This coming week is the Spring meeting of the Materials Research Society (MRS) in San Francisco. I am not going this year because it clashes with other things back home. However, my student, Rui, is not going either because he cannot get a USA visa. Rui is a Chinese national. We received a letter from the MRS confirming that he is to present a paper at the meeting and he went to the US Consulate in London for an interview in January, as part of the Visa process. Since then there has been silence from the Consulate. This is even worse than being refused a visa, in fact it is just plain rude.

A colleague has just returned from the TMS meeting also in the USA. he tells me that the session on Magnesium Alloys might as well have been cancelled as all the Chinese presenters could not attend because they could not get visas. China is the major producer in the world of Mg alloys and the current centre of research into the metal.

Does this mean the end of international meetings in the USA? Two years ago the American Ceramic Society organised the International Conference on Ceramics in Toronto to ease visa difficulties. Rui presented his work in Germany last year and we will send him to the European MRS in Warsaw this autumn. However, he will not get the opportunity to present his exciting results on nanomechanics to the US community.

So there we have it – the War on Terror has strangely mutated into a War on International Science