![]() Today, universities, including public university systems in California and Texas, rival the largest private firms in the world in the number of patent applications made per year. Before the law’s passage in 1980, results from publicly funded projects usually stayed in the public domain. The Bayh-Dole Act permits, and in fact encourages, universities to patent products from federally funded research and license them for profit. Similarly, the privatization and commercialization of academic research also mold the contours of inquiry. Subscribe to WIRED and stay smart with more of your favorite Ideas writers. To appropriate the private ache as an injury to national competitiveness is to trivialize its magnitude, to reduce the value of a person to their usefulness to the state. Even in this imagined scenario, the pain is unbearable. I try to picture my 19-year-old self in China today, watching the borders close due to the pandemic and visa restrictions, swallowing the shards of a shattered dream. To say so is to suggest that either government is entitled to my presence and my labor. It was not Beijing’s loss or Washington’s gain. When I left China for the US, the decision was personal. It’s amazing how the language and hence logic of the state are accepted as axiomatic. Foreign versus American, while I am both and neither. Everyone also seems to believe that US leadership in the sciences is essential, and one way to maintain that is to attract foreign talent, people like myself. Everyone appears to agree that foreign acquisition of ideas and personnel poses a real threat to American science. ![]() The focus of the current policy debate has been on the means the end is left unexamined. This week, the Justice Department announced an end to the China Initiative, concluding that the controversial program “is not the right approach” and that addressing the myriad of “national security threats” posed by the Chinese government, as well as other foreign adversaries, “demands a broader approach.” Andrew Lelling, former US Attorney for the District of Massachusetts and one of the leading prosecutors on the China Initiative, also acknowledged that while the initiative had “lost its focus” and some mistakes were made, it has “created a climate of fear among researchers” and “general deterrence” as a goal “has been achieved in spades.” The investigations have disproportionately targeted scientists of Chinese descent, and are denounced by academic associations and civil rights groups as racial profiling. A series of high-profile cases ended in acquittal or dismissal. The heavy-handed approach has since backfired. Any connection to China, be it personal or professional, was considered a potential conduit for intellectual property theft. In the fall of 2018, the US Justice Department launched a “China Initiative” to combat economic espionage, with a focus on academia. Being a foreign scientist in the US-and being Chinese in particular-has been labeled a security risk. But as tensions rise between my birth country and my adopted home, the dream is now suspect. ![]() When I arrived in Chicago in 2009 for my PhD in physics, it was a dream come true. As a child in China in the 1990s, I looked to the beautiful country across the Pacific as the place where I wanted to be, and I learned that a career in the sciences would take me there. Had I been born a decade later, would I still have aspired to come to the United States to be a scientist? Over the past few years, I’ve asked myself this question countless times and am nowhere near an answer.
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