France is one of dozens of countries now running structured programs that offer U.S. scientists multi year positions, generous funding, and academic freedom guarantees.
In February 2026, American physicist Kenneth Long moved to France, taking a position with CNRS, France's national scientific research agency, and splitting his time between Lyon and Geneva to continue work on the W boson, a subatomic particle tied to certain radioactivity and fusion processes, at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest particle accelerator. He was recruited through Choose CNRS, a French program that launched in April 2025 to attract researchers from the United States.
According to a feature in Scientific American by Sarah Scoles, Long is one of dozens of scientists being actively recruited abroad. France is one of dozens of countries now running such programs, each offering stable positions, generous funding, and explicit guarantees of academic freedom. The article frames the trend as a "great American brain drain" that could define science for a generation.
The shift is not a story of one country poaching American talent. It is a coordinated, international response to U.S. federal cuts to scientific programs, with governments on multiple continents building the institutional capacity to absorb the researchers who leave. The structural question is how quickly other countries can build the infrastructure to take a larger share of the world's research.
For Long, the move was a calculation about where his next project would be best supported. He continues to work on the W boson, a particle that requires the kind of long-horizon investment that a single grant cycle in any one country cannot easily fund. Choosing France, with a multi-year CNRS appointment and access to CERN, is a forward-looking decision rather than a retreat.
The U.S. has historically been the destination of choice for scientific talent because of its concentration of federal funding agencies, large research universities, and a policy environment that treated basic research as a public good. The current recruitment wave abroad suggests that other governments have read recent U.S. policy changes as a generational opening, and they are competing to fill it.
The open question is whether the U.S. response is a temporary budget cycle or a durable reorientation of federal science policy. If it is the latter, the receiving countries are not just hiring individual researchers. They are quietly building the next generation of scientific infrastructure, with American-trained scientists as the architects.