Now her postdoctoral training at the University of Maryland is winding down and Panchalingam is completing work under a US Department of Defense grant for breast-cancer research. So she is looking for a job. But she won't look in Europe. "It's a very closed system there," she says. "I have a lot of friends in the United Kingdom, but I might end up being a postdoc for 15 years. It's just not worth it."
Panchalingam is exactly the type of person Europe wants to return to its shores. Since the end of World War II, the best and brightest British, French, and German graduate students have traditionally finished their studies in the United States and often remained, the trend reversed for a brief period in the late 1960s and early 1970s when many US researchers headed to Britain. Nevertheless, today, Greeks, Spaniards, and Eastern Europeans join the British in the ...
