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But merely to have breathed a concentrated scientific atmosphere like Paris must have an effect on anyone who has lived where stupidity is tolerated... I have more fully learned at least three principles since I have been in Paris: not to take authority when I can have facts; not to guess when I can know; not to think a man must take physic because he is sick (1). —Oliver Wendell Holmes (1833)
In groundbreaking work, Howard Garrison and FASEB’s Office of Public Affairs have documented a major shift in the work force of biomedical science in the U.S (2)
. Garrison et al. found that foreign postdocs on temporary visas were the fastest growing segment of postdoctoral fellows in the life sciences, going from 27% of the total postdoctoral pool in 1977 to parity (50:50) with U.S. scientists in 1992. The even split between foreign and U.S. postdocs was maintained until 1998, when, suddenly, the number of U.S. postdocs declined. Indeed, by 2002, there were fewer American postdocs working than in 1998! By contrast, the number of foreign postdocs in life science took a spurt between 1998 and 2002, and, according to Garrison et al., this increase has "accounted for all of the recent growth in the biomedical science postdoc population" (2)
. By 2002, foreign postdocs outnumbered U.S. postdocs by 23% (16,890 to 13,787). Garrison et al. concluded that our "over-reliance on a temporary workforce may have far-reaching, negative consequences for our research enterprise."
I’m not sure that the consequences will be all negative: good science is good science, no matter where or by whom it is done. In fact, we wouldn’t have a research enterprise in the U.S. at all without a temporary workforce that traveled in the other direction. We might remember that, for more than a century, Americans who could afford it trekked to Europe for postgraduate study. In 1833, Harvard’s Jeffries Wyman, our first comparative anatomist, went to study zoology with Baron Cuvier at the Jardin de Plantes in Paris while his colleagues, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry Ingersoll Bowditch learned clinical investigation from Pierre C. A. Louis at the Hôtel Dieu (3)
. A generation later, Bowditch’s son, Henry Pickering Bowditch, was packed off to learn experimental medicine from Claude Bernard at the College de France in 1868. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 shifted the center of European science, and Bowditch, who was to become America’s first card-carrying physiologist, went to Leipzig in 1871 to study cardiac physiology with Karl Ludwig. By the 1880s, Leipzig became a busy hub of American postdoc activity, with Julius Cohnheim, Rudolph Leuckart, and Karl Ludwig playing host to future luminaries of FASEB: Samuel Meltzer (FASEB’s first president), Henry P. Bowditch (of the physiologists, APS), John J. Abel (of the pharmacologists, ASPET), and William Henry Welch (of the pathologists, ASEP (now, ASIP)) (3
, 4)
. Indeed, many of the men who founded the Rockefeller Institute and FASEB at the dawn of the 20th century (Christian A. Herter, Simon Flexner, William Henry Welch, Samuel Meltzer) had learned their science as "foreign postdocs" in Germany and published their papers in German journals (5)
. Bowditch’s paper from Leipzig spelled out the new physiology in the new scientific language of his day: "Über die Eigenthümlichkeiten der Reizbarkeit, welche die Muskelfasern des Herzens zeigen," (i.e., heart muscle is uniquely self-excitable) (6)
.
Walter B. Cannon, another of the founders of FASEB, was perhaps the only scientist of his generation to serve his postdoc years entirely in the U.S. He explained that he had been too poor to study abroad, but confessed that he was in debt to the continental tradition: "I think of myself as being one of Dr. Bowditch’s sons, and a grandson of Ludwig on one side, and of Jeffries Wyman on the other, with perhaps a great uncle in Claude Bernard." (7)
A generation later, the debt was repaid when scores of scientific refugees from Europe–they’ve been called "Hitler’s Gift"–were able to reconstitute their laboratories in the U.S. (8)
. The gift included a platoon of Nobel laureates, such as Otto Loewi and Severo Ochoa, Carl and Gert Cori, Albert Szent-Györgyi, Konrad Bloch and Fritz Lipmann, Salvador Luria and Max Delbrück (8)
. Cannon, himself, was instrumental in helping many of the refugees find places in the United States and played a major role in fighting nativist resentment at the influx. In time, many U.S. scientists became postdoc fellows of the exiled Europeans and together they laid the foundations for the flowering of U.S. biomedical research in the last half of the twentieth century. And in the immediate postwar period, traffic flowed back across the Atlantic as Delbrück’s student, Jim Watson, brought back DNA from his postdoc in Cambridge, and Arthur Pardee brought home molecular biology from Jacob and Monod in Paris. By then, the center of science had shifted once more, and the Pardee, Jacob, and Monod paper was written in English (9)
.
One could, in fact, argue that American science has ignored the narrow limits of national borders since Benjamin Franklin. Dr. Holmes appreciated this two-way traffic, honoring Daguerre and the Montgolfiers together with Morton and Franklin:
We’ve tried reform—and chloroform—and both have turned our brain;
When France called up the photograph, we roused the foe to pain;
Just so those earlier sages shared the chaplet of renown,
Hers sent a bladder to the clouds, ours brought their lightning down ... (10)
So, I’m not worried that our research enterprise will be diminished by an influx from foreign postdocs. For openers, biomedical training is no longer confined to two-way traffic over the Atlantic. Judging from the surnames in our journals, it’s not only the children of Delbrück and the Montgolfiers who flock to our laboratories. Science has gone global; our enterprise is enriched by young scientists from every part of the planet.
When I took another look at Garrison’s data on that sudden spurt of foreign postdocs around 2000 (2)
, I recalled another dramatic spurt, one equal in impact and perhaps related. Surely, one of the great practical consequences of biomedical science in the last few decades has been the growth of U.S. biotechnology, which has successfully brought many of our laboratory discoveries to the bedside. I note (see Table 1
) that the NASDAQ Biotech Index, which had hovered in the 200s pretty much from its founding in 1993 until 1998, suddenly took off to over 1600 in the last year of the Clinton boom (2000). It then dropped back to the 790s of today; but that’s still an overall rise of 291%. Could the spurt in biotech be due to an increased number of principal investigators, people of my generation or younger, who were mentoring all those postdocs? Not really; our tribe only increased by 23%. But the foreign postdocs doubled their numbers as the NASDAQ spiked (Table 1)
. One thing’s for sure—the influx of foreign postdocs wasn’t a disaster for the U.S. Indeed, I’d argue that the long-range U.S. investment in biomedical research, public and private, has paid off by creating new science, attracting new scientists, and founding a new industry. The foreign postdoctoral fellows are very much a part of U.S. science going global.
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In the U.S., we pay for support and upkeep of foreign postdocs, and as Garrison et al. note, 
75% of them tend to remain in this country. Those who stay have become new American scientists—many in biotechnology—and our investment in their training constitutes a national asset. Those who return continue their ties to America, collaborate with American labs, and become the product of an American investment in science worldwide. They publish in the English language, and they, together with their colleagues, who may or may not have worked in the U. S., publish their research in The FASEB Journal. I’ve tabulated the origins of papers published in The FASEB Journal (Table 2
).
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We note that as the number of foreign postdocs has doubled (between 1990 and 2005), the ratio of U.S. vs. foreign manuscripts that we publish has completely reversed, so that by 2005 only 24% of our published research originated from within the United States, whereas 15 years ago, 76% was of domestic origin. This increment is even more striking when we look at the first 100 IQs (initial queries or proposals for publication) received by this office since October 2005. Only 16% originated in this country; it will be of interest to see how far this tide will flow.
There may be unique circumstances that can explain this complete inversion of the domestic:foreign ratio; but the The FASEB Journal is by no means alone. Of 35 papers in the life sciences that appeared in Science, (the official publication of AAAS) from October through November 2005, only 45% originated entirely from the U.S. Science is now at the ratio that The FASEB Journal was in 1995.
A pessimist might argue that our biomedical enterprise is going the way of the American automobile industry. Judging from the foreign to domestic ratios of IQs received, we’re in line with General Motors. But, I’d argue that science is not an industry, it’s a common enterprise without borders and the global reach of our science is a virtue, not a vice. We remain the country to which the best of the world’s young still turn for support and training, for a universal language in which to write, and for open, international journals in which to publish. It might, however, also be said that we are in the position of Germany before its military and political climate turned hostile to science. We ought to heed that dark example and to resist the forces in our country that would stifle inquiry. A new climate of Endarkenment threatens to limit our science by turning scientific and ethical decisions into political ones: stem cell research, contraception, fertility research, regenerative medicine. Today’s challenge to the biomedical research enterprise is not posed by foreign postdocs:
It’s alleged that human embryonic stem cells are a veritable fount of cures for those afflicted with disease. However, to date, I am unaware of one person being cured from either private or federally funded embryonic stem cell research (12)
We’ve heard that song before and it’s charged with the same zeal that prompted Harper’s Weekly to oppose human dissection in 1853:
We cannot help thinking that the necessities of medical science have been greatly overrated. Even where the want is conceded, the benefits may be purchased too dear. Better that the causes of some bodily diseases remain concealed, than that the knowledge of them be obtained at the sacrifice of some of the best feelings of the soul (13)
We might remember why Germany lost its preeminence in the life sciences and its journals lost their coveted place in the bibliography of science: a totalitarian vision of Aryan, nativist science. The tide of American nativism is running strong these days; it’s the same sentiment that successfully fought dissection in American medical schools until 1853, that kept physiology out of our schools in the anti-vivisection fervor of the 1890s, and that almost prevented Rockefeller Institute from being launched.
There were, indeed, no experimental laboratories in the life sciences at all in the U.S. until the 1880s, when Welch and Abel et al. returned from their postdoc stints in Germany. So limited were the opportunities for bench research in physiology or biochemistry in the United States that well-off folks such as S. Weir Mitchell in Philadelphia and Christian A. Herter in New York set up research labs in their own homes. Herter, whose family was city gentry, held a teaching professorship at Bellevue Hospital Medical College, but was not provided with laboratory space. He established a private biochemistry laboratory on the fourth floor of his home at 817–19 Madison Avenue. The building still stands, sporting the remains of the original Corinthian facade designed by a premier New York architectural firm, Carèrre and Hastings. Its ground floor and garden have become the premises of Donna Karan’s high-end fashion store. The colorful fabrics seen through the windows of Karan’s emporium shimmer with the hues of azo dyes, pigments that Paul Ehrlich introduced to biology. In 1904, Christian Herter spent a year with Ehrlich in Frankfurt devoted to the chemistry of those dyes. They turned out to be forerunners not only of synthetic colorants, but also of sulfa-drugs and COX-2 inhibitors. Herter and Ehrlich published their results of their azo dye studies in Hoppe-Seyler’s Zeitschrifft für Physiologische Chemie: "Über einige Verwendungen der Naphtochinonsulfonsäure" (14)
. A German editor at the time would have called the paper a domestic publication by a foreign postdoc.
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FOOTNOTES
The opinions expressed in editorials, essays, letters to the editor, and other articles comprising the Up Front section are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of FASEB or its constituent societies. The FASEB Journal welcomes all points of view and many voices. We look forward to hearing these in the form of op-ed pieces and/or letters from its readers addressed to journals{at}faseb.org.
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