U.S. science is in chaos

There is some history to why it is as grim as it is right now (sunny skies will return, don't worry!). A lot of funding was around ~2019 from the VC people, and biomed PIs were getting their startups funded and hiring from the recent PhD cohorts. The horrible environment in STEM academic hiring needs no introduction, so the talent pool was rich. Early stage drug development and biotech is horrendously risky, so most don't make it past ~5-7 years. Now there are lots of people looking for a job, and the only surviving companies are the extremely hiring averse ones.

Did you mean to write, high interest rate environment?

"Academic experience typically doesn't count."

Why not?

I don't know if it's so much that talented people are being locked out, as much as it is that communities everywhere, not just industry, are requiring a level of people skills that academic people lack but nonetheless thrive without.

> The high interest environment means that biotech investing has been hit extremely hard

I don't think this reasoning can work. To the extent these things are directly related, the relationship would have to be: returns on investment are at an all-time high --> more investing than usual.

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Because it hasn't had as much time to dismantle democracy as all of the other democracies in the world have. lol

And/or corporate culture has some major drawbacks compared to universities and national labs.

Just out of curiosity, where did you move?

promotion is a good reason to move. good luck!

I'm sure they do genuinely have those problems but it's not like Western research has been free of such scandals.

How much is this actually happening? I've heard plenty of anecdotes, but the net migration flows haven't changed much. British Columbia did a big push to bring in American medical staff, and have only had a couple hundred move so far. Compare that to the number of Canadians moving south on TN visas, and I'm not sure it's significant.

I am saying this as someone who pursued Canadian citizenship by descent and moved to New Zealand in the last year, so it's definitely happening some, but my impression so far is that the total number of people who actually make the move is small. Most people who are skilled enough for an overseas employer to jump through hoops to put them on a visa have more lucrative jobs available in the US that are closer to home without all of the downsides of emigration.

I would believe that a lot of dual citizens or skilled immigrants to the US are moving home.

not much talent is going from US to Canada, it's almost always the reverse if you look at top canadian universities

where in Canada? i've _never_ heard that, but if so, great.

Are people really moving to China? A country that will never give outsiders citizenship?

Canada? For lower salary and lower life quality?

And welcome to our little odd ball land. Just remember, if an Aussie offers you a 'Golden Gay Time', take it and you will be pleasantly surprised. ;)

For anyone thinking of migrating to Australia, please add to your considerations the increasing groundswell of conservatism and support for anti-immigration and the very recent proclamations of anti-multiculturalism of the newly popular One Nation party:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6Y2wzmKHEU

The next federal election will be interesting as to the direction the Australian public wants to take the country, but it's not due until May 2028.

So either get in before then, or wait until afterwards to gauge your expectations of being welcome.

Having said that, the current Government (less conservative) won the May 2025 Federal election bigly (but maybe not quite a landslide) with 93 seats over the next most popular party at 43 seats, out of a total of 150 seats.

And do you meet other people who recently moved, or talking about moving there too ?

americans pretending they aren't immigrants by using the term expat always cracks me up

From what I understand, Spain has their own set of politics worth losing sleep over; perhaps as an expat you won't be as attached though.

Man Spain is mentioned as a top destination with expat influencers, youtubers and now even on hn. I get the feeling that something is going to crack at some point. You must be pricing out locals and they can't be happy about that.

Housing is really expensive in Spain and Portugal right now. I live in BC and mid/small cities there are actually more expensive than here

> Why leave: Sick of U.S. politics and the way it directly and indirectly affects us and how difficult it is to escape from it - it’s a major point of conversations with family and friends, it’s on the local radio, local subreddit, local social media pages, etc.

I mean so you'll move to Spain and just be horrible ignorant of any issues facing the local population, living in a financial bubble where you've earned significantly move then the them and can ignore any political issues locally.

Sure it's "freeing" to just move and stop caring about "politics" and use money to smooth over or move again if anything slightly bothers you.

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social security and medicare?

Starting wars was stupid and dumb and I hope the next administration cuts military just as severely but cutting spending severely isn't wrong.

Cutting military should be done, yes. But everything needs to get cut.

The Democrats only ran a balanced budget because of the Republican Revolution that got Republicans as a majority in the House.

Given the reproducibility crisis and perverse incentives of the past several decades, it may be less significant than you think. There’s no philosopher stone that turns money into impactful research. Fewer people in it for the love of the game focused on fewer problems may actually be a good thing.

The American Empire is gone and not coming back. It rose in a very different world and once these competitive advantages in science and elsewhere have been squandered they won't ever get back to the same level; there's too much competition from other countries now and too little faith that the US won't do this again.

As much as I hate it, we're heading into a more violent and less prosperous world. Whatever that morphs into long term almost certainly won't be as nice for Americans as the recent past was.

Our capitulation to Iran, a third rate military power that we chose to attack and then lost to, is really driving home the point at the moment.

The soft power the US has lost will take a generation or more to rebuild if it's ever rebuilt.

"A handful of years"? This is like the trend in K–12 education of blaming all issues on the COVID-19 pandemic. No, education was in a visible decline for five years before COVID, which means it had probably been declining for another decade or two before that.

I honestly think the decline started sometime in the 80s when it was accepted that everything is solely about profits and nothing else. It took a while but the enshittification of the country is accelerating. The latest developments are in my view just a symptom of this much longer trend.

If we want to prevent this from happening people need to be able to trust their government and feel their interests are shared by their representatives.

I for one welcome -the ̶̶̶̶̶screw ̶̶̶̶worm- our new AI overlords.

The piñata bit is a bit hyperbolic, but largely I agree that it’s a movement built against the principles of the enlightenment, and the movements of modernism and post-modernism that grew out of it.

It’s like: what if we took all of the principles of the enlightenment, and forced them through a sieve that served our racist, xenophobic, chauvinist world view? Rediscovering eugenics and pseudoscience, especially for christofascist ambitions and exploitative grifting.

Trump is a populist doing populist things, including attacking the intellectuals.

Conservatives have been basically purged from academia over the last 30 years, which frankly was a pretty dumb "victory" to celebrate, because now they voted in a dumb gorilla that is just smashing things as revenge.

1850s was the beginning of the railroad boom. You're thinking 1750s.

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Then there would be someone else who'd come. Considering they came to US and not to other places out of Europe. It would mean conditions were favorable in US.

You're not wrong, but let's not forget that some large number of scientists (cough Werner von Braun cough) were fleeing prosecution as Nazis.

I've seen clear discrimination in favor of foreign students, but it was specifically because of those abusive conditions. I know of professors who exclusively tried to recruit specific foreign nationalities (their own, typically) because they could get away with treating them worse than American students. I wouldn't have been able to get into those labs, but I also wouldn't want to.

im referring to the admissions process, and this discrimination has been present for decades

During my engineering grad program I was fascinated by the gender disparity among americans (almost no women) versus the nearly equal gender balance among engineering grad students from India, the Middle East (including Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia), and China.

The engineering gender imbalance seems to be almost unique to the USA. Countries with awful records on women's rights sent just as many women to get PhDs as men.

My understanding this is because being a grad student is hardly an economically good deal for a typical American student, but for the sort of foreigner who can afford to send their child to school in the US, it can still be valuable.

yeah most people are normal human beings, im saying the discrimination happens in getting admitted into the program

I know a ton of people who would love to get their Phd. When they can't make it work but see graduate programs heavily populated by foreign students (who may or may not stay) funded by (what they see as) their tax dollars, some become resentful. That's a pretty normal human reaction, not a uniquely white or American one. Understanding human realities and optics might have helped here. But instead you chose 'white people evil, Americans suck'. Not productive and in part how we got here with those positions now unfunded, and just as small minded as the attitudes you're condemning.

I don't know, I did grad school in psychology and our grants would have been classified as "Medicine" or "Health" but a huge % of it is fundamentally ideological work rather than basic research. Academia really is a complicated mess, it's not an easy problem.

It's actually kind of a hard problem.

There are tens of thousands of grants. Some of them are classified as "medicine" and study things like hormones, some are classified as "computer science" or "mathematics" and study things like statistical bias. Which of these are the "real science" ones (e.g. HRT in older people with menopause or low-T) and which are the partisan-coded ones (e.g. gender HRT)?

Put aside whether or not you think the latter should be funded and suppose you're just trying to distinguish them to make sure the former continues to be. If you can't do it accurately then the current administration will do it anyway but with a machete instead of a scalpel. You'd need a large team of people who can tell the difference to go through them all and classify them. This is nominally the job of the thing referred to as the "deep state", but what do you do if you don't expect them to be non-partisan?

This is why strategies like "have partisans capture the administrators for our side" are a mistake.

I'm curious why you think this would be an easy task. It strikes me as quite difficult! Separating scientific wheat from chaff requires a lot of effort and expertise.

As one famous example, Sokal intentionally made up funny bullshit and still fooled a ton of people!

and esp. since DOGE was led by Musk, who has an appreciation of basic science. One'd think he'd exercise good judgement and caution when it comes to cutting funding for science research.

Research on weather and climate is now considered "woke". Anything can be labeled as partisan. Safer to stop funding all research, unless it can be shown to support what we already believe.

My own experience during my PhD was that a few, if any, PI cared about your growth as a scientist. All they cared about was progress on their project which sometimes are the same. Most of the time they are not.

>What kind of person isn't curious about the puzzle of their own existence

A person who struggles to put food on the table and a roof over their heads, for one.

> What kind of person isn't curious about the puzzle of their own existence, or the nature of the physical reality they live in (and yes, by "being curious" I mean "being willing to put a tax dollar amount to them")?

Creationists.

> What kind of person isn't curious about the puzzle of their own existence

A person who is certain they already know the answer.

That's foolish. There is certainly an amount of money on funding research that is unreasonable! Determining where that line should rest is an inherently political question. Determining who should get funding for that is also a political question. The latter question was able to be papered over for many years because the scientific community generally contained roughly equal members of both parties. Since that isn't true any longer now "science" is getting treated like interest group just like all the other groups within the country. It's definitely going to hurt the country in the long run, but acting like this wasn't going to happen eventually when the university system purged itself of moderates and conservatives is foolish and obscures the part of the problem that came from the universities themselves.

A person who’s been told all the people doing the science look down on them. Partially true, too, based on how I’ve heard people talk about ”dumb redneck trump voters”

If the 20-something’s at DOGE proved anything last year, the keyword “black” associated with grant funding probably put the research on a list of DEI cuts.

Whatever diversity sections were required in grant proposals are nothing compared to the situation right now.

If your guy couldn’t say stuff like we will do outreach to local CCs, will design summer research programs, etc, then they’re just not a very good grant writer

People that view DEI like this are incredibly lost. The vast majority of cases of DEI initiatives are so tame, and nothing like they are portrayed as. "Pledge allegiance to the left" come on be real. The modern conservative movement is so unserious.

Please, please take a break from Fox News. This is so detached from reality it’s actually frightening.

So now we just require them to pledge allegiance to Trump instead.

> If I wanted racial purity in my collaborators it get a time machine to 1930s Germany.

If you knew more about it than some memes about racism, you'd know that the nihilism, this thin-skinned "at least we'll take them with us" sentiment you just expressed, was at the heart of it. But they had a lost war and the 1920s to be bitter about, the treaty of Versailles, not someone who "couldn't shut up" about something. The mind boggles.

Imagine that your people had the land you'd been living on for countless generations invaded, taken from them after a bloody campaign, where the survivors were forced into poverty in concentration camps, where they could not leave, where many women had their fallopian tubes tied without even their knowledge, where children were beaten for speaking their language, where they were intentionally and deliberately kept in structural poverty for generations, and other horrors.

What kinds of damages would you think your descendants should be owed? If you heard that the restitution given was for those who managed to climb into the ivory tower of academia are now first in line for research grants... Sure, that's a trade.

There are many scholarships, grants, services, and opportunities for descendants of Holocaust victims who had their property and lives taken from them. Do you support that? What's the difference?

> That they were getting government support because of it makes the me not care much about the fact the system is being burned down today.

I just want you to sit with that sentence for a minute. You'd rather have no publicly funded science, you'd rather have the entire enterprise collapse, just because of some people are getting research funding because they are descendants of genocide victims? Seriously?

Citation needed.

DEI statements are not about quotas. Anyone who was using them as quotas was acting illegally. But so far there has been no attempts at showing that that was the case anywhere (only people spouting off, like Charlie Kirks's statement about a theoretical black pilot).

How the fuck are ocean buoys based on skin color?

"I'm a slow learner, it's true, but... I learn."

In EU there are laws that force universities to give researchers a permanent contract after a couple years. The result? Everyone gets fired every couple of years. In certain fields, this implies changing country every couple of years.

Not that the university is paying much anyway, often the opposite: the researcher gets their own grant and they are forced to pay a cut to the host university, or to their group leader. It can get rather feudal.

The controversy is over whether we should learn more about it and take appropriate actions, or ignore it. This fundamental disagreement makes it a controversial topic.

Reminds me of the when all the catholic priests were molesting kids and being moved around instead of outed and prosecuted. This was also a controversial topic too for the same reasons. Some people wanted to take action, while other (more powerful) people wanted to ignore it.

Maybe off-topic, but sadly, climate change is an inconvenient topic for everyone. There's one thing that the poor, angry, ready-to-eat-the-rich masses hate more than the world warming up, and that's higher gas prices. Polices to reduce fossil fuel usage by making them expensive are strikingly unpopular across the world, regardless of how much they say they hate fossil fuel CEOs.

Indeed! Not scientifically controversial at all, but politically controversial, unfortunately.

It's a propaganda talking point. "Controversy" is generally as much a manufactured product as possible, because it assists propaganda goals.

And these same people likely fund "reports" and "news" with misinformation to make it confusing for the average person.

In theory it can also be beneficial to historical cold countries like Russia and Canada.

It’s entirely possible Russia will find itself with a pacific warm water port.

Perhaps tons of tundra frost will become fertile farm land.

Of course this is at the costs of billions of climate refugees having to migrate as well as a bunch of other side effects

> I just want to vent: climate change is not a controversial topic, it's an inconvenient topic for people making a lot of money.

If you’d like to do your part against climate change, you can start by walking everywhere today, avoiding heating and cooling your home, and never flying a plane again. These are changes I’m not willing to make, so the issue isn’t just inconvenient for the wealthy—it’s inconvenient for everyone. It’s easy to shift the problem onto others without doing anything about it yourself.

It is best to say that it is a religious topic. Everybody has strong opinions about it, but nobody has ever bothered to look into any details of atmosphere physics.

Everybody thinks he knows everything about the subject, but nobody ever checked anything. If people go into the details of some absorption spectrum they risk to get cancelled.

It's religion - and a strong one. With dogmas, taboos and holy authorities.

> You seem strongly in favor science that you understand, and opposed to research that you don't take an interest in or have read.

Just say it the clear way, so that everyone can see what you're doing: if I don't like it, it must be because I don't understand it.

The replication crisis in science is particularly bad within the social sciences, and also particularly bad within sociology. When experts within a field are unable to converge on a result, it's pretty decent evidence that the field has a major problem. And for sociology, the problem isn't that the math is too hard, it's that the practice of sociology is pretty much a political exercise masquerading as science.

Yes, we should fund grants to make sure that the heliocentric model is still wrong.

> Yours is an "ends justify the means" argument, but are you comfortable with the way these cuts were done?

Generally no. But I also think that certain classes of keyword filtering were probably a good idea. Filtering for any grants with "structural determinants of health" and reviewing them intensively with the goal of defunding 99%, for example, is probably a good idea.

> Would you approve so robustly of your own research being cut with a keyword search for government-unapproved terms?

I mean, there's zero chance my research would have fallen afoul of any such terms, but let me put it this way: my field was completely up-ended by DeepMind. They not only won a Nobel for that work in record time, but used an approach so severely out of fashion that it couldn't really get any attention.

I guess I'm saying: I don't think it would have been so bad to cut most of it, if it meant that we got more actual diversity in the field.

How does it feel to spread miss-information on internet? The Panama barrier was broken by screwworms 2 years before the cuts. It was dumb decision but didn't directly cause current infestation.

I believe it's a fairly common attitude. Thus far it doesn't seem to be down voted.

I wrote what I think of as a fairly coherent objection. I expect it to be voted down. Would you also recommend "pre vouching" for it?

> Diabetes is getting worse, just saying that "we looked at poor people's problems 50 years ago so don't need to look at them again" isn't going to flag it up.

Great! Do actual research into curing/treating/preventing diabetes. Do randomized trials on nutritional interventions in poor communities! Do any of a million other things that might actually affect the problem.

Do not: perform another observational study to see if poor people get diabetes more than rich people.

Intelligent response.

This is obviously an overly simple narrative, but one real factor: the Bell Labs model was built around giving brilliant people a lab and a bunch of funding, and leaving them on their own to explore for a while. Lots of blue sky goofy research, a lot of which ended up being useful. That has its own problems, including “which few brilliant minds get this opportunity?” and “how do we make the researchers accountable for actually getting something done?”

These are both reasonable questions about equitability and accountability. Unfortunately the solution we chose is a proliferation of bureaucracies that micromanage funding allocation and use. Some widely acknowledged consequences are 1) researchers spend more and more time writing grants and reports, and less and less doing research, and 2) the funding agencies (public and private, but especially public) are conservative and overwhelmingly fund work that they know will succeed. In practice that encourages monothink and endless incremental improvements on things that we already know how to do, and disincentives dissent, creativity, and real blue sky novel ideas.

Everyone loves to say they support creative ground breaking ideas, but that requires letting smart people sit around and think for a long time. And however smart they are, results are not guaranteed. The bureaucratic process is always going to prefer short term thinking with clear “deliverables”, even when it’s detrimental to progress.

Those were all ultimately for profit companies. You can only get so far with basic science if some bean counter is looking for a return on investment in the near future.

What those companies did is notable, but I think you are overselling their contributions to science. We've gotten way more scientific advancement from publicly funded science. There are private companies allowed to do R&D all over the world. Publicly funded independed science research is what has set the US apart.

Each of those companies had a profitable near monopoly, and were heavily vertically integrated.

Xerox PARC is a bit of an outlier, they didn't commercialize much of the things we remember them for. But Bell labs and IBM Research fed Bell and IBM lots of commercially viable stuff.

The reformed ATT is dominant in its industry, but one of several, and its industry is no longer all forms of real time communication. And afaik, they don't make any equipment anymore, etc.

There are not so many vertically integrated companies anymore. The market values the parts moee than the whole, so spinning out manufacturing or logistics or etc is a popular thing.

> What made places like Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, IBM Research, etc thrive? What happened to that mechanism, and can we have it back?

They were all playing around in a new field that had just opened up.

Research effectiveness is downstream of what's available to be found in the idea mines.

That's a good question, and I'd also add the Manhattan Project, the NIH, the NSF, NOAA, Fermilab, NIST, NCAR, and academic research including the state "land grant" universities. Every complex system has failure modes, but there must be success stories to learn from in all of those programs.

Disclosure: My education was funded by NSF, and I now work for a company that sells stuff for government funded research, though not exclusively.

Bell labs and IBM made gobs of money in their respective hey days

Bell Labs, which blew the rest away, was entirely government-subsidized in the form of the AT&T monopoly on telephone service. I'm not sure if AT&T was required to run Bell Labs or if it was just an enlightened policy that they were able to implement because of their unique circumstances, though.

For profit capitalism, and smashing of near monopoly pricing power, and questionable morals.