t point to them, because they will never be made,” Jeremy Berg, a former director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, told WaPo. “The hard part is you don’t know what you missed until years later, when something doesn’t happen.”

It’s not just NIH and not just biomedical research at risk. The National Science Foundation laid off some 10% of its workforce. "These arbitrary firings and failure of leadership directly impact the agency's ability to evaluate and fund good science," Mary Feeney, a public policy researcher at Arizona State University, said to NPR. "[It] is demoralizing for those who remain at the NSF, and will negatively affect the government's ability to attract talent to public service in the future."

NSF research funding could also be cut by half or more, as well as more staff cuts.  The cuts disproportionately impact young scientists, the future of our science. “There’s going to be a missing age class of researchers that will reverberate for years,” one federal scientist fears, reports Katie Langin in Science.

Don’t even get me started on RFK Jr. and his advocacy of junk science.  Don’t get me started on how federal agencies are purging datasets in order to meet vague DEI demands either; short-sighted and stupid.. Don’t get me started on climate change denialism, with the Trump Administration doing its best to kill participation by U.S. researchers on the next major report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Science is under attack. “Everyone is in a panic right now,” Mati Hlatshwayo Davis, the director of health for St. Louis, told Katherine Wu in The Atlantic. “And when researchers don't know what they’re allowed to do, science is not going to get done.”

“If you believe that innovation is important to economic development, then throwing a wrench in one of the most sophisticated and productive innovation machines in world history is not a good idea,” Deborah Seligsohn, an assistant professor of political science at Villanova University, told Karen Ho in MIT Technology Review. “They’re setting us up for economic decline.”

Ms. Ho predicts:

For starters, the purging of tens of thousands—and perhaps soon hundreds of thousands—of federal workers is removing scientists and technologists from the government and paralyzing the ability of critical agencies to function. Across multiple agencies, science and technology fellowship programs, designed to bring in talented early-career staff with advanced STEM degrees, have shuttered. Many other federal scientists were among the thousands who were terminated as probationary employees, a status they held because of the way scientific roles are often contractually structured.

She believes that talent will flow elsewhere – such as to China, to Canada, and even, ironically, to Germany. According to a report from the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), over the past decade or so, Chinese universities have made “significant gains” in listing of world universities, driven largely by research productivity. U.S. universities remain among the best in the world, but number in the top 500 has dropped.   

One can only imagine what such a listing will look like in a few years.

Things aren’t frozen everywhere. Ms. Ho points out: “China has made a remarkable ascent to become a global peer in scientific discoveries. By some metrics, it has even surpassed the US; it started accounting for more of the top 1% of most-cited papers globally, often called the Nobel Prize tier, back in 2019 and has continued to improve the quality of the rest of its research.” 

If you’re not worried, read Ms. Hao’s The foundations of America’s prosperity are being dismantled. Read Ms. Wu’s The Erasing of American Science. Read Ms. Langin’s U.S. early-career researchers struggling amid chaos. Then tell me you’re not worried.

Science will go on. Scientists will continue to invent the future. But it doesn’t have to be here, and, if we’re not careful, it won’t be.