Hue gift for Europeans: the chance to recruit top researchers from a bullied amergice by the White House War with elite universities. From here and the offion of open letters, fever funds, new research programs, political statements. The languages are different, the message is the same: “Come to us. We give you scientific asylum.”
This article is part of a series performed by using the digital archive Arcanum newspapersin which you can travel 150 years of history of Romania, as it has been recorded in each era by the lens of the journalists of the time, of advertisers, writers and ideologists of all orientations.
“It's like an earthquake in the epicenter of the scientific world […]. Such shocks are relatively rare, and Norway must take advantage of the opportunity as long as it exists, “wrote at the beginning of the year a Norwegian professor of political science, Tore Wig, in the daily Morgenbladet.” We can build the future of Norway with the minds of Trump. ”
The same thing I say, in other formulations, university university, Germany or Italy. At the end of March, the resort ministers from several EU countries, including Romania, asked the research commissioner, Ekaterina Zaharieva, “to act immediately” so that Europe could attract “brilliant people who could suffer from interference in their research and brutal funds.” The letter of the research ministers, whose text was not made public, does not explicitly mention the United States.
“Come to us”, a message with which the US has reached a scientific superpower
Could it be 2025, indeed, an inflection point? The exodus of talents from the twentieth century from Europe to America – unprecedented phenomenon, as large, in history – moved the Center for Gravity of Scientific Research over Atlantic. It was told, over time, “Brain Drain”, “Brain Migration”, “Brain Export”, “Brain Exodus”, “Exodus of Talent” And, more recently, “Loss of Human Capital”.
“Come to us” is the message that the United States has always transmitted to the persecuted, disregarded or lacking resources in their countries-be university, engineers, inventors, sociologists, historians, artists. And those who did not find their place at home flourished and gave the adoptive homeland that had better. America is today the scientific superpower of the world and because of them. The constantly quoted examples are the Manhattan project-the construction of the first atomic bomb, which would not have been possible in just a few years without the formidable contingent of European scientific minds-and the Apollo program in which the first trip per month took place.
If the Nobel prizes are an indicator, we can get an idea of the contribution of the scientists immigrant to the undeniable scientific supremacy of the United States. Over 25% of American citizens who have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics, Chemistry, Medicine and Economics were born in other countries.
Palade's case, the only laureate of a scientific Nobel of Romanian origin
Some have founded entire scientific disciplines. For example, George Emil Palade, the parent of modern cellular biology, was born in 1912 in Iași, did medicine in Bucharest, worked as an internist at Colentina Hospital and left the country in 1946, after the establishment of communism, for doctoral studies in the United States.
Palade, who discovered ribosomes – those corpuscles in which the cells synthesize proteins – was awarded in 1974 the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine. The communist press applauded copiously:
“The Nobel Prize granted to Professor Palade is also a distinction given to the creative intelligence of our people, who through this illustrious representative continues the line of foreign ancestors who carried our country worldwide,” wrote in 1974 the magazine “Magazine.
In an article by a magazine page, “Tribuna” described in detail the Nobel ceremony, the laureate program, the banquet. He even described “a color show” broadcast by the Swedish television about the new Nobel laureates.
“For a Romanian participant, the Nobel 1974 festivities had, apart from their historical values, a national significance with deep soul echoes,” concludes the author.
In fact, Palade could not have made the discoveries he made if he had not left Romania. Why did he choose to leave?
“I had the feeling that I do not know enough, and that if I really want to do something significant I have to go elsewhere-that is, in those places where truly interesting scientific activities are carried out,” said Palade, the only laureate of a scientific Nobel of Romanian origin, in an interview from 2002.
Palade thus described what specialized literature appoints “Pull Factor”the force of attraction of the Magnet countries, and here the United States has a long tradition in placing the red carpet for valuable people-it offers full academic freedom, an entire ecosystem that rewards scientific competitiveness and, last but not least, money from public and private sources.
At the other end of migration is the so-called “Push Factor” -All the forces that make people like Palade “go elsewhere”. In Europe I had, in the last century, two world wars, the Jewish persecution and, above all, the totalitarian regimes in central and eastern Europe, with everything they meant-from the marginalization of intellectuals to the poverty of resources or ideological control.
After the massive exodus of the last century, Europe went down the second place in the world, after the United States, in research and innovation. Today the EU allocates about 2% of GDP for research and development, almost half compared to the United States, according to The Economist, which mentions that Europe remains behind, while China and India are upstream, and in an index “Nature ” which takes into account the number of quotations from 145 scientific journals.
“The United States wanted to build the most redable bombs and cure the worst diseases”
Suddenly, however, in America two forces have appeared that make researchers and university – especially those without American citizenship or dual citizenship – to think about leaving. The first force is about the steep cutting of federal funds for ongoing programs. The second of the ideological control that the White House seeks to exercise on some of the programs financed in the public budget. Undesirable disciplines and directions of research, or dislocated from the priorities of the current government, are indexed, from climate studies to gender studies.
In total, American research has benefited from total federal funds of 60 billion euros in 2023, explains The New York Times – 30 times more than in the early 1950s – because “the United States wanted to build the most redable bombs and cure the worst diseases, to explore the farthest corners of the Solar System and to cultivate the most harvest”.
The federal government gave the money, the universities took them. They built the best performing research centers in the world – irresistible magnet for bright minds – and became dependent on this money. Today these funds are the lever by which the new administration forces university reforms that, at a declarative level, aims to combat anti -Semitism; In practice, the conditions for continuing the financing are related to the ideological priorities of the current administration.
Colombia University accepted the conditions imposed and retained access to 400 million federal funds for research. Harvard University, which did not accept the conditions, has already lost $ 2.2 billion – and could lose, in total, government funding up to 9 billion. Colombia and Harvard are just two of the universities on the list. And the cutting of federal financing means, in practice, probably thousands of scientists put free.
A poll made at the end of last month by the magazine “Nature” It suggests that the febrility with which Europeans are preparing for the import of American researchers is justified. Of the about 1,600 scientists from the United States who responded to the survey, over 1,200 – three quarters – say they take into account the possibility of leaving the country because of the Trump administration measures. Favorite destinations for relocation: Europe and Canada.
Mobilization in universities
There are at least a dozen European universities that have already launched their recruitment programs. In France, Lance Peak was Aix Marseille University, who posted on the guard page a new program, “Safe Place for Science”, presented by a text about “La Liberté Aadémique”, with explicit reference to the “United States context”.
The program registered, according to France24, almost 298 applicants for about 20 available positions. Among them, teachers from various American institutions, “including Johns Hopkins, NASA, Yale, Stanford, Colombia and Pennsylvania University.”
President Macron also capitalized, posting on Twitter on April 18 a message for “researchers from all over the world” – “Choose France!” -concluded with an invitation to a “Rendez-Vous” that would take place on May 5. And the former President François Hollande and the rector of the Aix-Marseille University called for the creation of the status of “scientific refugee” for foreign researchers.
In Germany, who still remembers the so-called “Paperclip” operation-the Clandestin post-war program of transplanting about 1,600 German scientists, with their families, in America-the designated chancellor Friedrich Merz talks about “a huge opportunity” for the country. “The US government is currently using the gross force against US universities, so researchers in America now contact Europe,” Mertz said. “Dear American researchers, you are welcome in Germany!” An article has entitled Deutsche.
In Belgium, Vrije Universiteit Brussel organized a contact point for interested researchers, explicitly referring to “alarming political interference” in the American academic world, created 12 postdoctoral positions dedicated to Americans “who feel threatened” and even made 18 housing.
Sweden has introduced a new grant scheme that covers the relocation costs for top researchers and their families, the Catalonia region made an important amount – 30 million euros – for the relocation and payment of wages of over 70 American scientists, Berlin has created a dedicated fund, focused on research in medicine and social sciences.
In all this choir without a conductor, the last voice is that of Norway, which has assembled a program of 8.2 million euros to attract “foreign researchers” specialized in “climatic researches, health and artificial intelligence”.
Finally, a matter of resources
The effervescence of European initiatives is comforting, but the skeptics shows first of all towards the unobstructed objective of allocating 3% of the EU GDP and, above all, to the gigantic difference between the money invested by research & development: while the American companies allocate about 606 billion annually. To all this, bureaucracy, language barriers, place culture is added. “Europe is ready to receive talents,” writes Eurativ, “but they may not have money to keep them.”
It's too early to talk about a “Brain Drain” From the United States to Europe, although there are many such titles in the US press. However, we can talk about the sudden decrease in the attractiveness of the United States for talented people in the rest of the world, be they students, young researchers, teachers. Without doing something special or different, Europe, Australia, Canada climb the list of options.
By the way of Canada: Timothy Snyder, one of the most reputed American historians, and shore brands, his wife, leave Yale University. As well as their good friend, philosophy professor Jason Stanley, specialized in fascism. All three will teach in the autumn at the University of Toronto.
Article made with the support of Digitca Arcanum.
