American Scientific Leadership Wobbles under Trump Attack

MAGA, and all authoritarians, hate scientists, because science reveals natural laws and physics that cannot be overruled or intimidated by an Executive Order, or a tweet, and are often inconvenient for, say, fossil fuel oligarchs.

American economic power and political influence have been heavily reliant on having the best scientific and engineering institutions in the world – all being dismantled now under MAGA.

Historically, the record of civilizations that have turned away from science, openness, pursuit of knowledge and encouraging diversity, provides some cautionary tales.

New York Times (gift link):

For decades, Bangalore, India, has been an incubator for scientific talent, sending newly minted Ph.D.s around the world to do groundbreaking research. In an ordinary year, many aim their sights at labs in the United States.

“These are our students, and we want them to go and do something amazing,” said a professor at the National Center for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, Raj Ladher.

But this is not an ordinary year.

When Professor Ladher queried some 30 graduates in the city recently about their plans, only one had certain employment in the United States. For many of the others, the political turmoil in Washington has dried up job opportunities in what Professor Ladher calls “the best research ecosystem in the world.” Some decided they would now rather take their skills elsewhere, including Austria, Japan and Australia, while others opted to stay in India.

As the Trump administration moves with abandon to deny visas, expel foreign students and slash spending on research, scientists in the United States are becoming increasingly alarmed. The global supremacy that the United States has long enjoyed in health, biology, the physical sciences and other fields, they warn, may be coming to an end.

“If things continue as they are, American science is ruined,” said David W. Hogg, a professor of physics and data science at New York University who works closely with astronomers and other experts around the world. “If it becomes impossible to work with non-U.S. scientists,” he said, “it would basically render the kinds of research that I do impossible.”

Research cuts and moves to curtail the presence of foreign students by the Trump administration have happened at a dizzying pace.

The administration has gone so far as moving to block any international students at all from attending Harvard, and more than $3 billion in research grants to the university were terminated or paused. At Johns Hopkins University, a bastion of scientific research, officials announced the layoffs of more than 2,000 people after losing $800 million in government grants. An analysis by The New York Times found that the National Science Foundation, the world’s pre-eminent funding agency in the physical sciences, has been issuing financing for new grants at its slowest rate since at least 1990.

It is not merely a matter of the American scientific community losing power or prestige.

Dirk Brockmann, a biology and physics professor in Germany, warned that there were much broader implications. The acceptance of risk and seemingly crazy leaps of inspiration woven into American attitudes, he said, help produce a research environment that nowhere else can quite match. The result has been decades of innovation, economic growth and military advances.

“There is something very deep in the culture that makes it very special,” said Professor Brockmann, who once taught at Northwestern. “It’s almost like a magical ingredient.”

There was a time when the U.S. government embraced America’s role in the global scientific community.

In 1945, a presidential science adviser, Vannevar Bush, issued a landmark blueprint for post-World War II science in the United States. “Science, the Endless Frontier,” it was called, and among its arguments was that the country would gain more by sharing information, including bringing in foreign scientists even if they might one day leave, than by trying to protect discoveries that would be made elsewhere anyway.

The blueprint helped drive the postwar scientific dominance of the United States, said Cole Donovan, an international technology adviser in the Biden White House. “Much of U.S. power and influence is derived from our science and technology supremacy,” he said.

Now the United States is taking in the welcome mat.

Professor Brockmann, who studies complex systems at the Dresden University of Technology, was once planning to return to Northwestern to give a keynote presentation in June. It was to be part of a family trip to the United States; his children once lived in Evanston, Ill., where he taught at the university from 2008 to 2013.

He canceled the talk after the Foreign Ministry issued new guidance on travel to the United States following the detention of German tourists at the American border. That warning he said, “was kind of a signal to me: I don’t feel safe.”

Jim Al-Khalili in The Guardian, 25 September 2010:

Under Ma’mūn’s patronage, and the spirit of openness towards other religions and cultures that he fostered, many scholars from all over the empire gravitated towards Baghdad, drawn by a vibrant sense of optimism and freedom of expression. Every week, guests would be invited to the palace, wined and dined, and then begin to discuss with the caliph all manner of scholarly subjects, from theology to mathematics. He would send emissaries great distances to get hold of ancient scientific texts: one, Salman, visited Constantinople to obtain Greek texts from the Emperor Leo V (Leo the Armenian). Often, defeated foreign rulers would be required to settle the terms of surrender to him with books from their libraries rather than in gold.

Ma’mūn was almost fanatical in his desire to collect all the world’s books under one roof, translate them into Arabic and have his scholars study them. The institution he created to realise his dream epitomises more than anything else the blossoming of the scientific golden age. It became known throughout the world as the House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikma).

No physical trace remains of this academy today, so we cannot be sure exactly where it was located or what it looked like. Some historians even argue against exaggerated claims about its scope and purpose and the role of Ma’mūn in setting it up. But whatever its function – and many of Baghdad’s scholars may not have been based physically within it – there is no doubt that the House of Wisdom has acquired a mythical status symbolising this golden age, on a par with the Library of Alexandria, 1,000 years earlier.

The House of Wisdom grew rapidly with the acquisition of texts from Greece, Persia and India, swelling with the addition of the Arabic translations of these texts, a process that was already becoming an industry in Baghdad. This growth would have gathered pace with the use of paper, the production of which the Arabs had learnt from Chinese prisoners of war, as a new and cheaper writing material replacing papyrus and parchment. The translators would have had scribes recording their work and producing multiple copies of each text. By the middle of the ninth century, Baghdad had become the centre of the civilised world, attracting the very best of Arab and Persian philosophers and scientists for several centuries to come.

Wikipedia:

Founded in 762 AD by Al-Mansur, Baghdad was the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate and became its most notable development project. The city evolved into a cultural and intellectual center of the Muslim world. This, in addition to housing several key academic institutions, including the House of Wisdom, as well as a multi-ethnic and multi-religious environment, garnered it a worldwide reputation as the “Center of Learning”. 

Brittanica:

This long, slow decline was merely a prelude to the devastating attacks from which Baghdad would not recover until the 20th century. In 1258 Hülegü, the grandson of Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan, overran Mesopotamia, sacked Baghdad, killed the caliph, and massacred hundreds of thousands of residents. He destroyed many of the surrounding dikes and headworks, making restoration of the irrigation system nearly impossible and thereby destroying Baghdad’s potential for future prosperity.