US Brain Drain Threatens Scientific and Biopharmaceutical Leadership

Before World War II, a significant number of German Jewish scientists fled Nazi persecution and came to the United States, where they contributed enormously to American scientific and technological innovation. A decade later, in the post-war period, more than 1,500 leading German scientists also came to the United States. They played critical roles in the development of spaceflight, jet aircraft, and guided missiles—capabilities that helped keep the United States ahead of the Soviet Union.

Today, however, the situation is reversed, as the United States, once the world’s premier destination for scientific talent, now faces a growing risk of brain drain. After major cuts to federal research budgets, hiring freezes across universities, and the termination of key programs, many researchers—especially early-career scientists—are looking abroad. A recent Naturesurvey found that more than 75 percent of U.S.-based scientists are considering leaving the country, most commonly for Europe or Canada. Among early-career researchers, the share was even higher—nearly 80 percent.

Universities outside the United States view this moment as a rare opportunity to attract American scientific talent. The risk is that the United States may lose not just individual scientists, but entire future research agendas and scientific communities that can take decades to build. If this trend continues, the country could face a lasting shortfall in expertise across critical fields—including biology, virology, immunology, and AI-enabled drug discovery—at exactly the moment global competitors are seeking to expand their scientific footprint.

National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Jay Bhattacharya has emphasized that “training future biomedical scientists” remains one of the agency’s top priorities, along with ensuring federal research support reaches institutions across the country—not only elite coastal universities. He has often stressed the importance of early-career researchers, who face a highly creative but high-risk phase of their careers and therefore require sustained support.

Yet several policies now in place run counter to this goal. One example is the Trump administration’s termination of the NIH’s MOSAIC (Maximizing Opportunities for Scientific and Academic Independent Careers) program. The initiative supported postdoctoral researchers from diverse backgrounds as they transitioned into independent research roles due to a broad executive order targeting DEI efforts. Policymakers designed MOSAIC to address two long-standing challenges at the NIH: the lack of diversity among NIH-funded investigators, and the precarious financial and career prospects of postdoctoral researchers. The program’s definition of diversity was intentionally broad, reflecting the NIH’s goal of cultivating scientific talent nationwide, including researchers from rural areas, first-generation college students, and recipients of federal aid programs. MOSAIC was specifically designed to target a point in the training pipeline where academia often loses underrepresented researchers. Beyond the program’s termination, the NIH funded fewer early-career researchers in 2025 than in any similar period since 2016.

Further, NIH issued significantly fewer grants this year—12,588 in 2025 compared to an average of 16,099 per year from 2015 to 2024. This drop of more than 3,500 awards affected virtually every domain of biology and medicine, leaving gaps in research on cancer, diabetes, aging, neurological disorders, and public health. There was also a stark decline in R01 grants: NIH awarded 24 percent fewer R01s in 2025, amounting to 1,319 fewer awards than expected in the agency’s flagship grant program, at a time when the biomedical workforce is already under strain.

Such changes, in addition to further proposed NIH funding cuts, risk accelerating a major brain drain at a time when scientific talent is globally contested. $1.7 billion in NIH funding has already been withheld, and over 2,200 grants totaling $3.8 billion have been canceled, prompting universities to freeze hiring, delay clinical trials, and scale back or shut down laboratories. This erosion of institutional capacity is difficult to reverse. Once labs close and teams disperse, the expertise and momentum they carried often cannot be easily reconstructed.

The downstream effects are not limited to academia: biotechnology start-ups, private sector R&D, and clinical innovation pipelines all depend on federally funded basic research and a steady influx of NIH-trained scientists. Without that flow of talent, the entire U.S. innovation engine—from basic discovery to commercial drug development—risks slowing down, jeopardizing progress on diseases that affect millions of Americans.

These shifts can be deeply damaging for U.S. science and biopharmaceutical competitiveness, as the NIH plays a central role in sustaining the nation’s biomedical workforce. It funds more than 300,000 researchers through nearly 50,000 competitive grants across 2,500 universities and research institutions. This scientific workforce is a strategic national asset—essential for responding to pandemics, countering biothreats, and sustaining the nation’s biopharmaceutical leadership.

Meanwhile, other nations are moving aggressively to capitalize on this opportunity and draw U.S.-based scientific talent. The European Union’s Choose Europe for Science, and France’s Choose France for Science are explicitly designed to attract top international talent, particularly from the United States, by offering stable funding, secure career prospects, and supportive research environments. Canada, Australia, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and the United Kingdom have all launched similar efforts. China has done so as well.

These programs are already seeing rising interest from U.S.-based scientists, highlighting how quickly talent can shift when incentives change. China demonstrated this dynamic with its own efforts to attract scientific talent from the United States: an estimated 20,000 U.S.-based researchers of Chinese descent left the country between 2010 and 2021, according to name-based analysis conducted by academic researchers.

NIH is not simply a research agency; it is the backbone of the United States’ biopharmaceutical innovation ecosystem. Weakening it by cutting training programs, defunding scientists, or allowing other nations to recruit away the next generation of researchers will erode America’s scientific capacity, diminish its global leadership, and undermine economic competitiveness and national security. If the United States wants to remain the world leader in biomedical science, it must retain the scientists who drive discovery. Protecting the next generation of researchers is not optional—it is foundational to the nation’s future.