alt Hacker NewsWe're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science
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>"Billions of dollars have been wiped from research budgets, almost 8,000 grants have been cancelled at NIH and the US National Science Foundation alone, and more than 1,000 NIH employees have been fired."
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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.
USA is still one of the top countries for scientists. Just as an example Europe had a few years of exporting the best GLP-1 drugs (finally something in which Europe was leader in science), Eli Lily quickly took it over.
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).
> In the normal trajectory of a life in science, Morgan would be planning to set up his own laboratory conducting groundbreaking research designed to win the war on superbugs. But with an ongoing hiring freeze at NIH, his options are limited.
That seems a bit too optimistic to be a valid argument.
This kind of Level 1 analysis misses what is really going on. "Brain drain" is not really a concern.
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.
If you create an economic incentive to go into math an science you will have no trouble attracting good people. But, for years, it has been a race to the bottom where the US over-produced researchers, scientists etc.. But then to put salt in the wound it also imported more of them to drive the wages down further. As more people have flooded in to STEM at bargain basement prices, the quality of the research has also gone down.
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.
Hurting yourself to hurt others is a well-established political practice in America.
It's also repelling their own citizen. Lots of videos of people being fed up with the ambient angst in the US any time they come back from another country.
The article provides absolutely no data to support any claims of a brain drain away from America, towards Europe or anywhere else. You’d think they would have found evidence if there was any. So after reading this, my prior on substantial numbers of researchers moving to Europe has gone down.
There is an obvious plausible reason why there might not be much brain drain to Europe: salaries are much lower there, because Europe is poorer.
Academics love to believe they don’t care about money, and Guardian readers love to believe that the US is doomed by its moral failings. I’ll believe both those things when I see evidence for them.
It's incredibly inexpensive for countries to import that top talent into their own universities. But governments just don't see the value, for the most part.
It’s less brain drain and more brain blockades. For now smart people still want to come here. We have to end our insane policy of preventing them from doing so.
I understand that the government is now too coarse to use soft power, and maybe it wasn't even working as well as it used to, but it is bizarre to undercut the sciences when their military capability is derived almost entirely from high technology since they can't field or lose lots of soldiers. I get they want to be Rome 3.0 or some bullshit, but Rome was famous for investing in engineering.
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.
Nationalists are all the same and all hate the country as it is vs how they imagine it to be - see the uk brexiters ignoring science and the creative industries.
Most of all they hate intelligent people as they see their schemes for what they are.
Meanwhile I’ve been getting Migrate to Canada ads in my IG feed…
But we’re great now I thought?
I think the US draining other countries of their best and brightest is why many countries have been left behind in terms of economic development.
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.
I am pretty sure we are still attracting top talents. We are not, however, attracting good to mediocre talents. Is that a good thing? What’s going to happen to all these mediocre graduate programs spread out all over the country where they simply existed to satiate foreign demand?
Trump is clearly winning his war on America.
now chinese know kill line in us, chinese will not go to us again.
It's not surprising. smart, educated people are a direct threat to the current administration and in general the US right has had academia in its sights for awhile. Ultimately it's bad for the country but how the US has been trending. Similarly, US education funding and the content of it has been politicized and it's producing a negative feedback loop.
Political goals and what's good for the average person are completely disconnected at this point.
Frankly, if the places that dominate at healthcare delivery efficiency also dominate at research, that could be good for the 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.
For an American startup/technology forum, this place is remarkably anti-America, anti-capitalism, anti-AI, anti-crypto.
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>As Trump slashes science funding, young researchers flee abroad. Without solid innovation, the US could cease to have the largest biomedical ecosystem in the world.
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.
It is not a "brain drain" when you declare war on science and fire all of your scientists. There must be some other phrase for that.
Does that mean Europe will get a sustainable lead on irreproachable Science?
There's a version of this that doesn't get talked about enough -- what happens to the compounds already in study when the researcher who designed the safety protocol leaves. Institutional knowledge about why certain interactions were flagged or screened against isn't usually documented well enough to hand off. It just lives in the PI's head.
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.
In all important areas such as clean energy, fusion energy, biotechnology and AI the Chinese government is heavily investing in and pushing Chinese companies to lead the world.
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