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We are watching a scientific superpower destroy itself
As China threatens to overtake US leadership in science and technology, America has responded by sabotaging its own engines of progress.
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According to the latest annual Nature Index, the single remaining US institution among the top 10 is Harvard, in second place, far behind the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Stephen Greenblatt
The Trump administration’s assault on America’s universities by cutting billions of dollars of federal support for scientific and medical research has called up from somewhere deep in my memory the phrase “duck and cover”.
These were words drilled into American schoolchildren in the 1950s. These actions were meant to protect us from the nuclear attack that could come, we were told, at any time. Though even in elementary school most of us intuited that there was something futile in these attempts to shield ourselves from destruction, we dutifully went through the motions. How else could we deal with the anxiety caused by the menace?
