France’s Aix-Marseille University has a long history of bringing precarious artists and researchers, welcoming people struggling to perform their work in war zones or while facing security threats. This time, it’s welcoming Americans.
In this week’s announcement, Aix-Marseille University has officially launched its $16.3 million Safe Space for Science program, aimed at assisting scientists who can no longer perform their profession in the U.S.
A week ago, France insisted the country’s research institutions figure out how to welcome scientists leaving the United States in reaction to President Donald Trump’s approaches. Since Trump returned to the White House, his administration has slashed federal funding for life-saving research and moved to forgive hundreds of federal workers operating on health and climate. “Many well-known researchers are already questioning their future in the United States,” France’s minister for higher education and research Philippe Baptiste said in a letter to the country’s academic institutions.
“We would naturally wish to welcome a certain number of them.”
Baptiste recommended research leaders send him “concrete proposals on the topic, both on priority technologies and scientific fields”. Aix-Marseille University in the south of France is launching a program dedicated to welcoming US researchers, especially those working on climate change.
In addition to the scores of cuts overseen by Trump’s billionaire tech giant ally Elon Musk, the US leader has pulled out the US from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Agreement. As a protest, scientists mobilised in cities across the United States with many of their French colleagues in the southwestern city of Toulouse regarding a solidarity demonstration.
The appointment of noted vaccine sceptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr as the director of the Department of Health and Human Services has also outraged many scientists. It comes as a US judge barred Trump’s administration from implementing steep cuts to federal budget funding for research that universities and Democratic-led states caution would lead to layoffs, lab shutdowns, and slowdowns of scientific and medical studies.
US District Judge Angel Kelley ruled that the planned funding cuts for the National Institutes of Health were unlawful, and opened a new tab at the request of 22 Democratic state attorneys general.
The outcomes could be dramatic. Eric Berton, the president of Aix-Marseille University, said cuts imply a decrease in scientific and human advancement, along with inquiries about academic freedom.
“It’s the foundations of science that are under attack, but also the language used to understand and explain the world as it is,”
he stated.
“We hope that our initiative will be followed by other universities in France and Europe. … We know that will not be able to solve this alone.”
French academics including Nobel Prize winners Anne L’Huillier, a physicist and Esther Duflo, an economist denounced “unprecedented attacks” on US science, stating they damaged “one of the pillars of democracy.”
The head of France’s Pasteur Public Health Institute, Yasmine Belkaid, said that she acquired “calls every day” from US-based European and American scientists searching for jobs. For French research, “You might call it a sad opportunity, but it is an opportunity all the same,” Belkaid, an immunology researcher once working in the US, said. “It is time for us to position ourselves as central players in this research ecosystem, which is necessary for our economic independence.
