DW - "Great Opportunity" For Max Planck Institut As Applications From US Scientists Spike 2-300%

[hatrack]

EDIT

"We can suddenly recruit talent that we would not have been able to attract under normal circumstances," said Patrick Cramer, President of the Max Planck Society in Germany. The prospect of a US science brain drain is seen as "a great opportunity for Europe as a research location," said Cramer.

Applications from US scientists to the group of 84 Max Planck Institutes have at least doubled and, in some cases, tripled. "But for research as a whole, it is a clear step backwards, something that worries me greatly," he said.

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"It's important to stand ready to take in outstanding researchers who have to or want to leave the US," said Christina Beck, head of communications at the Max Planck Society in Munich. Beck told DW that universities and research centers around Germany were "expecting a lot more applications from the US." Some European research institutes were looking to attract US-based researchers by making it easier for them to relocate and continue their work here.

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Some European science funders warn against exploiting the challenges US-based scientists face. "We should avoid saying 'God, they are having a bad time over there, now let's go and snatch them all back,'" said Maria Leptin, president of the European Research Council, at the European Parliament in February. But many others feel that Trump's science policies will affect science globally and say that that is what they are fighting against. As some expressed in that article in Nature
, scientific research is an inherently international, collaborative effort. And there are indications that some of the cuts to US research have already affected projects in other countries.

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https://www.dw.com/en/trumps-assault-on-science-bad-for-the-us-good-for-eu/a-71897988

[NNadir]

2. There is great irony in this, given what took place in Germany in the 1930s.

German science was pretty much at a pinnacle in the world before Hitler came to power. In the 1930s the brain drain - many leading scientists were Jewish or descended from Jews - left Germany bereft of its scientific dominance, in effect transferring it to the United States.

A very sad case was that of David Hilbert, one of the finest mathematicians ever to have lived. When he died in 1943, only ten people attended his funeral. The world's greatest minds, who should have been there, had almost all left Germany.

A equally bad case was that of Max Planck, who tried, unsuccessfully, to stem the bleeding of German science. His son Erwin was executed for participation in a plot against Hitler in 1944. All of his papers, invaluable as they may have been for the history of science, were destroyed in a bombing raid.

German science never really recovered its former prominence, although when I was a kid Chemistry students were still expected to learn German.

Science is not a spigot you turn on and off. My own son, now a Ph.D. student, is trying to plan emigration, which I encourage. If he gets out of the country, I don't think he'll be coming back.

America, for so long a scientific powerhouse unprecedented in world history, will become a scientific backwater. Future science students will be told to learn Chinese or French or perhaps even German.

This post is an expanded paraphrase of an earlier post in this thread that I accidentally deleted while trying to edit it.