Re: Science News

Fintan O'Toole, one of Ireland's top journalists, sees opportunity in
this :)

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2025/02/25/trump-and-musks-war-on-science-presents-a-startling-opportunity-for-ireland/
Non paywall version:
https://archive.is/gYmdm#selection-1893.0-1927.233


"The idiot wind now howling through the US offers Ireland a
transformative windfall
Trump is complaining that we pick America's pocket. Fair enough - we
should instead pick America's brains
…………………………………………………………

[...]

Last week, 1,200 employees at the National Institutes of Health,
America's premier biomedical research agency, were summarily
dismissed. There were also mass firings of scientists at the Food and
Drug Administration and the Centres for Disease Control. And federal
funding for scientific research into Alzheimer's, cardiac disease and
other illnesses at universities and institutes of technology has been
frozen indefinitely.

This is insane. One of the few things we know for sure about the
future is that medical science is making huge breakthroughs and that
the development of new treatments will be one of the main drivers of
economic growth. Trump is already set on closing off one path to
prosperity - the development of the green economy. With Musk and
Kennedy he is now blocking the other one.

But one country's madness can be another's road to reason. The
biomedical scientists that the US are dumping represent an immense
reservoir of intellectual capital. We don't in fact have to steal it -
Trump is giving it away for nothing. He and his gauleiters are not
just firing some of the world's best biomedical researchers - they are
creating a hostile environment in which science itself is the enemy of
the people.

If the Government has the wit to see it and the guts to go after it,
this is a generational opportunity. Ireland produces world-class
biomedical scientists. But we do not produce enough of them and we do
not support them well enough."

[...]