Doing Things Well Is an International Activity

In the US, funding agencies seem to be increasingly opposed to an often inevitable feature of good science: international collaboration. Scientists have been told by officials at the National Institutes of Health that they need to remove mention of foreign collaborators from progress reports, or that they need to avoid such collaborations to begin with. At NASA, officials have told scientists that rather than just avoiding funding work in China, they should actively avoid collaborating with Chinese researchers. And a recently introduced bill would make that restriction more explicit. I have a general policy against discussing concrete political issues on this blog, so I’m not going to dig into the details of who’s doing what here, how far it’s going or how novel it is. That policy extends to the comments. If you mention specific laws, politicians, or political parties, I will delete your comment. I do want to say something more general, though. I think people often underestimate just…