Global science ‘will be fine’

Every scientific empire falls, but “some civilizations have willfully squandered their scientific advantage,” The Atlantic says.

For example, Spanish science suffered during the Inquisition. The Soviet Union sabotaged its own scientific successes.

Adolf Hitler had “the greatest talent for scientific self-harm,” according to The Atlantic. Germany had been a great scientific power going back to the late 19th century. But Hitler’s purges of Jewish professors and others who opposed his rule led to a move of the center of gravity for science to the United States.

Now, amid President Trump’s “multipronged assault on America’s research institutions,” U.S. scientists are being pursued by China, the EU, individual European countries, Canada and others.

“If the U.S. is no longer the world’s technoscientific superpower, it will almost certainly suffer for the change. America’s technology sector might lose its creativity. But science itself, in the global sense, will be fine. The deep human curiosities that drive it do not belong to any nation-state,” The Atlantic says.