许多美国科学家正被外国大学招募，这些大学提供稳定的资金和学术自由。
Many American scientists are being recruited by foreign universities holding out offers of stable funding and academic freedom.
阿迪蒂·拉马克里希南 纽约 — — 哈莉·弗罗赫利确信自己将在美国度过整个科学生涯。她的家族自1700年代起就在美国生活。
ADITHI RAMAKRISHNAN NEW YORK — Halley Froehlich was sure she’d spend her scientific career in the United States. Her family has been in America since the 1700s.
但过去两年，联邦拨款延迟以及对未来的担忧促使她把生活装进箱子。她随丈夫和女儿搬到了芬兰，并在赫尔辛基大学继续她的研究 — — 研究人类食用的鱼类、贝类和海藻如何应对气候变化。
But over the past two years, delayed federal grants and fears about the future motivated her to pack her life into boxes. She moved to Finland with her husband and daughter and is continuing her research — studying how fish, shellfish and seaweed that humans eat are responding to climate change — at the University of Helsinki.
此后，许多人上了当。虽然无法量化全国范围内的总体变化，但科学家、研究人员和专业团队表示，这种转变清晰、前所未有且令人担忧。
Since then, many have taken the bait. While there is no way to quantify the overall change across the nation, scientists, researchers and professional groups say the shift is clear, unprecedented and concerning.
“你几乎可以和任何一所大学的研究副总裁谈谈，他们会告诉你他们失去了一两位顶尖教师，”美国大学协会政府关系和公共政策高级副总裁托宾·史密斯说。
“You can almost talk to any vice president for research at a university and they will tell you of one or two top faculty that they’ve lost,” said Tobin Smith, senior vice president of government relations and public policy for the Association of American Universities.
白宫发言人丽兹·赫斯顿表示，特朗普正在“结束浪费”，并“致力于让美国保持世界科学创新领导者的地位，这意味着要资助真正的科学。”但根据联邦科研资助联盟（Business for Federal Research Funding Coalition）4月的一份报告，超过一半的美国州已因其他国家的招聘项目而失去科学家。去年3月，早期职业生物医学科学家表示他们“现在”会留在美国的可能性比他们六个月前的回忆低了约20个百分点。
White House spokesperson Liz Huston said Trump is “ending waste” and is “committed to keeping America the world leader in scientific innovation, and that means funding real science.”But more than half of American states have lost scientists to recruitment programs in other countries, according to an April report from the Business for Federal Research Funding Coalition. Last March, early-career biomedical scientists were about 20 percentage points less likely to say they would “now” stay in the U.S.
而根据美国物理学会的数据，2025年毕业的物理学博士生离开美国的比例达到30年来最高。
compared to their recollection of how they felt six months earlier.
加拿大、法国、比利时和芬兰等国家正在宣传他们从美国机构招聘到的科学家，科学家们称这是一种令人不安且令人惊讶的发展，因为美国在医学、物理学和化学领域的诺贝尔奖数量上远远领先于世界其他国家。
And physics Ph.D. graduates in 2025 left the U.S.
“过去，美国就像山上的灯塔，是我们都想去的地方，”现任英国伯明翰大学的克里斯汀·斯塔维茨说。“我认为这种声誉的损失很难量化，但确实造成了严重的伤害。”一些美国科学家正在转向海外发展。以下是斯塔维茨去年离开美国国家海洋和大气管理局（NOAA）的工作，转而在英国成为一名研究软件工程师的原因。她说，NOAA已不再符合她的价值观，尤其是在她被要求删除网站中关于气候变化以及多元化、公平和包容性话题的引用之后。
at the highest rate in 30 years according to the American Institute of Physics. Countries including Canada, France, Belgium and Finland are touting their recruits from U.S. institutions, a disturbing and surprising development, scientists say, for a country that far and away leads the world in Nobel prizes for medicine, physics and chemistry. “It used to be the shining city on the hill where we all want to go,” said Christine Stawitz, now at the University of Birmingham in England. “That reputational loss, I think, is hard to quantify, but also really damaging.”Some American scientists are moving abroad.
她说，美国科学领域的动荡如今已成为科学会议上的常见话题。“现在人们在英国的会议上谈论美国时，就像我说的，我不知道那里到底发生了什么。情况不好，”她说。
Here’s why Stawitz left her job at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last year to become a research software engineer in the United Kingdom. She said NOAA no longer aligned with her values, especially after she was asked to strip websites of references to climate change and diversity, equity and inclusion topics.
弗雷利希离职的决定是慢慢酝酿的。就在国家科研格局被颠覆之前，她已经对美国的校园安全和枪支暴力感到担忧。随后，在加州大学圣塔巴巴拉分校，她的同事们的经费不断被推迟或取消。学生研究人员眼泪汪汪地闯进她的办公室，不知道如何规划自己的未来。她担心自己研究的联邦资金前景——她的研究涉及气候变化。
She says the upheaval in U.S. science is a common subject at scientific meetings. “People talk about the U.S. at conferences in the U.K. now like, I don’t know what’s going on there. It’s not good,” she said. Froehlich’s decision to leave was a slow burn. She was already concerned about school safety and gun violence in the U.S. when the nation’s research landscape was overturned. Then, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, her colleagues’ grants kept getting postponed or canceled.
“这些因素的累积效应最终让我们变得非常严肃，我觉得这里可能不再是我们的家了，”弗雷利希说。她通过芬兰研究理事会的一项倡议被招募过去，现在拥有五年、总额约300万美元的有保障资金。她搬进了赫尔辛基波罗的海附近的一套公寓，并正在参加大学提供的芬兰语课程。
Student researchers burst into her office in tears, unsure how to navigate their futures. She worried about future federal funding for her own research, which involves climate change. “The cumulative effect of those things ultimately ended up making us really serious about, I don’t think here is our home anymore,” said Froehlich.
国际科学家正离开美国。被美国作为全球科学领导者的声誉所吸引而来的国际研究人员也在寻找其他地方开展工作。
She was recruited through an initiative by the Research Council of Finland and now has five years of guaranteed funding totaling about $3 million. She moved into a flat by the Baltic Sea in Helsinki and is taking Finnish lessons offered by the university.
加拿大出生的生物学家詹姆斯·莱茨和来自阿根廷的玛丽亚·马尔多纳多被澳大利亚蒙纳士大学聘用，离开了他们在加州大学戴维斯分校的职位。两人均在纽约获得博士学位，并在美国从事科学研究超过十年。
And international scientists are leaving the US International researchers who were drawn to the U.S. for its reputation as a global leader in science are also seeking different places to do their work. Married biologists James Letts and Maria Maldonado were recruited to Australia’s Monash University and left behind their posts at the University of California, Davis.
与资助相关的不确定性 — — 包括在等待停滞资金期间被迫裁员一名科学家 — — 促使他们做出了这一决定。
Letts is from Canada, and Maldonado from Argentina.
“我只想做出色的科学研究并取得发现，但我也希望我的工作能有所意义。而在美国，实现这一点似乎非常困难，”莱茨说。
Both got their doctoral degrees in New York and spent over a decade doing science in the U.S.
美国科学诺贝尔奖的四十 percent 由移民获得。2025 年诺贝尔化学奖得主奥马尔·雅吉今年离开了加州大学伯克利分校的职位，前往中国清华大学领导一个人工智能实验室。
Grant-related uncertainty — including having to lay off a staff scientist while waiting for stalled funding — made them take the leap. “All I want to do is do great science and make discoveries, but I want my work to mean something as well. And the opportunity to do that seemed very difficult in the U.S.,” Letts said.
失去科学人才的后果。美国仍然是一个科学强国，全国遍布研究社区强大、资源充足的机构，这些机构吸引着外国科学家。即使每个欧洲国家都敞开大门，也仍然无法容纳所有美国科学家。
Forty percent of the U.S. science Nobel Prizes were won by immigrants Omar Yaghi, a 2025 Nobel Prize winner for chemistry, left his post at the University of California, Berkeley this year to direct an artificial intelligence lab at China’s Tsinghua University. The consequences of losing scientific talent The U.S. is still a science powerhouse, full of institutions around the country with robust research communities and well-resourced institutions that attract foreign scientists. Even if every European country threw open its doors, there still wouldn’t be enough capacity to accommodate every American scientist.
而且并非所有人都在离开。许多科学家选择留下，寻找新的研究经费来源或转向产业界的工作。
And not everyone is leaving. Many scientists are choosing to stay, searching for new sources of research funding or pivoting to jobs in industry.
然而，美国科研领域的声誉受损以及人才流失的现象可能尚未结束。据“各州联合民主中心”与“资助监督组织”发布的监测数据显示，自特朗普总统第二任期开始以来，联邦政府已削减或冻结了多达1740亿美元的科研拨款。此外，美国行政管理和预算局拟出台一项新规，旨在赋予政治任命官员更大的权力来决定未来哪些项目能够获得资助。目前国会已通过一项决议，将该规则的最终决定时间推迟至12月。
But the erosion of reputation and the talent drain may not be over. The Trump administration has cut or frozen up to $174 billion in federal grants since the president’s second term began, according to a tracking tool released by the States United Democracy Center and the organization Grant Witness. And a proposed rule from the Office of Management and Budget could give political appointees more control over what future projects are funded. A resolution approved by Congress has delayed a final decision on the rule until December.
那些已经离开美国或仍留在国内的科学家们都对留下的科研环境深感担忧。他们指出，由于研究生项目数量减少、资金短缺以及缺乏指导，新一代科研人员或将面临诸多困难；而美国整个科研事业要真正感受到这些影响，恐怕需要十年甚至更长时间。
Scientists who have moved away and those still in the U.S. are worried about what’s left behind. They say the next generation of scientists may struggle with fewer graduate programs, money and mentorship — and it could take a decade or longer for the U.S. scientific enterprise to truly feel those effects.
根据美国大学协会收集的招生数据，与去年相比，各大研究机构2026年秋季博士项目的录取人数减少了15%。史密斯指导过的一名学生便属于受影响者之一。
Major research institutions accepted 15% fewer applicants for fall 2026 doctoral programs compared to last year, according to admissions data collected by the Association of American Universities. One of the students impacted was a mentee of Smith’s.
“我给那位年轻人的建议是什么呢？明年不妨考虑去加拿大发展。”他说道。
“What is one of my pieces of advice to that young man? Next year, look in Canada,” he said.