Young scientists from all over the world come to the United States for graduate school and research fellowships. At the end of their training, they face a dilemma: stay in the United States, where the funding for science is among the best in the world, or return home and face more perilous funding. Stay and fully develop your scientific potential, or return home to improve the scientific capabilities of a developing nation?

At the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience I met many young scientists facing this choice.

Take Maria Chahrour, a Lebanese graduate student in human genetics at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Chahrour made an interesting discovery that any scientist (including me) would love to have made, and published it in Science magazine, one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world. And she’s still in graduate school! At this rate, she will have little problem getting a faculty position at Harvard or Yale.

She was one of several Lebanese scientists who told me the major challenge for scientists in Lebanon is funding for research. Lebanese universities focus on student education and have not made research a priority. Recently the American University in Beirut (AUB) formed the Abu Haidar Neuroscience Institute to concentrate on research. At AUB, it is possible to accomplish anything a scientist would hope to accomplish in the United States – it just takes longer.

What will Chahrour do? Will she stay in the United States, where she can use her scientific capabilities to their fullest? Or will she return to Lebanon, and sacrifice some of her scientific potential – discoveries that might help cure or prevent disease – in the hopes of improving science in Lebanon?

“I will try and accomplish both,” Chahrour said, adding she won’t be satisfied sacrificing either her scientific capabilities or the chance to improve research in Lebanon.