Tim van Opijnen | The US are on fire – and yet I stay, against my better judgment
Professor Tim van Opijnen works at Harvard in the United States. For Folia, he will be writing columns over the next six months about what it is like to work as a scientist in the US right now. Under President Donald Trump, everything is changing at a rapid pace. “While the flames are shooting through the roof, friends in Europe ask me why I’m still staying.”
This morning I woke up to the 1990s hit “Fire Water Burn” on the radio. For the past twenty years, that song has always reminded me of the unfortunate end of my parents’ farmhouse in the Zaan region. For an hour, a fire silently spread through the thatched roof. By the time the flames finally broke through, my parents tried desperately to put it out, but the house could not be saved. Today, though, I no longer thought of that house, but of the country I had moved to around the same time.
Why I was so determined, after studying and earning my PhD at the University of Amsterdam, to move to the United States was something I explained on Radio 1 in 2007: “Because I want to work in the Champions League of the life sciences,” I said with bravado.
Liberating
That ambition didn’t come out of nowhere. Back in 1999, I first flew to the US for an internship in Rochester, upstate New York — a city firmly within the Rust Belt. Its days of industrial glory were long gone, downtown lay deserted, and the dissatisfaction of people in the region was palpable.
And yet, the US felt liberating: for weeks on end we experimented late into the night. I stood with goosebumps during a speech by Al Gore on his presidential campaign. In a beat-up Chevy pickup we drove past endless cornfields in Indiana, and I felt how a society can encourage you to dream big. Boston would eventually become my home base: eight top universities, four thousand startups, and the research centers of every major pharmaceutical company, all within biking distance. Science on steroids — an environment where, as a researcher, it’s impossible not to get swept along.
Blind
But this past week, with the attack on Charlie Kirk, a far-right “influencer,” it finally dawned on me that I have been blind to something enormous. The first time Trump was elected felt like a once-in-a-lifetime event; the coup on January 6 was instigated by QAnon extremists; and for three years, Trump’s reelection seemed impossible. Then came the relentless inflation, Biden’s stubborn refusal—despite his rapid decline—to step aside, and the attempt on Trump’s life, which together paved the way for his return to power.
I occasionally came across Kirk on the internet platform Reddit. He would debate young people, and his views were so extreme that I dismissed him as a fringe lunatic without real influence. I expected his death would dominate the news cycle for no more than 24 hours. After all, what impact could the death of one man have in a country where school shootings occur almost daily?
What a miscalculation. Kirk managed to pull countless young people sharply to the right and was thus instrumental in Trump’s reelection. His assassination has dominated the news for days, Republicans and Democrats are being pitted against each other, and the president is asking live on Fox why he should even try to unite the country.
Taboo
In this first column, I wanted to write about how science in the US is under pressure: how vaccines have become a taboo word, how research funding is facing cuts of more than sixty percent. How, under the pretext of rising antisemitism, the government has frozen two billion dollars in research funding for Harvard. How my infectious disease lab now faces the threat of closure. How, in the corridors, there is talk that Harvard—like other institutions—is on the verge of capitulating and paying the government hundreds of millions of dollars in “extortion fees,” surrendering its autonomy simply to put an end to the intimidation.
But the incomprehensible refrain of “Fire Water Burn” made me decide otherwise: “…the roof is on fire, we don’t need no water, let the motherfucker burn…” While the flames shoot through the roof, the media proclaim this might actually be the solution to everything, and Kirk is being sanctified, friends in Europe ask me why I am still here. But this is home, and when my parents’ house caught fire, they didn’t run either. You stay and fight for it—even if, perhaps, against your better judgment.
Tim van Opijnen is alumnus of the UvA and professor of Pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston (USA), where his lab develops new antibacterial therapies. As of now he writes a monthly column about science under the Trump Administration.
