How do countries commit scientific suicide?

On “scientific suicide”

The phrase “scientific suicide” in the title might not be immediately clear. Does it refer to a suicide done “scientifically” (whatever that might mean)? Does it indicate science done so badly that it terminates careers? Or does it denote the actions of a larger entity that inexorably damages or terminates scientific work? In this article, I will be talking about scientific suicide on the largest possible scale, the national one. Perhaps, however, “suicide” is the wrong word. Perhaps “grievous self-harm” is more accurate. In none of what I describe did a country deliberately set out to kill its ability to do science. Yet “scientific suicide” is a more vivid term and expresses the seriousness of the situation better.

Spoiler alert: the short answer to the question in the title is that there are three main ways in which nations commit scientific suicide. They are: 1) reducing or eliminating the participation in science of any large group of people, 2) taking away the money for research, and 3) doing both. In this article, I want to look at three examples that illustrate these routes. Two are in the past: Nazi Germany in the 1930s and Russia in the 1990s. The third is the United States and what it is doing to itself right now.

The three situations differ greatly but a common theme emerges: scientific systems that had taken decades to build can be destroyed within months or a year or two and the damage can be irreparable. The two historical examples (Germany and Russia) show how slow and incomplete the recovery can be while the current example, the US, is still going through the destructive phase, hence we cannot say when a recovery might begin or how long it would need. However, the historical precedents and simple logic indicate that the diminishment of US science will be marked and long-term. This account will not be detailed in its numbers and statistics but in its general outlines it is correct.

Germany, 1933-1935

Let’s start with Nazi Germany, the simplest to describe. The destruction of German science started with a clear ideological idea: that Jews were harmful to German society and therefore that any Jews in high positions should be removed from them. The National Socialist-dominated government came to power in Germany on January 30, 1930 and immediately started propagandizing against Jews. On April 7, it issued an edict requiring the sacking of all Jewish professors from university positions and this was promptly carried out by the universities. The effects upon teaching and research were immediate, and affected all departments, not just science faculties though the latter were particularly hard hit.

This might seem more accurately described as a governmental action rather that of a country as a whole. Yet there was overwhelmingly compliance by the universities and departments in Germany and many academics supported the new law. Behind that widespread complicity lay wide-spread anti-Semitism, fear of the consequences of non-compliance, and, of course, opportunism since this expulsion of Jewish scientists opened up new positions for people remaining.

It was of course not portrayed by the government as a destructive act but as an improvement, an act of purification as it were. Hitler spoke of eliminating “Jewish science” and it was clear that he had certain Jewish scientists in mind, in particular Albert Einstein. Whether he actually believed that the kind of science a person does actually reflects their ethnic origins is unknown. There is no evidence that he understood much about science but it is clear that his particular animus was against scientists who were of Jewish origin; this was not bigotry against a certain religion, Judaism, but against an ethnicity. Those fired included many whose family had converted to one or another branch of Christianity. Altogether, it is estimated that around 2500 Jewish scientists, about 20% of the scientific workforce in Germany, lost their jobs. The vast majority chose to emigrate, not to stay in Germany and look for other work there.¹

Behind such numbers lie as many individual stories. One particularly interesting account is by a biologist who was not Jewish but who had Jewish friends in a German village in Bavaria during his childhood in the 1930s and early 1940s. This was the late Ulrich Grossbach and he witnessed their forced departure without fully understanding what was happening to them but was deeply disturbed by it. (I learned the story directly from him.) His account was of a geneticist named Ernst Caspari (1909-1988), who was Jewish by descent though his parents and he were practicing Protestants. As a graduate student in the 1930s, he made one of the seminal discoveries about what genes do – namely, that many genes specify enzymes – that led to the definitive later work in this area. He was not forced out of German science in 1933, with the initial wave of firings of Jewish scientists, but in 1935 after publishing that important work. He first went into exile in Turkey, then a few years later to the United States, where he had a decades-long distinguished academic career. In the end, Caspari’s story was thus a lucky one but Grossbach’s account makes clear how stressful the beginnings of the Nazi period were for German scientists.²

Though one cannot quantitate the damage done to German science by this expulsion of Jewish scientists, historians generally agree that it seriously harmed it, especially in physics. A current estimate of the number of scientists, mostly Jewish, who emigrated in the 1930s, in response to Nazism is 2500. That exodus included seven Nobel laureates and 20 scientists who would win a Nobel Prize later. This brain drain almost certainly contributed to the fact that Germany lost the race to develop the atomic bomb. Indeed, the Manhattan Project was initiated by the Roosevelt administration in 1942 in response to a plea by two Jewish immigrant scientists, namely Einstein himself and Leo Szilard.

The immediate damage to German science was probably not apparent in the early 1940s but it was clear after the war. Of course, the defeat in the war itself massively set back German science. Hence, it is impossible to estimate what proportion of the diminishment of German science was due to the forced emigration of Jewish scientists in the 1930s. What is certain is that what was Germany’s loss, due to its own actions, became a gain for other countries, especially Britain and the U.S., which gained the majority of the Jewish scientists who had fled Germany.

In the 1960s, when I was working for my degree in genetics, I was aware of four of them as major figures in my field. Three were men (Caspari, Curt Stern, and Richard Goldschmidt) and one a woman (Salome Gluecksohn-Waelsch) whom I had the honor of getting to know three decades later when she was in her 80s. Before the war, the U.S. had not been in the first rank of nations scientifically but after the war, it was, without question, the leading country in science.³

Russia, early 1990s

The second case of national scientific suicide concerns Russia, after the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. Maybe this is best seen as an accidental consequence rather than the result of a deliberate policy, as occurred in Nazi Germany.

I first learned about it on a two week trip to Russia in 2007. The purpose of that trip was to commission interesting articles for my journal, BioEssays, a broad-ranging biology review journal. This trip involved talking with many Russian scientists. Again and again, the decade of the 1990s came up as a traumatic experience. Basically, during most of that decade, until the very end when there was the beginning of an upturn, Russia was bankrupt. There was neither money for the work itself nor for salaries. People were struggling simply to survive and where possible to keep their programs going on a shoestring. Apparently, the financial disaster began with the lifting of price controls, which had been a feature of the Soviet years, and suddenly, everything became very expensive. In addition, all the banks involved with printing rubles did so with little restraint. (This happened not just in Russia but in all the other former Soviet republics.) The result, predictably, was hyper-inflation.

Altogether, about 1.4 million people left scientific research in Russia during this period, with estimates of 80,000 to 100,000 scientists emigrating. This was obviously a catastrophic blow to Russian science.

The whole traumatic experience began to ease soon after Vladimir Putin came into power in 1999. He made several changes that stabilized the currency and strengthened the foundations of the economy. (This is when Russia started becoming a petrostate, dependent for its survival on its oil reserves.) Many of the scientists I talked with gave Putin credit for creating the conditions that allowed some sort of normal life in Russia to resume after the catastrophic Yeltsin years but I was struck by how little warmth and approval many of them had for him. Some even referred to him as a dictator and did so without fear, which would have been impossible during the Soviet years (and quite possibly again today as Putin has tightened his control on Russian society).

Hence, by 2007, science in Russia was reviving somewhat. People had salaries that they could live on and there was now money for research (though still far less than in Europe or North America.) But one kind of damage had persisted. There was a missing generation in Russian science, those who had been in their mid-20s to mid-30s during the 1990s – this tends to be the period in life when one is at one’s most creative – but who, seeing the situation, had fled abroad (to Europe, North America, Australia). This not only created a major hole in the scientific work force but had removed the very people whom young scientists in the noughties (British slang for 2000-2009) needed as mentors. During my visit, many people stressed to me what a serious problem this was.

It is now nearly 20 years since that visit in 2007 and I do not know what the situation in Russian science is today, though I suspect it is worse. The war in Ukraine has drained both people – about 2500 Russian scientists have emigrated – and the war must be draining resources for science. What I took away from the experience of my visit was a new appreciation of the importance of the continuity of human resources in science. If you want a healthy national scientific environment, you cannot delete a generation. Doing so creates a deep wound that is very difficult, perhaps impossible, to heal.

The United States: 2025-??

My third example of national self-harm in science is the United States now. If you visit the US today and talk to scientists, as I have just recently, things do not look that different at first. College campuses and institutes look largely the same, many labs are busy, life goes on. But if you probe a little deeper, or just read the top science magazines, one realizes that there is some kind of general crisis in American science today. It is hard to quantitate the damage done so far and impossible to estimate the long-term effects but it is helpful to keep the distinction in between the immediate damage and the knock-on long term harms that will follow the present damage. The latter are certain to be huge but hard to estimate now.

There will be books written about this period in American science and any short summary now will be grossly incomplete and quite probably distorted relative to later evaluations. However, the source of the problem is clear: the animus of the Trump administration to scientific research and perhaps the idea of science itself. The first Trump administration showed some signs of this hostility but in the second one, the attitudes are more obvious and the attacks more virulent. It is not just the views of Trump himself but a whole cadre of people who serve under him who were almost certainly picked in part for their rejection of science or, at least, for their rejection of certain ideas. The most obvious of these is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, who is famous for his rejection of vaccines (despite the mountains of evidence in their favor). He is often described as now the most important man in American science. Unfortunately, he is not a scientist and clearly knows little biological science. The dangers that he poses to American scientific research and to the health of America and, indeed, the world, cannot even be estimated today but are probably huge.

I think that the pitchfork attack on science in the USA has at least four prongs. First, and most obviously, there is the cutting back of specific programs and their funding. These range from space research projects, sometimes decades in the planning and creation, to all kinds of disease research projects and biodiversity programs and climate change research. Second, there have been the attacks on and often the firing of many prominent scientists whose views were seen as out of register with the Trump administration goals. Third, there has been a tightening of the rules around allowing non-US citizen scientists to come work in the US. Since young scientists, many from outside the US, are often at the heart of scientific research, this crack down on young scientists from other countries may be the most damaging. Finally, there is the open attack on specific ideas, in particular those about the efficacy of vaccines and the reality of climate change.

The attack on funding of so many programs, totaling many billions of dollars, was the most dramatic and promised the most immediate damage in early 2025. However, the courts have increasingly weighed in and reversed a lot of these cuts. Also, enough Republicans in Congress, responsive to constituents who benefit from many of these programs have restored many of the funds, giving evidence of a certain resilience in the system. Still, it appears that thousands of research programs have been ended or severely curtailed. Also, the Trump administration is still talking about massive further cuts to NIH and the NSF.

Nevertheless, at present, I would emphasize the loss of human scientific resources as probably the most serious aspect of the attack on science. This has multiple forms, in particular the discouragement of young foreign scientists from obtaining work in the US, noted above. However, a worsening of the climate for scientific work is also affecting young native born Americans. There has not yet been a massive exodus of these scientists to Europe, Canada, Australia and other places but I cannot remember a time when so many were thinking and talking about it. Ultimately, the health of science depends on its human resources and the current threat to that element in American scientific research is big..⁴

Outlook

Of course, these four factors are connected and reinforce each other, which makes the potential reversal of the whole situation anytime soon hard to imagine. The diminution of American science today is still not close to what Germany did to itself in the 1930s or what happened to Russia in the 1990s but the undisputed pre-eminence of American science since the end of WWII is at some level, already gone. The reason is that confidence in the future of American science is already gone. As noted earlier, destruction of a civilizational state is much quicker and easier than building it up in the first place. Similarly, recovery from a period of extensive damage may be very slow even if new financial resources begin to flow in. That slowness reflects the fact that it takes both time and continued effort to restore the full human resources. Large numbers of people have to believe in the future of science for them to commit to it. I suspect that it will take decades to repair the damage that has been done in the past year and a half and, of course, it is not guaranteed that such repair will take pace.

We will return to this topic later. Stay tuned.

1. The few statistics in this article are from AI searches in Google. In general, I avoid using AI but for finding odd facts like this , it is useful.

2. See Grossbach, U. (2009). Seventy five years of developmental genetics: Ernst Caspari’s experiments on insect eye pigmentation, performed in an academic environment of political suppression. Genetics 187:1175-1182.
Doi: 10.1534/genetics.109.102723.

3. For an excellent book-length account of this tale of national loss and gain of scientific talent, see Medawar, J. and D. Pike. (2000). Hitler’s Gift: The True Story of the Scientists Expelled by the Nazi Regime. New York: Arcade Publishing.

4. After one year of the second Trump administration, Science magazine evaluates its effects in a special issue. This section was titled “A Long Shadow” and consisted of four articles titled “Damage assessment”, “Pressure on the Pipeline”, “Talking back”, and “What’s next”. See the issue of 22 January, 2026, pp. 338-347