As some of you know as a boy I was interested in science and wanted to make a career in scientific research. So I got a PhD from King’s College London in 1980 and them worked in Germany for 6 years. Where to go next? I felt I had seen British and German science and so thought about other places to try out. The most obvious place with decent labs and scientific culture was the US.
So it was logical that I then applied for and managed to get a job as assistant professor at the University of Florida (UF) in 1984. But why did I decide to go to the US? My younger self wasn’t organized enough to write down a list of reasons, but if he had I think he would have jotted, in order;

1. Good well funded labs and universities. Then as now the majority of the world’s most prestigious, best funded, successful, well-respected universities and institutes were in the US.
2. A decent scientific culture and respect for science based reality. Perhaps not universal in the population, but hell, they got to the moon.
3. Good pay and a high standard of living. The pay in a US university was better than that in the UK and Germany. And to a European, US food, gas, rent, house and land prices were at that time significantly lower.
4. Parks, better climate, natural beauty and all that. I’d been around the US a little and clearly there were some great state and national parks and a lot to see. And much of the US had a more appealing climate then that in the often cold, wet and dismal UK and Germany.
5. Multicultural melting pot. The UK and to a lesser degree Germany were also multicultural melting pots and I had no problems with Turks, Jews, Muslims, Arabs, Chinese, Indians, Pakistanis, in fact any kind of non-Anglo. So foreigners didn’t bother me at all, in fact I liked them and was interested in their cultures and food.
6. A stable democratic government with respect for the rule of law and good relations with other democracies. This was a given in those days. Of course it was clear that the US was considerably more right wing than Europe and there were occasional outbursts of craziness, but apart from Nixon and McCarthy, things looked reasonably stable. Of course there were other lesser problems, I didn’t like the then President Reagan and right wing politics much, I thought the gun and drug cultures and resulting problems were crazy and I was not impressed by the average education level, but I figured I could deal with all of that.

     There were some negatives, notably the only partially functional US health care system, but I was young and healthy and had not committed to more than a few years in the US, so this was not a big issue. So I took the job in UF and I think I was pretty successful. I didn’t win a Nobel Prize but I was reasonably well known in my area of research and published quite a lot of fairly decent peer reviewed publications, IMHO. I also started a small biotech company initially with the help of UF which grew surprisingly well so that I retired rather early from UF to concentrate on running that. This company has generated jobs for me and several others, so nobody can say I am taking an American’s job, I made jobs for myself and several others. So I am a minor example of the American dream. I came to the US with basically nothing and contributed enough to benefit both me, others and the US in general.
Supposing the 1984 young me got somehow transported to that lab in Germany now and was thinking about where to go next. OK…

1, Good well funded labs and universities; is that true now? Trump hates universities as they believe in things like diversity, equity and inclusion which he doesn’t like except when applied to overweight intellectually challenged old white men like him, or white South Africans. He also has no respect of real facts and actual reality, another significant count against universities, which of course function to deal with the world as it really is. Finally “well funded” is largely dependent on federal dollars from NIH, NSF, DOD, VA and other federal agencies. The Trump regime doesn’t like those either and is firing their staff, blocking grants which have any hint of subjects he doesn’t like and making it difficult to make use of already funded grants. So the US just isn’t like it was in 1984, would I risk moving from Germany to the US under these conditions? How about;

2, A decent scientific culture and respect for actual science. Americans are taught to be very confident about expressing their opinions which would be good if it melded with respect for expertise, knowledge, facts and data, but that respect is obviously sometimes missing. This was present but mostly under control in 1984 but now science denialism is much more widespread and unfortunately a major part of the current hopelessly crap government. Stupid ideas abound. Vaccines cause autism, evolution is not real, climate change is not happening or maybe it is but is not a big threat, there are only two sexes, Covid-19 was made in a lab etc. etc, all brought to the boil by silly rubbish posted on numerous fake news generating right wing sites. There are many people in government now who believe in some or all of this stupid nonsense. Worse, the problem of doing something about climate change is going backwards due to science denial paid for by the deep pockets of the rotten corrupt evil lying fossil fuel industry. 1984 was 4 years prior to James Hansen testifying before the US senate, pointing out the likely problems from fossil fuel induced climate change. However in 1984 there were already warning signs if you were reading science journals, but at that time we thought the threat was quite distant. Now anyone with no previous bias can see the climate has got much more threatening and all predictions suggest more changes at an ever accelerating rate. So the last 10 year were the hottest 10 years on record, 2024 was the hottest single year on record, and sea levels are rising at an accelerating rate, now almost a quarter of an inch a year. I still read the best science and economics journals and all of those, universally, treat climate change as a very real and pressing issue which needs to be seriously dealt with. So it was disappointing that climate change was hardly mentioned during the last US election and was very low on voters list of important issues, which says a lot about the average voter IMHO. And of course the EPA is being defunded, sensible regulations are being removed or ignored and funding for alternate energy is being cut. Worse those crappy gas and diesel guzzling smelly inefficient rubbish ICE cars are being supported while much better and more fun electric cars are not being supported. So 2, look like a firm no also.

3. Good pay and high standard of living. That of course depends on a stable research job for me in 2025 US on which I could build a career. Bearing in mind 1 and 2, this looks pretty questionable, would I be prepared to risk it? Probably not. And general standards of living have relatively declined for most people in the US as wages have increased less quickly than prices for rents, houses, land, insurance, food etc. So while some things are still cheaper in the US, one being gasoline, most things are now pretty comparable in price or more expensive, so the financial incentive to move to the US, even if you can get a job, is now reduced. Also of course the over expensive and inefficient US health care system is now a significant disincentive. And if you planned a family good luck paying for child care and education.

4. Parks, better climate, natural beauty and all that. Well the current crappy regime is firing employees at national parks and trying to close down many of them. I suppose they will get this under control and keep the most visited ones open eventually, but who knows? And of course even the climate is not what it was. We have always had hurricanes in Florida but they are becoming more intense and damaging every year. I am forced to carefully monitor the storm potential every summer so as to prepare backup systems, buy tinned food, toilet paper, collect water etc. to be ready for likely power outages. In England and Germany power outages hardly ever happened, in Florida, due to downed power lines, the power often goes out, sometimes for days and sometimes multiple times in a hurricane season. Apart from anything else this has resulted in a metastasizing insurance crisis in Florida, California and other states at particular risk from climate change. This of course impacts homeowners and groups thinking of setting up companies. And the climate is getting more and more extreme all the time. Would the 1984 me take a job in Florida or California in 2025, always assuming one was available? Maybe I’d consider somewhere apparently less prone to climate change, Boston, New York or somewhere, though of course issues 1-3 would still be top of my mind, I would likely have already ruled the US out for the combination of those reasons.

5. A multicultural melting pot. Well the US is still a multicultural melting pot but for how long? Clearly the current government doesn’t like any kind of non-white non-male non-Christian, so interesting new immigrants and their cultures and foods won’t be coming here except in very small numbers. And non-white non-male non-Christians are clearly getting marginalized all over. While I am white and male, I have always been a fervent and devout non-Christian, so don’t fit well with the current regime. I am not gay or transgender but a rapid anti-fascist and anti-right wing billionaires, which might get me into trouble. And a lot of the US right wingers don’t like any kind of immigrant, even white males like me, I’ve seen that myself. Another reason for me to look elsewhere.

6. a stable democratic government with respect for the rule of law and good relations with other democracies. The US government has never looked more unstable and less democratic then today, with someone in charge who looks more and more unhinged every moment. And rule of law? Forget that, Trump pardoning criminals and attempting to prosecute DOJ employees who previously were just doing their jobs in investigating his numerous legal transgressions. And ignoring and boasting about ignoring the judiciary over and over again. And while in 1984 I knew that the US sometimes drifted from an ethical foreign policy, think overthrowing democratically elected Iranian and Chilean governments, the failed attempt to invade Cuba and the fiasco of Vietnam, it seemed that the US did basically at some sort of level believe in democracy and human rights. Of course none of that is true now, previous allies are adversaries, NATO is scorned even though it has guaranteed peace in most of Europe for 80 years while the Trump regime aligns with one of the worlds very worst, that evil little turdy dwarf Putin, and those other petty and evil dictators, Xi and Kim. And the US used to have good relations with many allies and generated enormous amounts of goodwill from USAID and other programs. All that is over for now anyway.

     So the 1984 me would probably go back to the UK, or stay in Germany, or maybe France, Scandinavia, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, anywhere but the US. Something like this happened before. Germany was the world’s high tech center for Physics, Chemistry and other hard sciences before Hitler came along. When a country has such scientific dominance the best scientists from other countries flock there and further strengthen the science in that country. So scientists from all over the world worked in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. Of course when Hitler came into power, many of these fled or were otherwise neutralized, you know how, and the US and UK did very well out of the surviving immigrants and refugees. So the stupid racist white trash Nazi regime lost German scientists like Albert Einstein, Danes like Niels Bohr and Hungarians like Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Johnny Von Neuman and Eugene Wigner. These and many others had productive and militarily highly impactful careers in the US. In parallel the other fascist wind bag Mussolini lost Italy’s best scientists, notably Enrico Fermi who made the first nuclear reactor in Chicago, not Rome. The Soviets also lost a lot of excellent brains following their invasions of central Europe, one notable example being George Gamow. And of course the outstanding Hungarians I mentioned above had absolutely no interest in returning to Soviet occupied Hungary. These people together pioneered things like computers, nuclear energy and the atom bomb. So by being really stupid the Nazis and Fascists did a lot to aid the collapse of their own rotten regimes and the loss of talent meant that Soviets had to play catch up with the west for years after the second world war. It’s almost like totalitarianism doesn’t work isn’t it? And because at one time the Nazis looked like they might invade and occupy the UK, the Brits gifted the US their prize cutting edge technologies, notably microwave radar, jet engines and the prototype of the Manhattan project. So look it up, American radar was heavily influenced by the work of Randall and Boot, the first American jet aircraft had a British engine and the top secret “Tube Alloys” program eventually resulted in the Manhattan project. It’s almost as if foreigners can be useful. I’m not claiming that the US had no native scientists, it did, but these and other immigrants gave the country considerable advantages over the rest of the world. And how about this; the Chinese born scientist Qian Xuesen came to the US in 1935 and trained at MIT and Caltech. After working on the Manhattan project he cofounded the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab and had faculty positions at MIT and Caltech. He was regarded as being a genius, but got investigated for spying during the McCarthy era, another right wing bolus of unsubstantiated made up paranoia. So he was stripped of security clearances at the DOD where he had been a colonel even though there was no evidence that he was in fact a spy. He was subjected to house arrest for 5 years, apparently the US did not want his expertise to get to China. He finally got deported back to China in 1955, whwn he was in exchange for US pilots shot down over Korea. And guess what happened then? He was put in charge of China’s rocket program, essentially giving the Chinese the expertise to develop their own cutting edge weapons. One of his projects was the Silkworm, widely sold including to Iran who used them to attack US flagged tankers. That worked out well didn’t it? The US’s self inflicted loss was China’s gain.

     To get back to the 1984 me in 2025; Perhaps I and/or he would pass for now on looking for a job in the US and check back in a few years in the hope that this nonsense regime got replaced by something more normal and sensible. But right now as outlined above, a definitive no, no, no, no, no, no and an overall are you f**king kidding me? In fact all 6 reasons for wanting to go to the US in 1984 have become 6 good reasons for not going now. All over the world there are well educated talented young people with highly marketable skills who are now probably thinking about the same as I would have done. This is a huge problem, the US has done great out of immigrants, not just the ones fleeing the Nazis, Fascists and Soviets as noted above. So Google/Alphabet cofounder Sergei Brin is Russian, Intel cofounder Andy Grove was Hungarian, Apple cofounder Steve Jobs was the son of a Syrian immigrant, Jensen Huang, founder of Nvidia is South Korean and I could mention SpaceX, Tesla, Boring, Neuralink etc. etc. founder or with some sort of roll anyway for Elon Musk who is South African. And there are many more, in fact a staggering 46% of the Fortune 500 companies had an immigrant or child of an immigrant as cofounder. The injection of this foreign talent has obviously had enormous impact on the US economy and it looks like this injection will now greatly fall or even stop all together. So that means that people who could be generating new technologies and industries in the US will just do it somewhere else. And what is the basis of current US military power? It is dependent on things like nuclear weapons, radar, computers and jet engines, sounds familiar? The US is already struggling in competition with China. In 1986 and onwards I taught academically top notch Chinese, Indian, Korean and other foreign graduate students in UF, only the very best were accepted. In fact their transcripts were way better than those of US student applicants. The immigrants got PhDs with no problems and almost all of them would then stay on in the US, adding their talents to the US pool. Now they will all either stay in China, India, Korea or wherever or go somewhere else but not the US. I know that many young American born scientists are currently wondering if they can make any kind of career in the US so that many are looking at the other places where you can do research, Canada, UK, Germany etc. etc. And the power of US science comes from the very talented researchers at places like the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes, Harvard, Janelia, the Rockefeller, UCLA, Stanford, UCSF etc. etc. The leading figures at these places are now being actively recruited by foreign institutions. So the US is not only incentivizing talented people not to come here but also incentivizing talented US scientists here now to go somewhere else. As in the past the strongest economies and war winning states are those with the best grasp of science and innovation. So how is the decimation of universities and research good for the long term future of the US?

     In fact I wonder what this rubbish regime is thinking. It’s already clear that the US is losing the race for the future with China. China makes great AI, is already dominating solar panels, batteries and other alternate energy products and their electric cars will shortly eradicate most of the legacy European, Japanese and American auto makers, by the end of this decade if not before, see if I’m right. China has far more people, far more well trained engineers and scientists, better general education, a stronger work ethic, great funding for research and business set up and is clearly the only current economy competitive with the US. That economy is growing more than twice as fast as that of the US, so will overtake the US pretty soon. Going forward the inward looking US with little innovation will be overtaken by an unstoppable China and new cutting edge technologies will emerge more and more from China and other advanced countries, not the US. The denial of climate change in the US is ridiculously stupid as it slows the necessary progress away from fossil fuels which is inevitable and is happening pretty much everywhere else in the world. In a few years the US is likely to have a vast store of useless fossil fuel which nobody wants, fleets of obsolete ICE vehicles, and will have lost the ability to compete with China which will completely own all renewable technologies, not to mention AI and whatever new technologies emerge. China will have ultra clean air and so a much healthier population while Americans continue to breath in rotten dirty fossil fuel derived carcinogenic smelly smutty crap for no good reason. So the US is on a path that can only lead to rapid decline while China gets more and more powerful, not a formula for a viable US or a stable world. So why on earth is this happening? Clearly Trump is just not right in the head, but Musk is a smart guy. It now seems clear that Musk realizes that the silly DOGE thing was very poorly executed and will be highly counterproductive, so he is distancing himself from it, although the damage has now been done. Is overwork, hubris and ketamine the problem? Hopefully the rapid decline in popularity of the Trump/Musk regime will result in the republicans losing the House and Senate, which might stop and possibly reverse some of this nonsense. But I fear that the US is stuck with this regime which clearly does not believe in any version of democracy. Again history is informative, Hitler was actually elected by a minority of the population but all the same democratically. Once in power he shut down the free press and by intimidation consolidated all power in himself and the evil Nazi party, and you know how that worked out. Tell me that something like this is not happening now.