Hacker News Reader

Comment by miley_cyrus | Hacker News Reader

For those who aren't in academia, this is every governmental science agency now. For example just 9 minutes ago (midnight ET) a funding announcement from the NIH just hit my inbox for "a mission to serve historically underrepresented populations in biomedical research that award doctorate degrees in the health professions or the sciences related to health."

View on HN

Imagine if the Manhattan Project was constructed with these ridiculous requirements.

This could be a somewhat ironic example considering the likelihood that many people who could have contributed to the Manhattan Project were unable to do so due to institutional barriers relating to their ethnicity.

Even some talented people who did work for the Project got life-altering roadblocks later on such as Qian Xuesen.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Here is an article about a scientist being stripped of his position for "lying to government officials about his contact with a Chinese government agency": https://apnews.com/article/235705c7507a46188fc26a663d96b014

Relevant quote:

As part of a new science and technology “risk matrix,” which has not been made public, the Department of Energy also said it would not fund joint research or support “sensitive country foreign nationals.”

Sure, there were a bunch of genius-level physicists capable of building an atom bomb and the US Government didn't use them because it wanted to be mean to people. That's believable.

No, the idea is that in that era an untold number of talented people were barred from contributing to the US due to discriminatory roadblocks at every level in terms of access to education and so on.

Your sarcasm is hilariously misplaced because the person I cited was driven away by stubborn US officials only to become the leading light behind the Chinese nuclear program. All they had to do was leave him alone. So yes, what you are describing literally happened...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com