In the latest example of insanity, congress wants to penalize scientists who dare to work with Chinese scientists.
Scientists and research advocates in the United States are mobilizing to fight a bill that would essentially prohibit researchers with any ties to China and other countries deemed hostile from receiving federal funding. Nearly 800 academics signed a 29 October letter opposing the ban, part of a bill passed recently by the U.S. House of Representatives that sets spending priorities for the Department of Defense (DOD). A coalition of higher education and research advocacy groups has also urged Congress to strike the language as members reconcile the House version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) with what the Senate adopted last month. Final passage is expected by the end of the year.
The Securing American Funding and Expertise from Adversarial Research Exploitation (SAFE) Act would deny federal funding to any U.S. scientist who collaborates with anyone “affiliated with a hostile foreign entity,” a category that includes four countries: China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. The prohibited activities would include joint research, co-authorship on papers, and advising a foreign graduate student or postdoctoral fellow. The language is retroactive, meaning any interactions during the previous 5 years could make a scientist ineligible for future federal funding.
You know, collaboration is an essential part of good science — both partners benefit from working together. There are many highly qualified, expert Chinese scientists we could profitably work with, and this kind of bill is only penalizing Americans, denying them research funding and restricting who they can partner with. The bill is sponsored by yet another short-sighted, ignorant MAGA Republican.
The act’s author, Representative John Moolenaar (R–MI), wants to “stop federal [science] funding from going to universities or researchers that collaborate with China’s military and intelligence services.” Moolenaar chairs the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, which has produced a slew of reports in the past 2 years decrying what it sees as a rising tide of such harmful collaborations.
We have a whole committee on the Chinese Communist Party? Chaired by a jingoistic conservative fanatic? Do they also oppose the Yellow Peril and the Red Menace?
Well, at least it looks like constituents are getting disgusted with him.
This is cosmically stupid for a huge number of reasons.
There are a huge number of Chinese students in the USA right now.
It is 277,398.
They are an important part of the university system since they usually pay full tuition.
What is the point of letting all these Chinese students in and then…discriminating against them?
Almost half of those Chinese students are graduate students.
Who do you think does all the research at Universities. The actual research most of the time is done by…graduate students. The professor teaches a few classes maybe, writes a lot of grants, and sort of supervises the research.
Grad students are cheap skilled labor that keep the US research establishement running. They are a resource.
This is nuts, cuckoo, crazy.
It is something a flat out ignorant bigot with zero understanding of science or universities would come up with.
PS Some of them there foreigners have been my friends, colleagues, and coworkers.
They aren’t secret agents trying to wreck the USA.
They don’t say much but they aren’t exactly all that fond of their Commie government either. That is why they end up in the USA and end up staying here.
Meanwhile, on the other end of the political spectrum(/s):
Trump doubles down on plan for 600,000 Chinese student visas despite MAGA backlash
It seems “Moolenaar” is Dutch for insular bovine.
When you mix red and yellow, you get orange… it’s slowly becoming clear to me.
“I have here a list of 250 scientists …”
@1 “Who do you think does all the research at Universities?” As a former grad student, (Berkeley), I can confirm this!
raven @1:
Postdocs too. Arguably more so, since they often are the ones bringing grad students up to speed.
The retroactive bit will pair well with “lab leak” BS, facilitating more blacklisting of the HHS scientists.
raven #1
I still don’t buy Trump’s claim that Chinese students are what’s keeping HBCUs alive. A president of an HBCU also showed this claim wasn’t true.
Trump doesn’t hesitate in trying to pit one group against another.
To give anyone an idea of how pointless this is, the vast majority of university research is open and unclassified. This means it will all be published in the open scientific literature and indexed at the NLM and other databases.
Note that this quote is only for DofDefense (now the DofWar) funding. Even from the Pentagon, the vast majority of research funding is unclassified.
From this we can get a rough estimate that 96-98% of university research is unclassified and will be published in the open scientific literature.
Persecuting Chinese students, grad students, and scientists isn’t going to solve any problems whatsoever.
It will however, create a few.