In the US, funding agencies seem to be increasingly opposed to an often inevitable feature of good science: international collaboration. Scientists have been told by officials at the National Institutes of Health that they need to remove mention of foreign collaborators from progress reports, or that they need to avoid such collaborations to begin with. At NASA, officials have told scientists that rather than just avoiding funding work in China, they should actively avoid collaborating with Chinese researchers. And a recently introduced bill would make that restriction more explicit.
I have a general policy against discussing concrete political issues on this blog, so I’m not going to dig into the details of who’s doing what here, how far it’s going or how novel it is. That policy extends to the comments. If you mention specific laws, politicians, or political parties, I will delete your comment.
I do want to say something more general, though. I think people often underestimate just how important international collaboration is.
I’ve talked before about how scientific specialization spreads scientists around the world. Scientists want to work with people who work on their specific interests, and there are often only a few people that fit that description. So people move across the world, creating centers of expertise.
More than that, though, essentially any activity, done well, is done internationally. The better you want to perform, the more likely it is that the best collaborator will be someone in another country.
People don’t notice this as much as they could, because they’re used to the exceptions. Popular art is often siloed by language and cultural references. Sports are intentionally set up as competitions between regions and nations, and militaries compete as a practical necessity. But without those exceptions, international competition wins out. The best doctor, the best classical musician, and the best businessperson for a job can’t be expected to come from one country or another. Those fields, like science, are international.
When that internationalism is weak, it’s a warning sign. Without that drive to succeed on an international stage, scientists get lazy. There are countries with a history of academic cronyism, where universities were run more on interpersonal politics than scholarly merit, cozy fiefdoms where prominent academics dole out positions. To combat this, policymakers work to make their research systems more international. They explicitly ask about international collaborations and participation in international conferences in grant applications, not to discourage them, but to encourage them: to reward academics who show merit on the international stage and break up lazy patronage networks.
It worries me that it sounds like some US policymakers want to do the opposite. People are increasingly worried about bias and groupthink in the sciences, and increasingly mad that scientists could be wasting the public’s money to maintain a cushy lifestyle. International collaboration is how you hold scientists to account, how you force them to compete and show their merit. If you drop that, academia is going to get a whole lot worse.
4 gravitons 
Scientific research is indeed an international activity, but this might only be because travel and communication are so easy nowadays. I am not sure that restricting international collaborations would necessarily make science worse. After all, in neural networks (natural and artificial), each neuron is not connected to all others. And historically, great science has been done in relatively isolated communities. (Example: physics in the Soviet Union.)
Moreover, all these international collaborations may make academia excessively standardized and homogeneous. Funding systems, publications, diplomas, etc, used to vary much more geographically. These variations might have been good for originality and robustness of research. The research ecosystem needs diversity!
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People make this kind of argument, about artificial barriers strengthening diversity and robustness, in a lot of domains. It comes up in regard to trade in development economics, and in the appendix to Guns, Germs, and Steel.
The thing is, I think academics don’t actually need artificial barriers to do this, because they make barriers on their own. Different subfields and research programs invent different jargon, and you easily get situations where groups are studying the same thing from totally different perspectives that take a huge amount of work to “translate” between. The most famous example is probably the difference between people trained in GR and in particle physics in their approaches to quantum gravity. So I think academia is one of the domains that needs this kind of thing the least.
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You would have to go back beyond the start of modern science to find any situation where it was not an international activity, and even then, the precursors did not respect national borders. People would communicate via letters and even brave some very difficult conditions to visit each other.
As for the Soviet Union, it was, as its name suggests, a union, an amalgamation of what are now separate nations, and while for a certain period they did not have as free access to, say, Western European or American science, they did have all the rest of the Eastern Bloc. Nevertheless, their advances were pretty uneven.
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In the 19th Century, when science was positivist and looking for universal truth, it was one of the core areas where internationalism held sway. Although interrupted by WWI, physics seems especially to have been international in the interwar period. However, the development of the atom and hydrogen bombs during WWII revealed that science could be the sine qua non of national power and became the engine of the military-industrial complex of which Eisenhower warned. Then we had the Space Race.
Medicine had also been a core area of internationalism, but as it moved from being an art to a science in the 1960s and nearly universal basic medical care brought about human population growth with its attendant medical problems, both scientific medical investigation and more engineering-like health care delivery became profit centers protected by an international patent system. This fit well into the developing economic system where countries no longer sought colonies but instead empowered multinational corporations to exploit the resources and service the populations of lesser-developed countries.
Concern over ecology and climate change, driven in part by increased scientific knowledge coming from satellites, and a growing realization that a mobile world made possible the rapid spread of local disease outbreaks, led to increased internationalism at the end of the 20th century. The opening of academic gates to international students permitted the human potential of the Third World to be realized more fully. But the gains of this period are literally being erased by resurgent ultranationalism and acceptance, if not glorification, of inequality.
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