[ProjectArcturis]

This kind of Level 1 analysis misses what is really going on. "Brain drain" is not really a concern.

There is a tremendous glut of talented biomedical researchers. We have been overproducing them for decades. Even before the cuts, it was incredibly hard to go from a PhD to a tenured professorship. 5-15% would achieve that, depending how you measured.

The cuts have made things worse, but European/RoW funding is even stingier. It's not like there's a firehose of funding drawing away researchers. There may be a few high-profile departures, but the US is still the least-bad place to find research money.

We need to produce fewer PhDs and provide better support for those we do produce.

[tensor]

This kind of analysis isn't much better. First, many countries are increasing funding substantially (e.g. [1]).

Secondly, it's about more than funding. The US is also no longer safe for a great many of the scientists that would normally choose come to the US to work. And even for those that aren't too worried about ICE, scientists tend to be very liberal and value freedom and democracy a great deal. The US has suddenly become a very undesirable place to live if you value these things.

Third, scientific freedom is under attack in the US. And there is nothing scientists value more than the freedom to pursue their research.

My take is that most Americans can't imagine a world where they are not number one. But that is a very naive idea.

[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/innovation-science-economic-develop...

[radioactivist]

While I echo some of your points, [1] is bad example (as a Canadian).

Research money in Canada is harder to come by; a basic research grant is roughly ~5x-10x lower than a comparable American grant (students are cheaper here, so its not completely proportional, but equipment, travel, etc doesn't scale).

The example for money for poaching international researchers also comes with the asterisk that while they found ~$2B for this, they also are cutting the base funding of the federal granting agencies by a few percent at the same time, atop of that funding being anemic for decades at this point. A big "fuck you" to the Canadian research community in my opinion.

[ProjectArcturis]

> many countries are increasing funding substantially (e.g. [1]).

This illustrates exactly my point. Canada is planning on spending up to CAD$1.7B over 12 years. That is equivalent to USD$100M per year, or 0.3% of the NIH 2026 budget. Maybe if Europe does something similar they can get to 2%!

> The US is also no longer safe

I agree that Trump's regime has made the US a less welcoming place for foreign scientists, and that budget cuts mean less research will be done. What I disagree with is the idea that "brain drain" is a significant threat to US science. We simply have such an incredible oversupply of biomed PhDs that we should welcome the prospect of other countries absorbing the supply.

[juniperus]

it's all about funding. for every 1 person nervous about intellectual safety in the US, there are 50–100 waiting to fill that spot, if not 1,000–10,000. Funding has been cut in academia, and less positions are available as a result. No country is remarkably filling this gap, aside from a hilariously few more availabilities and some more graduate student positions (who operate as the scientific labor in Europe and other countries, before graduating and having to come to the US for job opportunity).

As others have pointed out, presumably the outcome is that higher value scientists are favored, and higher impact research is demanded. When industry demands certain research, the funding appears because private entities will fund those positions and those grants. The widespread funding of all avenues of science is a great feature of American intellectual culture and hopefully it doesn't vanish. But it was a remarkably uneconomical arrangement and a total aberration of history, so I wouldn't hold my breath about it sticking around through the tides of history, it was more of a fluke, and many in academia wishing to regenerate that fluke are a bit delusional and a bit tied to the idea of a golden era like the boomers dreaming of the 1950s suburbs. A great deal of research is important science, but totally worthless for the foreseeable future on an economic basis. We might not yet conceive of why this research does have economic value, but it's so abstracted that as it stands, the value isn't tangible and it's thus impossible to defend reasonably.

Scientific freedom doesn't mean the freedom to expect a subsidized career on the basis of non-lucrative research. It's more of a privilege to have such a lifestyle that is downstream of a wealthy empire. Since America is going bankrupt, the dollar-reaper is coming for the superfluous. So, there goes your funding for conure breeding or the health benefits of community gardens and expect more stability if you're researching crop diseases or livestock vector research.

[tick_tock_tick]

> scientists tend to be very liberal and value freedom and democracy a great deal

What is the alternative? Canada and Europe don't even have free speech.

[b65e8bee43c2ed0]

>scientists tend to be very liberal and value freedom and democracy a great deal

two election results in the past ten years have apparently failed to teach y'all wholesome folx that many people around you are secretly unwholesome.

[roger110]

I've heard more than 0 people complaining that it's not safe, but not a whole lot. And not the productive people either. Also, unfortunately the same opinions that get you in trouble in the US will get you in trouble in western Europe. I'm not saying it's right, just that it doesn't seem to be actually draining brains.

[darth_avocado]

While I agree, US is still the top destination for research, I don’t agree with “Brain Drain is not a concern” nor do I agree with “We need fewer PhDs”. The real risk of drain is people leaving their fields of expertise to never return. Pretty much all AI startups at the moment are coming from and being built by PhDs. The pace of innovation slows down and it can have huge long term economic impact. Having fewer PHDs also exacerbates that problem. If fewer people are looking for funding in the first place, you’d have even fewer ideas that could end up contributing meaningfully to society. The only solution to funding problems is more funding.

[ProjectArcturis]

>The real risk of drain is people leaving their fields of expertise to never return.

That is happening right now, all the time! Especially in the biomed field! Many, many PhDs spend 5-8 years getting their degree and receiving minimal pay, then 4+ years being nomadic postdocs, also making terrible money, only to eventually arrive at the end of the road and realize they have to do something completely different.

It is unsustainable for every professor to train 10 PhDs in their career, because there aren't going to be 10 professorships (or even 3) for those PhDs to fill. Funding has to grow at the same exponential rate as the number of researchers. It did, from roughly 1950s to 1980s, as the university system expanded to accommodate the Boomer generation. It has slowed since, and the PhD to professorship pipeline got longer and leakier. It's doing a tremendous disservice to the bright, well-intentioned young people who join PhD programs.

[janalsncm]

Why does the fact that there isn’t enough funding for the PhDs that exist imply we should produce fewer of them? At least from what the article mentions, figuring out new and better ways to fight diseases seems like one of the most important problems a human could be working on. In my mind the solution is to provide funding and fix the funding process, not produce fewer scientists.

Also, those scientists already exist. If the US decides not to fund them, they will go produce patents and grow the economies of other places. Many countries wish they could attract the talent that the US does.

[iugtmkbdfil834]

<< Why does the fact that there isn’t enough funding for the PhDs that exist imply we should produce fewer of them?

In most of the world, most humans have to move within the realm of available resources. One could easily say that if a manager of US sees too many PhDs, it is natural to conclude that since there is not enough resources to go around, adding more resource consumers is silly. We can argue all over whether it is a good policy, or whether the allocation makes sense, or whether the resources are really not there, but, how is is this a difficult logic gate?

[mtsr]

You are forgetting that tenured researchers often need lots of PhD students to actually do their research. So that ratio of 8 PhDs to a tenured researchers could actually be pretty good.

[141205]

You would forget that this would cause exponential growth: in a couple decades, a single lab could produce more people seeking tenure track than an entire country's worth of positions; there need to be smarter ways to provide the requisite labor for science, since this is clearly unsustainable praxis. Running a pyramid scheme of this magnitude is only going to cause an implosion—which we may already be witnessing.

[jltsiren]

That's a result of the funding model focused on small competitive grants. You could probably get at least as good research with a funding model that replaces every three PhD students with a student and a staff scientist. But then the society would have fewer PhDs overall, which would have unpredictable consequences.

[ProjectArcturis]

Pretty good for the professor, not so good for the students.

[Xeronate]

Purely anecdotal, but my friend's dad was a professor at well respected university in California doing Cancer research and recently moved to China even though he didn't want to because the money was too much for him to pass up.

[eunos]

> We need to produce fewer PhDs and provide better support for those we do produce.

You'll have gluts of Masters then and so on.

[lukev]

Set aside the question of how we might implement this (which I grant is complex and path-dependent)... but imagine if 5% of the wealth of every US billionaire were instead allocated to research and development.

Ultimately I don't think even the billionaires would be unhappy.

[ikrenji]

why produce less PhDs instead of fixing funding? in what world does the pentagon need 1 trillion dollars while NIH gets 10 billy or so?

[pks016]

One can dream. Capitalist society would never reduce their PhD slaves. Saying this as someone who's closer to finishing PhD.