The flight from European science

From the declaration of independence onwards, the USA has always been the ‘promised land’ for all sorts of people from Europe. The promise of ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’ attracted liberals fleeing oppression in post‐Napoleonic Europe and Irish farmers seeking a better life during the potato famine. The attraction of the USA for Europeans has not changed since, although many people these days immigrate for reasons other than oppression or starvation. Notably, young scientists from Europe, but also from Asia, leave their countries because they find better conditions for their research in the USA. Indeed, the list of US noble laureates reads like a Who's Who of international science.The reasons have been analysed in numerous statements and articles. The USA spend a higher percentage of the gross domestic product on research than European and most Asian countries. And the amount of money the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation is spending has been steadily increasing compared with the stagnating budgets of most European research councils. The high quality of research is more visible in the USA than in Europe, making it easier to define ‘centres of excellence’—universities and research institutes with a high reputation among scientists world‐wide. Europe faces the additional problem of complex language and cultural differences that make it harder for scientists to change from one country to another. Indeed, in some European countries it has become obligatory for scientists to put a stay in the USA on their curriculum vitae in order to get access to higher positions within their countries' research hierarchies.Many PhD students and postdoctoral fellows, however, have additional, more personal reasons to leave Europe. For them, it is mainly the access to funding that has become the decisive argument. Salaries for researchers in the natural sciences have …