Yep, this effort is the culmination of 50 years of research. Could be the last harrah of the NIH with the amount of cuts we've had and the scientists who are taking jobs in other countries.
Unfortunately a staggering amount of research in other countries is largely funded by the NIH/USA.
What a shortsighted view.
The technology used on this same article was funded by Max Planck (Germany), Sweden and the NIH to a french and a USA scientist. Should those collaborations stop?
That may be partially true, but it's also important to understand that the US benefited a lot from that. Scientists from all over the world moved to work in the US, students looked forward to studying there and working in US companies, etc.
That is changing. Children in my country are moving from learning English to French and German in order to study in European universities. This started after Brexit and will accelerate now.
And those grant awards need to demonstrate how they benefit the USA. Many are (were) related to disease surveillance in developing countries to prevent pandemics, or collaborations with countries that are more advanced than the US in niche areas.
Terrible take. Do all scientists who make breakthroughs that we might benefit from live in the US? CRISPR itself was a US-German collaboration.
The reason for this is very pragmatic actually. We don’t have enough researchers of a particular specialty in one country alone. When you get that specialized the air is very rare.
By pooling our funding / effort we can create a larger body of collaborators to solve problems faster and better.
It could be that the organizations are funding wild stuff that isn’t salient. I’ll concede that.
However, in basic sciences there are so few specialists it is important to share resources. The funding is worse than ever (hello 2006!), and that trend is unlikely to reverse for a while.
Source: I worked in bioenergetics for 10y, my collaborators were from Hungary, Chile, Canada, Israel, Italy, and more! At a major conference on mito energetics they all fit in one big lecture hall (100ish?)
And so what?
Indeed - does it matter who performed the research? If the CRISPR reasearch were performed in another country, would that change the outcome for the infant?
That means that it's not going to happen anymore.
Unless those other countries step up and fund it themselves.
They might. They might not.