W hen the British academic Alan Fenwick, an authority on the parasitic disease schistosomiasis, was invited to speak in the United States, he did not expect to be treated as a security threat. A professor of tropical parasitology at Imperial College London, he was set to travel to Washington in February to deliver the plenary presentation at a major conference before heading to Harvard for a guest lecture.
His work to understand and treat schistosomiasis, which afflicts more than 200 million people, has taken him to those countries most affected, including Sudan. This work, in partnership with American scientists, and supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, among other sources, has helped treat more than 100 million people in Africa and the Middle East. These scientific advances have brought controlling and eventually eliminating this condition — which is especially common among the world’s poorest children — within reach.
Just days before he was due to travel to Washington, Professor Fenwick was told of his exclusion from the government’s Visa Waiver Program. He was forced to make an exceptional application for a full visa, a process that takes as long as three months. The U.S. Embassy in London said his scientific and humanitarian work in Sudan automatically disqualified him from traveling as any other Briton would under the U.S. visa-waiver program.
New limits on U.S. visa waivers held Fenwick back. These rules require nationals of the visa-waiver countries, including Britain, to apply for a full visa in advance of traveling to the United States if they have spent time since March 2011 in Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Syria, Libya, Somalia or Yemen: countries designated by the Department of Homeland Security as presenting a terrorist risk. Dual nationals of Iran, Iraq, Sudan, or Syria, including several of my colleagues at Imperial College London, have to go through a similar process.
After spending days navigating bureaucracy, making a series of appeals, and being helped along by the pleas of some well-connected friends, Fenwick was granted an interview with the embassy and finally acquired his visa. The delay caused him to miss giving his plenary at the Washington conference, depriving top U.S. scholars of Fenwick’s latest insights. Fortunately, he caught a flight just in time for his Harvard lecture.
What is the harm? A few precious days of research time lost to bureaucracy, a conference that was diminished because U.S. scientists could not hear from Fenwick, and a slowdown in the fight against schistosomiasis? The real harm goes well beyond this and is both practical and symbolic.
Professor Fenwick’s experience should sound alarm bells in Washington. It serves as a grim warning to the international scientific community. If the new rules are not rethought, many others will receive the wrong message about American science and American scientists’ ability to collaborate with others around the world. When one of the world’s foremost experts on a tropical disease is treated like that, we should be seriously worried about the wider damage to American science and its reputation abroad.
The proportion of scientific papers that are internationally co-authored has more than doubled in 20 years. One-third of American papers now feature international collaborators. As American and international scientists work together in their race to understand and defeat diseases, we should not erect unnecessary barriers to collaboration. Finding a solution to the Zika virus, a tropical disease that is spreading ever closer to the United States, is an urgent concern in which international scientific collaboration is essential. The need for worldwide collaboration was brought home to us during the recent Ebola crisis, when laboratories across the world worked tirelessly to bring the epidemic under control.
The United States has special relationships with the 38 countries that benefit from the visa-waiver program. These relationships have deep roots in cooperation and collaboration. One of my predecessors as head of Imperial College London, Sir Henry Tizard, cultivated such collaboration during World War II. In 1940, as German planes bombed London and Liverpool, Tizard led a delegation of scientists to the United States, armed with Britain’s best R&D in their suitcases. They shared discoveries and innovations in radar technology with their peers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, winning support from President Roosevelt’s adviser Vannevar Bush and the banker-turned-physicist Alfred Loomis. Their combined know-how, sharing, and openness helped turn around the Allied war effort in Europe and the Pacific. Tizard, Bush, and Loomis seeded a U.S.-led culture of mutual trust and cooperation that has flourished for decades.
We see that culture flourish on the International Space Station and at CERN, where national rivalries and political differences are overcome in the name of discovery. Through collaboration we defeated smallpox and made a dent in the AIDS epidemic, and it is how we will overcome environmental threats and harness low-carbon technologies. Scientific cooperation improves and secures our way of life.
As the attacks in Brussels remind us, protecting ourselves from terrorists is a clear priority. We cannot allow visa policies designed to do that to erode the collaboration essential to solving health crises and the other great challenges of our time. The children suffering from schistosomiasis in Sudan and other nations will be among the first to lose out, and so will Americans. The United States is the world’s epicenter of scientific collaboration. This status strengthens our health, wealth, and security.
As an American leading a British university recognized for its large numbers of international students, faculty members, and partnerships, I see firsthand the benefits of global scientific mobility. It provides a catalyst for knowledge creation, innovation, and education. We take for granted our ability to work with colleagues from countries including China, India, Brazil and, above all, the United States.
When we take on genuinely global challenges like cancer, antimicrobial resistance, or malnutrition, our response, too, must be truly global. We cannot effectively map the brain or have a moonshot against cancer without bringing the very best researchers together from around the world. We should be tearing down barriers to cooperation, not erecting new ones.
Congress and the White House should urgently review the new visa-waiver restrictions. U.S. policy makers can, and must, find a way to ensure that scientists working for the global good can travel to the United States as freely as they travel throughout the rest of the world. The alternative would only hurt American science.
