It does not begin with a scandal, but with a system. Not with an outrage, but with a decision: Research – yes, but only if it fits the worldview. Migration – maybe, but only if it does not ask questions. Science – welcome, as long as it does not resist. That is how one might describe the political climate in the United States since January 2025. What is being overlooked is not only an ethical bankruptcy - but a strategic self-destruction.
Ardem Patapoutian exemplifies this contradiction. Born in 1967 in Beirut, he fled the Lebanese civil war as a young man to the United States. There, he first worked as a pizza delivery driver, wrote horoscopes for an Armenian newspaper - and began studying cell biology at UCLA. He earned his PhD from the renowned Caltech, later becoming a professor at the Scripps Research Institute and a researcher at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His discovery of receptors that detect temperature and touch earned him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2021. An American dream? Only on the surface.
Because four years later, during Donald Trump's second term, Patapoutian’s institute suddenly became one of those whose funding was frozen. The Trump administration cut billions from NIH, NSF, NASA - targeting especially those fields in which the U.S. was once a global leader: biotechnology, artificial intelligence, environmental science. Immigrant researchers were hit particularly hard. Visas were not renewed. Work permits disappeared. Projects were canceled because their themes did not fit the ideological filter.
During this period, Patapoutian received an offer from China: twenty years of guaranteed funding at any university of his choice. An entire lab could be relocated within a few weeks, including equipment, team, and housing for his family. Patapoutian declined - out of conviction, out of loyalty to the United States, the country that once gave him a home. But his case is the exception, not the rule. Many others are leaving - to Canada, to Europe, to Australia. They take their ideas, their discoveries, their patents with them. And their future.
What is happening here is not just a “brain drain.” It is a conscious shrinking of national potential in the name of a policy that only tolerates science when it submits. The anti-immigrant ideology of the Trump administration - disguised as efficiency policy - does not primarily target “illegal immigrants,” but some of the country’s most brilliant minds. People like Marianna Zhang, whose project on racism and gender roles was canceled. Or like neuroscientist Brandon Coventry, who shut down his lab after years in Wisconsin because he lacked the funds - and the air.
At the same time, other countries are acting quickly and strategically. China, for example, with programs like the “Qiming Plan” (启明计划), recruits highly qualified researchers, offering stable long-term contracts, freedom of research topics, and tax incentives. Canada advertises under the motto “Where science is still free” with research freedom and social respect. And the EU is following suit: in Aix-Marseille and Berlin, programs are emerging that explicitly target American researchers - with great success.
So what remains? A country that mutilates itself. That celebrates Nobel laureates - and then lets them fall. That invites young scientists - and then exiles them. That puts its capacity for innovation at risk in the name of ideological purification. The question raised by Ardem Patapoutian’s story is bigger than himself. It is this: how long can a country like America survive if it systematically silences its brightest voices?
In a world already engaged in a race for knowledge, technology, and trust, it is a dangerous answer to say: we are giving up willingly - and letting China move ahead. The statement made at a protest at the Statue of Liberty captured it with brutal clarity: “We are giving our best minds to our biggest competitor because we would rather harm immigrants than help America.” It is more than a political misstep. It is a betrayal of the future.
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