President Donald Trump’s executive order banning visitors from seven countries from entering the US has scientists concerned about what might come next, as Peter Gwynne reports
The scientific community has reacted with dismay at US President Donald Trump’s executive order to temporarily ban travellers from seven predominantly Islamic countries from entering the US. The concerns, which have been shared among academic institutions, hi-tech firms and scientific societies worldwide, remain even after a court of appeals upheld a federal judge’s decision to block the ban. As Physics World went to press, the Trump administration insisted that it will find a way to overturn those judgments and reinstate a ban similar – if not identical – to the original.
The executive order closed US entry to immigrants from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen for 90 days, suspended the entry of refugees from anywhere in the world for 120 days and permanently banned Syrian citizens from entry. President Trump claimed that the order protected the country from incursion by “radical Islamic terrorists”. His opponents, meanwhile, assert that no individuals from the seven named nations have killed any Americans in terrorist attacks over the past four decades.
Issued a week after the new president’s inauguration, the ban prevented several scientists, doctors and members of technology companies from visiting or even returning to the US. Because the original executive order lacked detail, customs officers in some US airports initially refused entry to individuals from the targeted nations who possessed “green cards” that allow them to remain in the country with all the privileges of US citizens except the right to vote. “There really are science issues at stake, because you can’t do good science if you don’t have freedom of collaboration and a diversity of perspectives in research” says Rush Holt, the physicist and former Congressman who is chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
One prominent scientist to be affected by Trump’s ban is Iranian researcher Samira Asgari, who was initially prevented from flying to the US to take up a two-year contract at Harvard University to study the effect of the human genome on susceptibility to tuberculosis. She was later allowed to make the trip. Others simply decided not to fulfil their travel plans. Mohamed Hassan, a dual citizen of Sudan and Italy who is interim director of the World Academy of Sciences, cancelled a visit to the AAAS annual meeting in Boston last month. So did Sudanese electronic engineer Rania Abdelhameed Mokhtar, despite being scheduled to collect an award, which was given in absentia.
“The executive order signed by the US president is profoundly disruptive. It will immediately have a negative effect on scientific research and the essential scientific processes of exchanging information and ideas,” Hassan told Research Fortnight. “In the long run the order will erode trust in the US and undermine the sense that the US is a reliable partner for scientific research. This is very disturbing both for scientists from the developing world and for our colleagues in North America and Europe.”
Scientific societies outside the US have lamented the prevention of individuals from specific countries from entering the US. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) noted in a statement issued before the ban was temporarily overturned that it “considers that mobility restrictions can have a direct impact on the astronomical communities of countries at both ends of the ban, as well as astronomy as a whole”. IAU general secretary Piero Benvenuti told Physics World that the IAU will “always denounce the possible damage that such decisions may cause to science” adding that the IAU has no plans to stop activities in the US because of the ban. “If anything, we will try to facilitate the participation in our activities, scientific and educational, by any world citizen,” he adds. However, G2 Massive Stars, one of the IAU’s 35 commissions, which plan activates in various sub-fields of astronomy, announced in early February that it will not hold any meeting in the US while any such ban remained in place.
National scientific organizations have also added their concerns. A statement by a group of German scientific societies describes the order as “a sweeping discrimination of human beings based on their ethnicity and consequently also an act of aggression against the fundamental values of science”. And according to the UK’s Royal Astronomical Society, “The ban hinders researchers from sharing their work with their peers, a fundamental tenet of scientific endeavour. The restrictions threaten to damage collaboration between the US and nations around the world.”
Scientific progress depends on openness, transparency, and the free flow of ideas and people
Within the US, a group of 171 scientific, engineering and educational societies, national associations and universities – among them the American Physical Society and the American Institute of Physics – issued a statement before the ban was overturned urging the administration to rescind the order. The statement expresses deep concern that it will “have a negative impact on the ability of scientists and engineers in industry and academia” to travel freely.
“Scientific progress depends on openness, transparency, and the free flow of ideas and people, and these principles have helped the US attract and richly benefit from international scientific talent,” the statement says. “The executive order will discourage many of the best and brightest international students, scholars, engineers and scientists from studying and working, attending academic and scientific conferences, or seeking to build new businesses in the US. Implementation of this policy will compromise the United States’ ability to attract international scientific talent and maintain scientific and economic leadership.”
Slow out of the box
The travel ban is not the only issue that has concerned scientists as they come to terms with a new approach to business at the White House. As the Senate approved the administration’s nominees, government efforts to counter global warming appear all but certain to be reduced, although perhaps more slowly than some administration advocates have suggested. Scott Pruitt, the lawyer whom the senate approved as the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) late last month, reportedly plans to cut the agency’s staff, close some of its regional offices, repeal recent regulations on battling climate change and weaken its regulations on environmental matters. Intriguingly, a predecessor of Pruitt’s, Anne Gorsuch, carried out a similar downsizing agenda as Ronald Reagan’s first EPA director in the early 1980s. The Trump administration has nominated her son, Neil Gorsuch, as a Supreme Court justice.
Rumours also emerged last month that the Princeton University physicist William Happer could become Trump’s scientific adviser. In the past Happer has said that researchers working on climate change resemble a “glassy-eyed chanting cult”, adding that climate change was a “so-called” science. The physicist apparently met Trump in January to discuss taking the role and has since said that if he was offered the job, he would accept. Another individual tipped as possible science adviser – computer scientist David Gelernter from Yale University – has said that he is “unconvinced” by evidence of human contribution to climate change. He has also criticized the “intellectualism” of modern academia.
The House of Representatives Science, Space and Technology Committee has also resumed efforts it began two years ago to restrict the ways in which government agencies use scientific results in their development of policies. Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican who heads the committee, has continued to question the findings of government scientists. In a recent hearing, Smith called on the AAAS publication Science Advances to retract a paper on “data biases in global warming” by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) researchers. He says that a former NOAA scientist had questioned the team’s scientific integrity. In testimony, Rush Holt stated that the objection was to the way the data was archived rather than the paper’s findings, which have been replicated. “Policy-makers should never dictate the conclusions of a scientific study and they should base policy on a review of relevant research and the provision of relevant statutes,” Holt told the committee. “In other words, the integrity of the process must be upheld.”
Trump is also likely to relax long-held policies on the process of approving new pharmaceutical drugs. The administration has raised the possibility of a presidential commission to study the safety of vaccines, including a purported connection between vaccines and autism that the medical profession has discredited. “What will become of the major government agencies of scientific research, the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation?” asks Bard College president Leon Botstein in a comment in the New York Times. “Will their research agendas be manipulated to fit Trump’s view of reality? Will there be a continuing erosion of support for basic research as opposed to research that contributes to some commercial product?”
An open letter issued by 39 European science organizations warns against the executive order and also indications that the US government is paying too much attention to views not based on fact and sound scientific evidence, especially in areas such as climate science and the safety of vaccines. It also highlights the danger of the administration stopping scientists from speaking to the media without first seeking permission. “All of these are at odds with the principles of transparency, open communication, [and the] mobility of scholars and scientists, which are vital to scientific progress and to the benefit our societies, economies and cultures derive from it,” the statement says. “Restrictions on research, scientists and research centres in inconvenient areas have no place in science…Our colleagues working in the US will suffer, the United States and US citizens will pay a price, as will Europe and Europeans, and countries and people all across the globe.”
One US group has gone beyond just issuing statements. On 22 April thousands of scientists are expected to participate in a March for Science in Washington DC as well as in several other cities around the world. The event is intended to “champion publicly funded and publicly communicated science as a pillar of human freedom and prosperity”. While much of the scientific community approves of the event, some members worry that it could be counterproductive, by politicizing science. “[The march] will make my job more difficult and increase polarization,” Robert Young, a Western Carolina University geologist who studies the effect of rising sea levels on coastlines, wrote in the New York Times.
Holt, meanwhile, says that the US scientific community is anxious that science will suffer from government neglect. “The administration and transition team have been silent about scientific issues. Many scientists think that it’s been an ominous silence,” he says. “There is no science adviser appointed and essentially no new appointments of trained scientists and engineers to any positions. If this is to be a science-friendly administration they’re pretty slow out of the box.”
