Virginia Postrel, Columnist

Criminalizing Science Is Really Dumb

The U.S. is playing into China’s hands by prosecuting researchers it ought to be welcoming.

January 27, 2021 at 2:00 PM UTC

Virginia Postrel is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. She is a visiting fellow at the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy at Chapman University and author, most recently, of “The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World.”

No place for scientists.
Photographer: Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

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Ever since the Nazis drove Europe’s greatest minds into exile, U.S. science has flourished by attracting talent from overseas. After World War II, the country’s prosperity and openness to immigrant scientists turned “brain drain” into a huge national advantage. Mixing global talent with America’s own made U.S. labs the world’s leading source of scientific discoveries, a status that only intensified with the opening of China to the West.

Now that status is under threat from Chinese ambitions — and the U.S. government’s self-defeating response to them. In a reversal of national identities, China is acting like a keen capitalist employer, wooing Chinese-born scientists with top-of-the-line new labs and lavish funding. The U.S., meanwhile, is taking the authoritarian role, using the threat of high-profile criminal prosecutions to strike fear in the scientific community.