Massive cuts to US research present a “real opportunity” for the UK to recruit leading American scientists, a Nobel prizewinning biologist has insisted, but low salaries and dwindling resources may tarnish efforts to woo those fleeing Donald Trump’s presidency.

Venki Ramakrishnan, a group leader at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, told ̽����Ƶ that there was “considerable interest” from US-based scientists in coming to the UK following unprecedented cuts to federal research funding and attacks on US universities since Trump took office in January.

“I talked to one prominent scientist from a well-known East Coast institution who expressed interest in the possibility,” said Ramakrishnan, who himself switched from America to Cambridge in the late 1990s prior to winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009.

“Quite a few of us moved to the LMB from the US, but the LMB has some special characteristics, such as stable, if not huge, funding which allows you to focus on long-term challenging projects,” said the former Royal Society president on what might attract US scholars.

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Nonetheless the impact of Trump’s administration on disaffected US scientists was a “real opportunity” for UK science, even if the “question of both salary and resources [within UK universities] will be an issue for many [US researchers]”, who are typically paid between 50 per cent to 100 per cent more than their UK equivalents, said Ramakrishnan.

The call to reverse a near-century-old transfer of scientific talent towards America comes as European universities have started courting US-based scientists with attractive salaries and start-up packages. The University of Aix-Marseille is providing for those seeking “scientific asylum” from the US while other institutions have created new postdoctoral research positions for international talent. Meanwhile the European Research Council (ERC) is doubling its relocation allowance for researchers outside the European Union to €2 million (£1.8 million).

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French president Emmanuel Macron is thought to be pushing the EU to free up more funds for top US talent under the Horizon Europe framework.

Asked if the UK should consider similar schemes, Ramakrishnan said the financial constraints faced by UK science amid widespread job cuts at British universities could make this difficult.

“I don’t know if UKRI has the resources to do this at the moment, but perhaps the Wellcome Trust and other charities could step up to the occasion,” said Ramakrishnan, who noted how Wellcome had schemes that were designed to attract scientists from the US and elsewhere, which included both a salary supplement and long-term and fairly generous support.

“They should be encouraged to do this now without delay. UK philanthropists and other foundations could also do something,” he added.

Nobel economics laureate Daron Acemoglu, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), told THE that “pay differentials are still large” between academic salaries in the US and Europe but “those differentials are less now than they used to be a few decades ago”.

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The reluctance of scholars to leave the “very high concentration of top academics and researchers in several hubs in the United States, such as Boston or San Francisco”, might weigh more heavily for many researchers, added Acemoglu, who moved from the London School of Economics to MIT in the mid-1990s.

However, there are now “many excellent well-paying academic and medical institutions around the world and distances within Europe are not large, so an active [research] ecosystem has already emerged”, he said.

More broadly, US scholars now “understood that we are dealing with something more serious this time” compared with Trump’s first term “both in terms of the implications for US institutions and for US academia”.

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“For the entire post-World War II era, the US economy was fuelled by science and technology, and a very important part of that has been the flow of very talented people from all around the world. This could now reverse. Many fewer people in the UK and Europe now speak of their desire to come to the United States,” he said.

American students may also be heading to Europe for their PhD study, said Darby Saxbe, professor of psychology at University of Southern California.

“I am definitely seeing rumblings of this. One of my current lab managers, who was planning on applying to graduate school next year, just asked me about graduate programmes in Europe and Canada, because she is now second-guessing the option to get a PhD in the US,” said Saxbe.

Younger students could also follow, she added. “I’m on a Facebook group of parents of teenagers who are applying to college, and there has been a lot of recent discussion of international universities, especially for students who are interested in the sciences,” said Saxbe.

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“It definitely feels like we may be on the cusp of a brain drain given that the current climate is very demoralising for trainees,” she added.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com