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Scientists go where science is funded. A large proportion of U.S. scientists are also immigrants, who will tend to go where immigrants are welcomed.
China or Saudi Arabia can wave their money around, but at least some people will be repulsed by the obligation to keep their mouths shut and praise the Dear Leader.
Their cultural insularity does not help either. You can live in China, but you will never be accepted as Chinese. The US was quite unique (together with Canada, Australia etc.) that it was able and willing to accept you as an American even with a funny accent, as long as you wanted to be one.
Are you also implying that in the US anyone is free to speak negatively of “dear leader”?
There are a multitude of current examples to the contrary.
Well, based on the current admin and supporters, only part of the US was unique
Big cities and metropolitan areas are very progressive and welcoming to well educated foreigners, and the countryside is filled with racist idiots who live in fear of something they only know from the television
Ok It probably matters during elections and the policies that lead up to them (must appease the rural vote with mostly symbolic and emotionally wretching anti-immigrant rhetoric) but cities need skilled (and unskilled) labour and when they get what they need they stand to generate a lot of money (re taxes to the policy makers from earlier).
Well, using Texas as an example, it's those people 50km away that win elections. Of course, gerrymandering helps, but even with large metro areas leaning left, there's enough of those 50km away that swings that lean to the right.
Ignore the people in the rural areas as your own peril
I still don’t quite understand why. The contact hypothesis makes some sense but can that explain the whole urban rural divergence?
Rural populations will even vote hard against their own interests in other areas over culture war stuff.
When the part of the country that was less unique took power, they immediately did what everyone else that was not unique did and became unwelcoming of foreigners.
I guess to you other countries that the US is becoming more like would also not be of a hive mind by having people that are welcoming of foreigners. Where's your hive mind comment about that part of the original comment?
I mean we are literally putting people in concentration camps right now. Kinda hard to take the moral high ground at the moment. Scientists are fleeing the United States for their safety, just like they did from 1930s Germany.
Because people understand that people don't get to choose their government or culture and that everyone deserves better healthcare. Every child who is at risk from the rise of anti-vax 100% deserves better vaccines and ought to bear 0% responsibility for what the adults do.
It is when researchers can't make enough money to eat and live, which is an actual reality in the US right now.
Researchers at top institutions often make less than Uber drivers.
There are other countries where you can live on less and the government isn't dipping their hands into your pockets every 5 seconds.
In software San Francisco is still the top for AI research: even when Peter Steinberger didn't know what he will do with OpenClaw, it was clear to him that the only place to move to was USA.
Terrence Tao was a good example of what happens when an exceptionally smart person stops getting funded by an American University: not moving to another country, but got VC money and created a new company.
USA politics is looked at so closely, because it matters and changes and still more democratic than most countries in the world even though democracy is a mess (as it's supposed to be).
What was the last thing that a major US Lab published? It's all trade secrets.
Chinese labs are the only ones publishing results as they happen.
The US is in the position it was for semiconductor manufacturing, first it was labs and open science. Then by the 80s fabs started costing millions and universities stopped being able to contribute and nothing got published.
Now it's getting to trillions and if Intel goes under there is no one in the US who knows how to make any semiconductor generation newer than 2010.
He’s moving from London after all, arguably the global AI research hub.
(Also likely SA told him the offer was contingent on him relocating)
But capital structures and politicians are still too close to old European companies from the second world war and don't allow venture capital to florish.
It's easier to earn money by winning a fake EU tender and giving back half of the money to a politician than doing something innovative.
> The U.S. used to be sort of the default, the no brainer, option. If you got an offer from a top U.S. university, this was like almost the best thing that could happen to you as an academic ... If it's just a less welcoming, atmosphere for science in general here, the best and brightest may not automatically come to the US as they have for decades.
Also in the USA you just wait 4 (or 8) years and you have a new president. In many other countries you don't have that luxury.
All of this was by design so that big corporate interests could get cheap labor and increase profits. Since the US government is for sale to the highest bidder, and the corporations have no loyalty to the country, they will feed off the host until it can no longer sustain itself and then look for another host to feed off of.
There is a tremendous glut of talented biomedical researchers. We have been overproducing them for decades. Even before the cuts, it was incredibly hard to go from a PhD to a tenured professorship. 5-15% would achieve that, depending how you measured.
The cuts have made things worse, but European/RoW funding is even stingier. It's not like there's a firehose of funding drawing away researchers. There may be a few high-profile departures, but the US is still the least-bad place to find research money.
We need to produce fewer PhDs and provide better support for those we do produce.
Secondly, it's about more than funding. The US is also no longer safe for a great many of the scientists that would normally choose come to the US to work. And even for those that aren't too worried about ICE, scientists tend to be very liberal and value freedom and democracy a great deal. The US has suddenly become a very undesirable place to live if you value these things.
Third, scientific freedom is under attack in the US. And there is nothing scientists value more than the freedom to pursue their research.
My take is that most Americans can't imagine a world where they are not number one. But that is a very naive idea.
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/innovation-science-economic-develop...
This illustrates exactly my point. Canada is planning on spending up to CAD$1.7B over 12 years. That is equivalent to USD$100M per year, or 0.3% of the NIH 2026 budget. Maybe if Europe does something similar they can get to 2%!
> The US is also no longer safe
I agree that Trump's regime has made the US a less welcoming place for foreign scientists, and that budget cuts mean less research will be done. What I disagree with is the idea that "brain drain" is a significant threat to US science. We simply have such an incredible oversupply of biomed PhDs that we should welcome the prospect of other countries absorbing the supply.
Nor does he or ever did have the support of "(over) half the country". His maximum approval level in 2025 was at the beginning of his term at 47% "approve" and is currently around 36%, according to the Gallup poll.
The popular vote does not matter in the US. The electoral college matters.
(Also, "non-negative" is carrying a lot of weight, since both Trump in his first term and George W. Bush in his first lost the popular vote. The idea that a wide majority of the country is conservative, let alone MAGA, is risible.)
two election results in the past ten years have apparently failed to teach y'all wholesome folx that many people around you are secretly unwholesome.
That is happening right now, all the time! Especially in the biomed field! Many, many PhDs spend 5-8 years getting their degree and receiving minimal pay, then 4+ years being nomadic postdocs, also making terrible money, only to eventually arrive at the end of the road and realize they have to do something completely different.
It is unsustainable for every professor to train 10 PhDs in their career, because there aren't going to be 10 professorships (or even 3) for those PhDs to fill. Funding has to grow at the same exponential rate as the number of researchers. It did, from roughly 1950s to 1980s, as the university system expanded to accommodate the Boomer generation. It has slowed since, and the PhD to professorship pipeline got longer and leakier. It's doing a tremendous disservice to the bright, well-intentioned young people who join PhD programs.
Also, those scientists already exist. If the US decides not to fund them, they will go produce patents and grow the economies of other places. Many countries wish they could attract the talent that the US does.
In most of the world, most humans have to move within the realm of available resources. One could easily say that if a manager of US sees too many PhDs, it is natural to conclude that since there is not enough resources to go around, adding more resource consumers is silly. We can argue all over whether it is a good policy, or whether the allocation makes sense, or whether the resources are really not there, but, how is is this a difficult logic gate?
Further, reduction in funds for public resources or increase in misery for scientists are not in and of themselves evidence that those resources were over-funded or too cushy. For the research discussed in the article it is quite clearly a political decision, not directly grounded in a need for less medical research.
The US is currently choosing to divert absolutely staggering amounts of those resources away from things we have traditionally valued—science, art, infrastructure, taking care of the least fortunate among us, etc—and using them instead to enrich the already-wealthy, in the most blatant and cruel ways.
There is no possible way this can be spun as being about "available resources". The grift is utterly, 100% transparent.
Eh, I mean if you put it that way, I suppose all those budgets are just a show and not at all an indication of how utterly fucked we are as a country unless we both:
a) massively reduce spending b) massively raise taxes
In very real terms, there is only so much money. Some additional money can be borrowed, but we a slowly ( but surely ) reaching a breaking point on that as well.
The issue is: no one is willing to sacrifice anything. And I am sympathetic, but if hard choices are not made now, they will be kinda made for us anyway.
We need to claw back billions and billions and billions of dollars from people for whom it will make zero difference in their daily lives, so that we can spend it on people for whom $100 can change their month, and $10000 can change their life.
That seems a bit too optimistic to be a valid argument.
The hiring freeze stops everyone not just that one specific person. A 4 year pause on new researchers is meaningful even if this specific person wasn’t going to start a lab.
Most of all they hate intelligent people as they see their schemes for what they are.
Other countries need to take up the mantle of research and they can't do that if all of them go to the US. I think this is overall good for the rest of the world, because relying on the US and the sociopathic companies that exploit public research for personal gain is bad for the entire world.
The US having a dogshit healthcare delivery system but so much research means that good vertical integration is not possible.
Conversely a more integrated EU — continent scale welfare state — could do really interesting "integrated OpEx and CapEx" medical research in ways that are simply impossible in the US.
Remember the Danes making Ozempic is making something that is fundamentally far more useful for Americans than Danes (of course the money is good for Danes). Most non-American drug research today probably chases the lucrative American market, but ideally that would change.
A bunch of dunces.
Or perhaps they are so far up their own assholes that they think AI is going to do research by itself with no funding from now on.
Ironically enough, the guy that coined the term "soft power" recently died. He did his doctorate with Henry Kissinger.
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/07/us/trump-fede...
Oh no. We might lose the largest most expensive medical system in the world. I would sure hate to have an affordable lightweight medical system. I mean, aren't we doomed if we can't spend another five trillion dollars on a covid shot. Think of the poor pharma companies.
I made the leap this year. No regrets.
On federal level they are still at about 25% without an option to come into power. It is bad, but it is not hopeless, yet.
The should welcome the diversity of crime.
Well the Swiss are not in EU either, but both are still in Europe
No, you don't. You still have to file but you get "Federal Tax Credits" for income tax paid abroad and seeing how a EU country's income tax will almost certainly be higher than the US', you'll end up paying nothing. There's also tax treaties to avoid double taxation in other ways.
"Expats" living in Europe? I ask because "expat" usually refers to someone who moved to a lower cost of living country that may also have significantly lower income tax compared to the EU.
> It looks like the Federal Tax Credit only covers up to $130,000 per year of income.
$130k/yr is absolute bank in Europe. From a quick Google search, that would put you well in the top 5% of earners in Berlin, just as an example. So, this shouldn't be much of an issue.
The country must have a tax treaty with US, so they exchange the info about your taxes in background. But many countries in EU has higher tax rates than US, then you owe $0.
Also, if the US restores their democracy and also decides to value science again, will the salaries for scientists abroad compete enough to prevent scientists moving back.
To maintain a sustainable lead the money and investment has to be substantial and long term.
China also has been playing the long game with the build out of it's technology capabilities. I could very easily see them doing the same for medicine. They aren't afraid of losing money on investment for a particularly long period of time. They are currently thinking in decades and not quarters.
We don’t have elections anymore? When did this happen?
It is fair to say that the USA is still a democracy, but not because of elections. Elections have little to do with democracy. In fact, if the majority of the population hold the view that elections equate to democracy, you don't have a democracy.
Political goals and what's good for the average person are completely disconnected at this point.
We've been building Bio-Twin (biotwin.io) partly for exactly this reason -- AI pre-screening that externalizes the safety logic so it's not dependent on which scientist is still employed. Not pitching, just -- this is a real downstream consequence of the brain drain that seems underdiscussed here.
China Is Outspending the U.S. to Achieve the ‘Holy Grail’ of Clean Energy: Fusion See: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/13/climate/china-us-fusion-e...
America's lead in biotechnology is slipping, while China has made synthetic biology a national priority. In the iGEM international competition, only one American school finished in top 10, seven were from China. See: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/teens-may-have-come-up-with-new... Or watch video: https://youtu.be/VEj5I4CBbgU