In addition there's a severe "passion tax" for these sorts of jobs, the salary difference for a "Data Scientist, Computational Biology", and "Computational Biologist" is pretty big, and hiring is also brutal.
I know a ton of extremely talented people who have been locked out of employment for a long time now. The high interest environment means that biotech investing has been hit extremely hard, as biotech is even higher risk than most software and AI spending (thanks for the correction, Schlagbohrer). Pharma companiees with big hits, like Lilly with GLP1 agonists, are hiring a bit as they try to move into the modern era of pharma with lots of AI tools, but it's still brutal.
I don't think this reasoning can work. To the extent these things are directly related, the relationship would have to be: returns on investment are at an all-time high --> more investing than usual.
I happily had a job in academia in the US. Probably what most would call “successful” after exiting a startup and getting a PhD I was US engineering faculty for 8 years.
We picked up our keys to our new house in another country a few days ago and I start next month with a faculty promotion. Many of my colleagues are or are looking to follow.
does that get you a new fed administration that isn't idiotically anti-science?
I've read that asia is leading the world in scientific discoveries and therefore Mandarin gets the naming rights. That's privilege and the reason English is fleeting
I don't think I believe that this is a real Confucius quote.
russia: brain drain
usa: brain drain
I am saying this as someone who pursued Canadian citizenship by descent and moved to New Zealand in the last year, so it's definitely happening some, but my impression so far is that the total number of people who actually make the move is small. Most people who are skilled enough for an overseas employer to jump through hoops to put them on a visa have more lucrative jobs available in the US that are closer to home without all of the downsides of emigration.
I would believe that a lot of dual citizens or skilled immigrants to the US are moving home.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6Y2wzmKHEU
The next federal election will be interesting as to the direction the Australian public wants to take the country, but it's not due until May 2028.
So either get in before then, or wait until afterwards to gauge your expectations of being welcome.
Having said that, the current Government (less conservative) won the May 2025 Federal election bigly (but maybe not quite a landslide) with 93 seats over the next most popular party at 43 seats, out of a total of 150 seats.
my guess is southeast asia may overtake europe in a decade or so considering how wildly popular asian culture is with teenagers.
Why Spain: Expat communities, cost of living, friendly visa options, beautiful climate.
Why leave: Sick of U.S. politics and the way it directly and indirectly affects us and how difficult it is to escape from it - it’s a major point of conversations with family and friends, it’s on the local radio, local subreddit, local social media pages, etc.
Also, I have over $7k in personal medical costs annually (out of pocket). That’s just me, not my family cumulatively. For Ostomy supplies, iron infusions, and more.
I mean so you'll move to Spain and just be horrible ignorant of any issues facing the local population, living in a financial bubble where you've earned significantly move then the them and can ignore any political issues locally.
Sure it's "freeing" to just move and stop caring about "politics" and use money to smooth over or move again if anything slightly bothers you.
Where are you heading?
Is the assertion there are no places for her to enjoy doing what she's great at, without leaving the country, in private industry?
Genuinely curious.
At least it's a good thing that we're able to a) observe and b) talk about and c) acknowledge openly(ish) that academic, mainstream, practicing "science" (including as visible to microscopists and all that entails) is currently a "mess".
This allows us to, eventually, address those issues (or die trying!).
Science used to move at a pace of one lifetime after another (pearl clutching 'til the end and confirmation bias and careers built on saving face and economic entrenchments all that).
But I hypothesize that with AI, we can point to "a thing that is not a person with all that is bundled up with that" and say "look, maybe this other train of thought is worth entertaining". Not to say the AI is right. Ideas will stand or fall on their own merit. Just that an AI is not a person outside the field. Normally, an outsider says something, nobody listens. But, if an anonymous AI says something (of course, cleaned up for voice and concision and validated by a human as a first pass), the worst you can say is "ok prove it" or "here is where that is wrong". Instead of: deafening silence.
In other words, I hope AI augments our ability to have those hard conversations that need to be had. Without people losing their jobs due to their prior (understandable) errors, and within the spirit of always using the best available information.
I shared this optimistic indirect use-case for AI with (less technical) friends recently, and they literally were speechless and finally one person said "you're the only one who thinks that".
Am I right, though? There's a there there, isn't there?
While there are a lot of problems with how the journal model of publication has evolved over time, and AI has actually made that problem far worse, not better, the real threat and "mess" that science is in currently in the US is from the administration.
Science in the US used to be one of the world's best funded science communities, and also one with the most independence. That is currently being reversed at a startling pace, both in funding and independence. This is the mess science is in, and it's a great loss for the world. While US science leadership may not have been without issue, it was still a huge positive for humanity. It's not about AI.
Science has had waves, and people have over pushed its advances (for profit) and hidden some of its shortcomings (we can point to a lot of problems) and is going through a massive reckoning where its influence is being curtailed.
Probably (IMO) the biggest problem science has, is that people don't realise that the key to its strength isn't that it finds all these advances/truths, but that it's comfortable with the idea that we really don't know anything.
Fundamentally science says - this is the best understanding we have of the given data, AND, reiterating that this is what people miss, science absolutely accepts that a better understanding or fresh data can at any moment in time change things.
That confuses most people, they like their understanding of the world to be concrete.
I'm sorry that scientific projects are being cut but are we supposed to keep funding everything ad infinitum regardless of how our economy and our future is going to be crippled by debt?
EVERYONE is going to be crying about their projects being cut and there's no good way to do it where everyone is going to be happy. Some people are going to lose their jobs, and that sucks but there is no other way except having the courage to cut funding. We have to cut everything and then reorganize at a lower budget number and the reallocate funds to the most important projects.
We can't keep funding everything. You may not care about our debt but I certainly do and there's more than enough of us around that care. Our descendants are going to be fucked and that's not fair. I'm sorry you're losing your job but soon over half our budget is going to be used to pay off interest on our debt. Just the interest and not the principal. This is an economic crisis.
Science funding is a minuscule part of the US budget
It depends. Do you want to be rich?
People don't "fund" science, they "invest" in science.
There is a big difference. Often, each dollar invested will return multiplied by five, ten or more.
But you can also spent 14 millions painting a pool in a different shade of blue or much more building the Barbie's disco dance house and will end with... the same pool, or a disco dance house that you will never be allowed to use. Is your money after all.
If you actually cared about the national debt you would back higher taxes and the democratic party given that the democrats are the only party who actually run a balanced budget at any point in the last 50 years.
But you don’t care about the national debt. You don’t care about the well being of americans. You don’t care about the cost of living, or protecting the environment for our children.
You don’t care about making the country better. All you care about is making sure that you don’t see anyone who is different. Your willful ignorance and hate disgusts me.
The GOP cut a measly $60 million per year for scientific monitoring instruments in the ocean, yet are increasing spending by hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on things like military spending, White House security, and deporting good people they call “illegals”.
They haven’t cut the national debt because they cut taxes on the rich. Taxing the rich could pay for all the science and gradually pay down the debt. But it’s in the GOP interest to cut science to dumb down the population. Climate change is “fake” they say, meanwhile Fox acquired Roku (100+ million households), Paramount (MAGA) acquiring Warner Brothers, CBS, CNN, etc. Oligarchs taking over TikTok and their disinformation machine strengthens.
What was that new number they were throwing around, 1.4 Trillion dollar budget?
But sure, let's worry about cutting funding to research institutes which were sucking the US dry with their budgets in the millions.
Seems to be playing out.
They have drowned their municipalities in debt cumulatively equivalent to the US federal and state debt as a percentage of GDP. Localities aren’t allowed to tax but are responsible for local services and industry. Local governments borrowed heavily to hit GDP growth targets and compete with each other for investment and talent.
There is now a backwards migration of the working class back to rural towns from the cities because the incentives China gives is towards technologies that only benefit their already upper-middle class workers. About 500 million Chinese live in rural areas and over 20% of their workforce toils in the fields. That’s not changing anytime soon. Youth unemployment has been 15-20+ percent for some time.
Take AI for instance. The US grid is struggling to keep up with demand, while Chinese one has a lot of headway [1]. Usually, this could be solved by an increase in spending lasting a few years which would make the debt tick up, but that would've been an absolutely fine use of debt since it buys some shiny new infra that will pay dividends for the next 20ish years.
Now? Not possible. The US is already drowning in debt and the usual buyers are not showing up to buy it because of the Iran fiasco. With oil so expensive everyone was using their USD reserves to buy oil, not debt. Which mades interest rates go up considerably, and for a country with already ~130% of debt/gdp ratio these are terrible news.
So, I don't think there will be a great power race. Europe is fucked by both high debt, and lack of innovation. Russia is struggling already to finance a war of conquest they started. China is the only one that can run if it comes down to it (unless of course the numbers coming out of China are mega bogus, but for that I don't know enough to have an opinion).
[1] https://fortune.com/2025/08/14/data-centers-china-grid-us-in...
I object. The CCP is much more deeply indebted than the US when taking into account provincial and local governments as well as state-owned enterprises.[0] And of course the US debt is financed in its own currency while Chinese foreign debt is financed in dollars or other currencies.
The problem in the US is regulation. An environmental impact study takes 54 months in the US.[1] The CCP, which has no problem poisoning its people or even launching rockets over inhabited villages, doesn't delay itself at all.[2] I'm glad we don't poison our people or place dangerous industry in places that could harm populated areas, or even perform some prophylactic measures to protect nature, but I'm confident that we could do this in less then a year (less than six months?) and make much faster progress. Even for something like nuclear, the ten years (mostly caused by red tape) are really onerous.
> China is the only one that can run if it comes down to it (unless of course the numbers coming out of China are mega bogus, but for that I don't know enough to have an opinion).
Yes, the common opinion among China watchers is that any number the CCP touches is "mega bogus." They're actually in the midst of something of a financial crisis at the moment because of the high debt.
[0]https://www.statista.com/topics/11662/debt-in-china/
[1]https://www.rff.org/publications/reports/how-long-does-it-ta...
[2]https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/11/china-keeps-dropping...
Spoken like somebody who has no idea what they are talking about.
Apart from the large share of fundamental science which Europe has always been bigger in and better at (I mean, there's a huge tunnel in Texas to show that Americans at some point understood this and tried to compete), Europe is funding the military tools of the next generation in Ukraine.
Americans used to be excellent executors, then China took that role. What's left?
They thought we were crashing, rushed the cockpit, and pushed forward as hard as they could on the stick. Forward is up, right?
Anything that depends on a basic understanding of the scientific process, and resulting scientific facts is absolutely a partisan issue right now.
The only relevant difference is that you might be able to push it back a bit on "strategic interest" types of arguments
The scientists need to market their research to exploit the biases of the administration. Sad that it's come to this.
If your guy couldn’t say stuff like we will do outreach to local CCs, will design summer research programs, etc, then they’re just not a very good grant writer
Creationists.
A person who struggles to put food on the table and a roof over their heads, for one.
A person who is certain they already know the answer.
Academia was not doing well pre-Trump. The DEI infection ran deep - and it still does. Complete nonsense was getting funded in the social sciences and cognitive science / psychology. It was really tragic. And now all these institutions are saddled with personnel debt. The morons they hired during the DEI moral panic - some of them are even tenured by now. People who overtly aren't even doing science - they are performing their politics with science. Overtly.
This is a blunt instrument, yes. But things were going very poorly overall, and we needed a shake-up.
Given the choice between: Biden (or later Harris) is elected and things keep going the way they were going, or the current timeline, I choose the current timeline.
(P.S.: Scientific American is trash now, you shouldn't read it. https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6202 )
You do understand that what's happening isn't merely a "shake up", right? It's the coordinated dismantling of structural components of America's innovation economy in ways that will take decades to recover from, if it all (can't do much if emigrants take their talents to China instead of the USA).
Strong "cut off your nose to spite your face" vibes. Hope that works out for you. It's not working out for many of my colleagues, especially early-career scientists at federal labs who are hemorrhaging from the system, often moving completely out of science altogether. Great return on investment we're getting for all those GRFPs!
No, that is just your opinion.
It's not exactly new. We've been through this with the crackdown on climate science during the W Bush administration, with sequestration during the early/mid 2010's, and with the budget shenanigans during the first Trump administration. Denying the painfully obvious impact of our contemporary science policy is like fiddling while Rome is burning.
"90% of the systematic differences in behavior between men and women are driven by biology"
"~70-80% of the variance in intelligence is heritable"
"Your personality is mostly defined by your genes"
"Small-scale societies before modernity were hierarchical and extremely violent, which is why they were successful"
"There are no matriarchal societies at all, past or present"
"Slavery was a human universal until recently. Its end was when a bunch of Westerners were like "Maybe that's wrong and we should stop" - and they forced everyone else"
You know what's also cutting off your nose to spite your face? Getting rid of math classes in public high schools because brown kids do poorly in them. All people are born a blank slate, amirite? So it must be ~~systemic racism~~. And bullshit "research" that was designed (and advertised) to come to that conclusion got funded everywhere. The government was entirely captured by this complete nonsense. And it did a huge amount of damage, not least of which is the reaction to it we are now experiencing.
I can imagine how it just seems like a stupid social game in physics, but if you study humans it's really the meat of the thing.
Man, if you think it was bad now, wait until you learn about lobotomies!
However, it also made us put ourselves out there and fundraise, which led to new connections and new opportunities.
So yes, it’s been chaotic, but like Petyr Baelish says, chaos is a ladder.
Edit: Interesting how controversial my take seems to be. I’ve seen votes on this post go up and down multiple times. Why only vote? Reply!
Rather than demand reversion back to mean, we should be asking, "Before we reset this system back to the way it was, was it working and are there improvements to be made?"
Because the current chaos can be viewed as an opportunity to improve, and we should take it because may of the systems in chaos today, were dysfunctional or in need of modernization yesterday.