Sadly, the US top researchers have been forced to leave their country to another, where they will be appreciated for their achievements in science.

See Substack, Dean Blundell, full coverage of the topic:

Dean Blundell

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August 30, 2026

Here’s a number Donald Trump will never say out loud: 48.

That’s how many of America’s top researchers quietly walked out of Harvard, MIT, Yale, Carnegie Mellon, UCSF, the University of Michigan and the National Institutes of Health this summer, and walked into Canadian universities with a cheque from Ottawa in their hand and a look on their face like someone who just got out of a bad marriage.

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On Thursday, Mélanie Joly stood up at UBC in Vancouver and announced the first 64 Eddie Goldenberg Research Chairs of Canada. Three quarters of them came from the United States. All four of the top-tier, highest-paid distinguished chairs came from the US. The federal government is putting $504 million behind them over eight years, plus another $37 million to recruit 63 younger researchers over the next year, all of it under a $1.7 billion talent program Carney’s government launched in December while everybody was watching the tariff fight.

Dean Blundell

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November 16, 2025

Everyone with a pulse saw this coming in January of 2025. JD Vance had already stood at a National Conservatism podium and told the room that professors are the enemy. RFK Jr. was about to run American health policy. Vatnik Soup posted at the time that the resulting brain drain would be unprecedented and that Europe and Canada should welcome these academics with open arms. That was a prediction. This week it became an invoice.

Then Trump actually did it. By January of this year Nature had counted more than 7,800 American research grants terminated or frozen and roughly 25,000 scientists and staff walking out of federal research agencies. He went after foreign students. He went after anything with the word equity in it. He accused universities of harbouring people who hate America, which is a strange thing to say about the places that gave America the internet, mRNA vaccines and the atomic bomb.

The late Eddie Goldenberg, Chrétien’s old chief of staff, saw the opening and spent his last months telling Ottawa and the universities to make an ambitious play for every disaffected researcher in Trump’s America. Carney’s government listened, rebranded the whole program in his name, and put real money behind it. Each chair gets at least a million dollars a year for eight years to build a lab and hire a team. The distinguished chairs get $1.5 million a year. That is not a job offer. That is a life raft with a research budget.

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June 3, 2025

The names that should embarrass Washington

Phillip Zamore. He ran the RNA Therapeutics Institute at the University of Massachusetts. RNA therapeutics is the field that gave the world the COVID vaccine. He is now going to McGill. He told the Globe and Mail he shopped his move to Europe and Japan before Canada made him an offer that took his breath away, and then he said the part that should be carved into the wall of every Republican senator’s office: “I’ve pretty much lost my country.” He said he was scared to keep being a scientist in America, that the international trainees he wanted to recruit could be denied visas or deported. He didn’t leave because Montreal has better bagels. He left because his own government made him afraid.

Kevin Hall. This one is personal for anyone who has watched RFK Jr. pretend to care about what Americans eat. Hall was one of the most respected nutrition scientists at the NIH. He ran the studies on ultraprocessed food that actually proved the thing Kennedy keeps yelling about. He quit last year and said federal officials were censoring his work. The guy whose research made the “Make America Healthy Again” slogan sound remotely credible is now at the University of Ottawa, because the people running MAHA couldn’t stand him telling the truth about it.

Peter Caravan. A kid from Newfoundland who did his undergrad at Acadia, his PhD at UBC, and then spent twenty years at Mass General and Harvard Medical School building one of the top molecular imaging programs on the planet. He’s coming back to UBC as a distinguished chair with $12 million in research money. He stood at the podium Thursday, got choked up, and said he meant it in the literal sense when he called it an honour. He was coming home. He also said nobody from Canada recruited him. He came looking for us.

There’s more. Sara Seager, the MIT astrophysicist who hunts for life on other planets, is at U of T. Curtis Huttenhower left Harvard for UBC. Kathryn Whitehead left Carnegie Mellon for UBC to work down the hall from Pieter Cullis, the Canadian who invented the lipid nanoparticles inside every mRNA shot on earth, and she said she wasn’t even looking. Ethan Zuckerman, the man who invented the pop-up ad and later apologized for it, is going to McGill, which is the only part of this story America might be glad to lose.

How happy are they? Look at the tape

Nobody in these interviews sounds like a mercenary. They sound like people who got out.

Zamore said the things he valued about democracy, especially the role of science within it, no longer exist at the federal level in America. Caravan cried. Whitehead called it a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Dozens of the 64 are Canadians who left for the American money years ago and are coming back now that the American money comes with a loyalty test attached.

That’s the part the Trump people will never understand. Scientists don’t need a flag. They need a lab, a budget, students who won’t be deported, and a government that doesn’t fire them for publishing the wrong result. For eighty years the United States had all four. In eighteen months it burned three of them for a photo op.