Abstract Summary
In 1794, several persecuted scientists, most notably the chemist Joseph Priestley, fled England for asylum in the United States. Americans celebrated Priestley’s arrival as a victory for science, human rights, and freedom, while their leaders hoped refugee scientists would enhance national science and security. Thomas Jefferson, seeing science as crucial to international prestige and imperial ambitions, used Priestley’s presence to define American conceptions of freedom and human rights as fundamental to the scientific discipline. By declaring the United States the best, freest place to practice science, Jefferson began to realign the internationalism of science according to U.S. interests, ideology and national development. In the 1970s, U.S. scientists again rallied to protect human rights, endeavoring to rescue Soviet scientists from persecution, in particular the physicist Andrei Sakharov. The rhetoric of human rights that U.S. scientists used to support Sakharov was almost identical to the language used in support of Priestley two hundred years earlier. Science was again deemed impossible without the U.S. conceptions of freedom and human rights, and the United States again posited as the ideal place to practice science. By this point, however, the United States had become the scientific juggernaut envisioned by Jefferson, with U.S. institutions producing hundreds of Nobel Prize winners. This paper examines the long interaction of U.S. scientists with human rights movements and the political, scientific, and ideological consequences of turning the United States into what Jeremy Belknap in 1780 called “the Mistress of the Sciences, as well as the Asylum of Liberty.”
