When Stanford University physicists Steve Kivelson and Peter Michelson received word that the Agreement between the United States and China on Cooperation in Science and Technology might not be renewed just a week before its expiration in late August, they spent the weekend composing a strongly worded letter of objection to the Biden administration. They argued that the agreement, first signed in 1979 and renewed approximately every five years since, should not lapse. Instead every effort should be made to nurture open and transparent scientific cooperation.
By August 27 they’d collected more than 1,000 endorsements from distinguished U.S. scientists. The urgency of their message reflects widespread outrage over scientific collaborations in fields ranging from physics to cancer research that were shattered by the Department of Justice’s four-year-long China Initiative, which officially ended in 2022. The initiative’s McCarthy-style bullying, aimed at disrupting research collaborations perceived as benefitting China at the expense of the U.S., cost hundreds of scientists their jobs and funding, wrecked dozens of productive research relationships and spread fear among valued Chinese collaborators. In 2021 thousands of Chinese scientists who previously would have remained at top U.S. research institutions left for China. These were “talented, idealistic and productive immigrants and visitors,” Kivelson told me.
Failing to repair relations puts the U.S. in danger of what amounts to scientific “suicide,” according to the Guardian. U.S. scientists have lost access to advanced Chinese labs, massive data sets and teams of highly trained graduate students. Kivelson’s own field, quantum materials, he told Nature in August, “is highly dependent on and benefits from cooperation with colleagues in China.” Chinese colleagues sent their best students to Stanford. Once home in China, these students would attest to the freedom and richness of opportunities in the U.S. “That makes it that much harder for the Chinese Communist Party to portray the U.S. as a monolithically and ruthless adversary,” said Kivelson.
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The increasingly intrusive meddling is based on largely bipartisan fears that China will steal U.S. secrets, turning our own research against us. U.S. scientists are not naive: China’s ever more authoritarian government presents a real threat, especially in terms of economic competitiveness and military capabilities. U.S. universities are built on and committed to open research and publication, however. “A university like Stanford is not Los Alamos National Laboratory,” Kivelson said at a recent talk given to Asia Pacific American Justice Task Force.
As someone who has been observing international scientific collaborations for many decades—and seen previous iterations of these kinds of crackdowns—I’ve come to conclude that U.S. policymakers don’t understand what science is actually “for.” Of course, the primary business of science is to discover how the universe and everything in it works. But beyond advancing knowledge, science plays an enormous, often unseen role in keeping avenues of contact open even when political borders slam shut. Like the arts, science is an essential part of our common humanity. Scientists share a common language and have ways of connecting that elude politicians; sometimes they provide the only glue that holds a fracturing world together. They allow enemies as well as allies to keep tabs on each other.
During the Vietnam War, I visited the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (now the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory) and was surprised to see that physicists from warring nations were collaborating on experiments. SLAC’s founder and director, Pief Panofsky (who was also deeply involved in the Manhattan Project) explained that these contacts were a critical way to learn, as he put it, “that your enemy isn’t 10 feet tall—or 10 inches tall.” In terms of national defense alone, scientific isolation works against the U.S. Most historians agree that one of the primary reasons the U.S. got the bomb and Hitler didn’t was that Jewish scientists had been forced to flee Germany. Lieutenant General Leslie Groves permitted many brilliant scientists with known left-wing politics to join in the project. Expertise trumped ideology.
I was introduced to physics by Frank Oppenheimer, J. Robert Oppenheimer’s younger brother, as a young journalist and spent many hours with bomb scientists. I have since spent decades listening to scientists talk not just about their work but also about how they see the role of science in society. I have consistently been impressed by how highly they value collaborations as ways of keeping countries and people connected.
Nobel laureate chemist Roald Hoffmann, a Holocaust survivor, brought together 13 young chemists, six of whom were women, from Israel, Palestine, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria to a small village in Jordan to study molecular bonding in 2006. Bombs went off in Amman, Jordan, hotels two months before the conference. A bomb went off in Tel Aviv the day the conference ended. The young people calculated orbitals by day, played music and cooked food for each other in the evening. “An Israeli student had never spoken socially to an Arab scientist,” Hoffmann wrote in an essay. “An Iranian, initially puzzled, learned why Jews wanted to live in Israel.”
In a 2006 interview with Nature, Hoffman was asked whether the workshop’s topic, “chemistry bonds,” was a metaphor. He replied, “Atoms bond because they don’t have a choice.... But people do have a choice.”
Frank Oppenheimer discovered novel properties of cosmic rays before the Red Scare cut his career short. During his years in exile as a cattle rancher, he thought a great deal about science and peace. He thought that politicians would do well to learn from the honesty and transparency required in science, a field where violators are expelled. Politics, he said, would benefit enormously if liars were banned from holding office.
More foundationally, Frank saw science as a part of common culture far more deeply embedded in people than nearly always transient geopolitical conflicts. His closest friend, physicist Robert Wilson, famously threw up after learning that the bomb he helped to build was dropped on the people of Hiroshima. He went on to build a world-class scientific laboratory—the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab)—the whole of the lab intended as an art installation.
Frank loved to quote his friend’s defense of the expense of Fermilab. When Wilson was repeatedly asked in a 1969 hearing by Senator John Pastore of Rhode Island to explain the value of high-energy physics for national defense and competition with Russia, he answered that it had none:
“It only has to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture.... It has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things that we really venerate and honor in our country and are patriotic about. In that sense, this new knowledge has all to do with honor and country but it has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending.”
These words should not be forgotten when we ask what science is “for.”
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.