The Isolation of American Synchrotron Science

IUCr misses the USA again

About six months ago I wrote that the brain drain to America had frozen, “put on ICE,” I said. More recently Neil deGrasse Tyson also talked about America losing its scientists, and that is getting a lot of well-deserved attention. But synchrotrons and synchrotron science also have a compounding problem that’s damaging: isolation. For instance, this week much of the crystallography world is gathering in Calgary for the IUCr Congress, a conference that has not been held in the United States since Seattle in 1996. Thirty years out in the cold. American synchrotrons remain some of the best in the world (looking at you, APS), but the scientists who actually operate beamlines and do experiments struggle to travel nationally and especially internationally, while foreign scientists have increasingly more reasons not to come here. Synchrotron science has always moved through people as much as papers: at a talk, over a beer, standing beside someone else's poster, seeing a strange piece of hardware, complaining about software, or discovering that another facility solved your problem five years ago. Institutional knowledge is Rumsfeldian; you don't know what you don't know. Europe has multiple synchrotrons separated by a train ride or a cheap flight. American facilities are separated from each other by a continent and from much of the synchrotron world by two oceans, capricious travel guidance, weird budget restrictions and opaque demonic bureaucracy. We can build brighter sources, faster detectors and better robots, but if the people running them become progressively disconnected from the international community, we risk optimizing the machines while isolating the science.