Science is dying – and no one seems to care
Science seems all but doomed, observes columnist Tim van Opijnen. And that’s not just in the United States, where he lives and works, but in Europe as well. The result? China is now effortlessly overtaking us. “While we’re still debating whether investing in science is even necessary, China is going all-in for the long term.”
A couple of weeks ago four Nobel laureates stood in a gazebo on Boston Common. They were there for “Stand Up for Science,” a demonstration to rally the troops to protect science from being dismantled. However, even in the most scientifically dense city in America only a hundred or so people bothered to show. Two weeks earlier I had attended an anti-ICE demonstration in the same place; it was freezing, while a brass band electrified thousands of people who believed democracy still has a chance. That was a movement. The gazebo was a vigil.
I stood there in the snow with frozen toes, a scientist who knows exactly what is being lost and all I felt was disappointment. I wondered if even I, someone whose life is invested in that gazebo couldn’t sustain my fury, what chance does anyone else have?
The Trump administration last year proposed cutting the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the largest funder of research in the life sciences in the world, by 40%. Congress blocked it, we all exhaled in relief and went on our merry ways declaring victory. But due to a lack of transparency, it now seems that new grants are somehow only being awarded at less than a third of their normal rate. In other words, the 40% cut was stopped at the front door but simply strolled in through the window while we have all been watching the circus in the streets headlining extrajudicial killings on Monday, and bombs on “name your favorite country that has lots of oil” on Tuesday.
Science is not being dismantled because anyone has calculated it is expendable. On the contrary, NIH investment underlies more than half of all FDA-approved drugs over the past two decades, returning two and a half dollars for every dollar invested. The mRNA platform that put a COVID vaccine in your arm in record time was assembled over decades in underfunded public laboratories. The fact that we have every rational reason to double down and are dismantling instead is not a policy failure. It is a confession about what we actually value, versus what we tell ourselves we do. It’s not a mistake, it’s a choice.
And in Washington no one is losing sleep over it. Because there is no rival vision being protected. No competing theory of human flourishing being advanced. What exists in its place is spectacle, self-enrichment, and daily political theater. Science is not being dismantled to build something better. It is being torn down to build back nothing.
No courage
Perhaps you are reading this from the ‘grachtengordel’ in Amsterdam or “‘t Kopje van Bloemendaal”, recognizing America’s self-destruction from a comfortable distance. I want to disturb that distance with some precision. Last week the ERC released a white paper confirming what researchers have known for a generation: Europe’s scientific landscape is fractured into two tiers and lacks cohesion. The Draghi report called this existential in 2024, recommending the research budget be doubled. The political response was an insulting €25 million compromise. Twenty-six years after the European Research Area became an official objective, it remains aspiration dressed as architecture. When European officials magnanimously invited displaced American scientists to rebuild their careers in the ‘old country’, they were extending the hospitality of someone offering a guest room they forgot was dismantled years ago. The EU’s failure seems less theatrical than Washington’s. More managerial. More fluent in the language of frameworks and multi-stakeholder consultations. But the vacancy at its center is identical: no vision, no courage, no leader willing to say: this is where we are going and what we’re building, and we are serious about it.
Meanwhile, and this is where ‘Western’ self-congratulation should have the decency to fall silent, the Nature Indexreported last year that eight of the world’s top ten research institutions by output are now Chinese. One belongs to the US. One to Europe. We have told ourselves for decades that China’s rise was built on imitation, on IP developed in Western laboratories and appropriated eastward. That story is finished. China has its own issues but made a long-term national bet on science while we are arguing about whether the bet is necessary in the first place. We are still telling the old story because the new one has consequences.
Choice of now
Which is why my favorite show right now is For All Mankind on Apple TV. It imagines a single counterfactual (spoiler alert!): on June 26 1969 the Soviets reach the Moon first. Subsequently it traces what happens when a civilization refuses to concede the future. The space race never ends. Technologies develop that didn’t in our timeline. Others, engineered specifically to colonize human attention, never find the oxygen to ignite. It is science fiction. It is also the only place I have recently encountered the argument that no serving leader in Washington, Brussels or the Hague has had the imagination to make: that the future is not a destination we are being carried toward, but a choice, made right now, in the granular present tense of never-awarded grants, empty gazebos and researchers boarding planes waving farewell to a country that was once scientifically great. That one shift in what a civilization decides to care about rewrites everything downstream, including the technology you never become addicted to, because we were working on something important. A screenwriter imagined this. Our leaders could not be bothered. And for the most part neither can we. It could all have been different. The only reason it isn’t is because we decided it wouldn’t.
Tim van Opijnen is a professor of pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA, where his lab develops new antibacterial therapies. He writes a monthly column for Folia about conducting research in Trump’s America.
