We Are Watching a Scientific Superpower Destroy Itself

The Felon's regime is steadily implementing Project 2025 which was drafted by white "Christian" nationalist who want to return America to 1950, make open racial discrimination and homophobia socially acceptable again, and to silence knowledge and scientific endeavors that challenge the 12th century religious beliefs of the political right.  Hence the attacks on universities under the concocted excuse they they have nor reined in antisemitism - even though MAGA world is largely antisemitic - , the slashing of funding for scientific and medical research and the erasure of any whisper in favor of diversity, equity and inclusion. Project 2025 authors hold a zero sum world view: if any gays or non-whites improve their lot, it's claimed to be at the expense of whites, particularly white heterosexual males. In this quest to embrace ignorance and wipe away knowledge and science that shows the errors of Christofascist beliefs, severe damage is being done to America's position as a scientific super power.  Already, China has made huge strides to surpass America as a scientific leader and this self-destruction of America's scientific prowess will only accelerate America's decline.   Throw in the efforts of red state governors and legislatures to end vaccine mandates, and America will be a far sicker and less prosperous nation.  A piece the New York Times looks at the immense damage being done:

The Trump administration’s assault on America’s universities by cutting billions of dollars of federal support for scientific and medical research has called up from somewhere deep in my memory the phrase “duck and cover.” These were words drilled into American schoolchildren in the 1950s. . . . Though even in elementary school most of us intuited that there was something futile in these attempts to shield ourselves from destruction, we dutifully went through the motions. How else could we deal with the anxiety caused by the menace?

The anxiety greatly increased in October 1957, when Americans learned of the Soviet Union’s successful launch of the world’s first satellite, Sputnik 1. The vivid evidence of the technological superiority in rocketry of our Cold War enemy provoked a remarkably rapid response. In 1958, by a bipartisan vote, Congress passed and President Dwight Eisenhower signed the National Defense Education Act, one of the most consequential federal interventions in education in the nation’s history. Together with the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, it made America into the world’s undisputed leader in science and technology.

Nearly 70 years later, that leadership is in peril. According to the latest annual Nature Index, which tracks research institutions by their contributions to leading science journals, the single remaining U.S. institution among the top 10 is Harvard, in second place, far behind the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

A decade ago, C.A.S. was the only Chinese institution to figure in the top 10. Now eight of the 10 leaders are in China. If this does not constitute a Sputnik moment, it is hard to imagine what would.

But if America’s response to Sputnik reflected a nation united in its commitment to science and determined to invest in the country’s intellectual potential, we see in our response to China today a bitterly divided, disoriented America. We are currently governed by a leader indifferent to scientific consensus if it contradicts his political or economic interests, hostile to immigrants and intent on crippling the research universities that embody our collective hope for the future. The menace now is within. And with very few exceptions, the leaders of American universities have done little more than duck and cover.

The N.D.E.A. reflected the widespread realization that something had to be done in schools and universities besides teaching students to hide under their desks. The country urgently needed more trained physicists, chemists, mathematicians, aerospace engineers, electrical engineers, material scientists and a host of other experts in STEM fields, and the government grasped that to get them would take a massive infusion of money pumped into schools and universities: roughly $1 billion, the equivalent of more than $11 billion today.

From the start, this government investment in education wasn’t free of ideological interest. It was fueled by fear — fear of the Russians, fear of the atomic bomb, fear of falling behind in the “space race” — and intended to influence curricula. . . . . Until 1962, recipients of N.D.E.A. funds had to sign an affidavit affirming that they did not support any organization that sought to overthrow the U.S. government. But in one of those moments in which the right policy is chosen for the wrong reason, Southern segregationists in Congress, worried that some of the funds might be used to further desegregation efforts, added a provision stipulating that no part of the act would allow the federal government to dictate school curriculum, instruction, administration or personnel.

The act also played a significant role in diversifying the nation’s campuses by providing low-interest loans to applicants in need, incidentally challenging policies that had restricted admission for disfavored groups, such as Jewish, Asian, Black, Polish and Italian students.

What began as a project of national security blossomed into a generator for limitless curiosity, creativity and critique. A seemingly unending succession of inventions and discoveries emerged with the support of the laboratories and research institutes of American universities: the internet, the M.R.I., recombinant DNA, human embryonic stem cells, CRISPR genome editing, the contributions to mRNA technology that made a new generation of vaccines (including for Covid-19) possible, and on and on, along with epochal breakthroughs in our understanding of matter and the origin of the universe.

The result of the huge influx of tax dollars was institutions that not only trained scientists, medical researchers and weapons engineers but also cultivated sociologists, historians, philosophers and poets.  . . . .By the 1990s, American universities had become global cultural icons — envied for their intellectual breadth, celebrated for their academic freedom and eagerly sought after by international students who viewed them as the apex of open inquiry and prestige.

And now, notwithstanding its triumphs, the whole enterprise is in serious trouble. The Trump administration began its assault by using the pro-Palestinian demonstrations on many campuses to charge elite universities with antisemitism. The rationale has largely shifted to complaints about affirmative action, diversity initiatives, liberal bias and the like. Scientific research has been curtailed; postdoctoral fellowships have been abruptly canceled; laboratories have been shuttered and visas denied. The damage to scientific enterprise extends beyond our borders, whether it’s from the cancellation of nearly $500 million in funding for mRNA research under the health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a kind of Lysenko lite — or the purging of data on which climate researchers around the world depend. We will never know what diseases might have been cured or what advances in technology might have been invented had the lights not gone out in the labs.

Why on earth would we abandon institutions that have genuinely made America great? Why would we squander the world’s admiration for this magnificent achievement of ours? Why would we put at risk laboratories that are working to cure cancers or perfecting artificial limbs or exploring deep space or testing the limits of artificial intelligence?

We need to get up from under our desks and persuade our fellow citizens that the institutions that they have helped create with their tax dollars are incredibly precious and important.