Cross-border partnerships mean faster discoveries and a safer world
It seems that the USA is plunging into an era of isolation and isolation. The White House wants to cancel international agreements, including them Paris Agreement to deal with climate change, and the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), and uses presidential orders to stop or slow down the entry of refugees and immigrants into the US.
These changes are bad for the USA, they could spell disaster for hundreds of thousands of desperate people around the planet and they are also likely to stifle science. This stranglehold will increase the vulnerability of the US to new and dangerous viruses and will harm efforts to explore space and deal with threats on a global scale such as climate change.
Scientific research depends on the sharing of ideas that does not stop at political borders, including between countries whose relations are not friendly. Even during the Cold War, the hostility between the US and the USSR was marginalized when the American researcher Albert B. Sabin and his Soviet colleagues tried a live oral vaccine against the polio virus in the USSR. This successful experiment provided the proof that allowed the new vaccine to be used worldwide, which eventually resulted in the eradication of the polio virus in most countries. during The International Polar Years, in the years 1883-1882 and 1933-1932, several countries tried to put aside their differences to explore the Arctic and Antarctic regions.
Louis Pasteur He once declared that "science has no homeland because knowledge belongs to humanity and is the torch that lights the world". Many countries returned and witnessed the wisdom of his words.
The Americans and Soviets also collaborated in the 60s and 70s to advance space exploration. Among other things, they exchanged weather data from meteorological satellites, jointly launched satellites, and together mapped the Earth's geomagnetic field. When the Soviet spacecraft was launched into space Cosmos 936 In 1977, it carried on board seven American biological experiments, and in 2014, even before the renewal of diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Cuban Academy of Sciences agreed to cooperate in research on drug resistance, on cancer, on New epidemics and infectious diseases, as well as in the field of brain research.
In recent years, the US has taken important steps to strengthen its scientific diplomacy. In 2009, President Barack Obama spoke in Cairo about cooperation with scientists in the Muslim world and topics such as the development of new energy sources, the creation of green jobs, the digitization of documents and information, the supply of clean water and the development of new agricultural crops. Following this speech, "The US Science Ambassadors Program” which locates prominent American scientists and uses them to use science, technology and innovation as diplomatic and economic tools outside the US borders. One of the researchers in the program, the vaccine scientist Peter Hotz, used his position as an envoy in the Middle East to establish a research partnership in the field of vaccines between his American institution and a university in Saudi Arabia.
But now, in the era of President Donald Trump, the future of the messenger program is clouded. The entry bans imposed by the new president disrupted the plans of researchers, sowed uncertainty, and caused scientists and researchers in countries outside the US to think about whether they should even try to come to the US for work or to attend conferences. They also raised concerns among foreign scientists working in the US that if they went to visit relatives in countries with a Muslim majority they would not be able to return.
This situation is grim, because better science, and scientific dialogue, benefits everyone. to detect new dangers such as viruses affinityוEbola And to stop them, cooperation between countries in different parts of the world is necessary. For example, without international cooperation it is impossible to understand the extent of the damage caused by the Zika virus and it is impossible to test possible vaccines among the populations exposed to the virus.
In the field of space exploration, the US needs Russia's assistance in sending astronauts to the International Space Station. In order to better map the stars and explore the unknown, the US must build cooperation with China because China has the largest radio telescope in the world. To help reduce the damage of climate change, all countries responsible for emitting large amounts of greenhouse gases, including the US, China and India, must take steps to address the problem and find solutions that will help vulnerable communities build resistance to these damages.
It is important that Americans oppose the current administration's trend of isolation and isolation. The US must continue to cultivate new relationships all over the world, and use science as a diplomatic tool. The growing benefit from such partnerships far outweighs the risks involved, and we will all be harmed by their weakening.
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Adi
The situation in the US is not good. It is very difficult to find American engineers. In the last year, the situation has worsened. The Chinese and Indians are afraid to come, and the good ones get good offers at home.
Wow, what a load of bullshit. Another cognitive triplet from the delusional American left. Living in a bubble of sad hysteria, all day licking Obama and screaming about Trumpocalypse like paperbacks.
Living in la la land. They write, they tweet, and meanwhile the dark forces of Iran, Russia, and Islam are killing, slaughtering and conquering in the real world. The West is morally bankrupt. We will all pay for it.
Not bad, for hundreds of years, apart from terrorism and crime, no inventions or innovations have come out of the Islamic world and Africa and the rest of the third world against which the walls are intended, and rightly so. And even then the innovations were intellectual theft from peoples that Islam had brutally conquered