BOSTON — The official theme of the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, held February 13–15, is “Science Shaping Tomorrow.”
The unofficial theme is “uncertainty.”
With thousands of scientists, advocates and policy experts in attendance, AAAS is the largest science meeting to take place in the United States since the beginning of the second Trump administration. It’s happening against a backdrop of threats to funding that supports research, scrubbing public data from online sources and a purge of federal workers.
Even as the meeting got under way, thousands of employees across the federal government were being fired, including scientists at the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Protection Agency as part of Trump’s plan to downsize the government.
“We are gathered in a moment of turmoil. It’s turmoil,” said AAAS CEO Sudip Parikh in a Feb. 13 welcome address. “I don’t want to sugarcoat that.”
Noted AAAS board chair Joseph Francisco: “The unprecedented nature of the last few weeks have left many of us in the science and engineering community uncertain, anxious, and fearful… These feelings are valid.”
The researchers I spoke with used words like “chaos,” “confusion” and “insane” to describe the climate at their institutions.
“Right now, the prevailing sense is confusion,” says Miles Arnett, who is working on a Ph.D. in bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania. “I went to a panel today with people who recently worked in government. No one knows what is coming,” Arnett says. “It has a paralyzing effect.”
Some attendees distanced themselves from where they work when speaking about their experiences. One federal researcher turned his name badge around so I couldn’t see where he worked before he talked to me. Others declined to give their affiliations when asking questions during scientific sessions.
“I’ve had so many people tell me, ‘I’m here as a private citizen, I’m not saying what my affiliation is,’” says Melissa Varga, a science advocate at the Union of Concerned Scientists who is based in Washington, D.C.
And in nearly every science talk, presenters alluded to the political situation — if they didn’t address it outright. In a session about distrust in science, political scientist Katherine Ognyanova of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. “ended essentially with saying, ‘OK, well, there’s more levels of misinformation than ever, and there’s no guard rails, so we’re kind of screwed,’” says biologist Emma Courtney of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. The talk ended with an illustration of a mushroom cloud captioned, “The End.”
In addition to fear for their livelihoods and public safety, scientists expressed fear for the longstanding prestige of the American scientific enterprise. Several speakers cited a post-World War II “social contract,” when scientists and government agreed that publicly funding basic research was a good idea and would eventually lead to economic and technological advances.
Until recently, that sense of intellectual freedom and opportunity in America drew STEM students from all over the world. But discussions at the AAAS meeting suggest that could quickly change.
“People come to America because of the strength of science,” says Nada Salem, who is from Canada and studies bioethics and medical ethics at Harvard Medical School. Salem says she is now hearing more and more international scientists talk about leaving the United States. “It’s really sad.”
Some American scientists may be looking to leave the United States too. “Every day you wake up and see something new that’s very upsetting,” says Aidan Zlotak, who is working on a Ph.D. in quantum physics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. “As soon as I finish my degree, my first priority will be getting out of the country,” he says, adding that there are a lot of quantum physics research opportunities in Europe.
Taking action
While there is general agreement that American science is under threat, there is not consensus about what to do about it — or what can be done. Tolerance for uncertainty is important for doing science, but the uncertainty in the landscape is harder for scientists to tolerate.
There is a strong temptation among researchers to keep their heads down, keep doing science and hope for the best. But many meeting attendees expressed a desire for greater unity and collective action.
“Your silence is not going to protect you,” said epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves of Yale School of Public Health in a session about the political determinants of health. From astronomers to zoologists, “they’re coming for all of us, and the people we serve.”
Just being together and talking about how to adapt is helpful for morale. “At a meeting of scientists, the best thing you can do is talk about what you can do,” Zlotak says.
A few efforts are ramping up. The Union of Concerned Scientists is collecting signatures to an open letter to Congress opposing the Trump administration’s actions against science, including the ongoing firings as well as grant freezes and proposed budget cuts. The letter has more than 50,000 signatures so far. More than 80 meeting attendees had signed on by the afternoon of February 15.
Another idea is to track health, environmental, economic and other impacts of political actions, says Matt Heid, director of communications strategy at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Mass.
“Everything happening now will have immediate impact, but also medium- and long-term impacts that will hit every state,” Heid says. Scientists should “continue to highlight how when science is censored, when scientists are censored, people get hurt.”
One pressing example is that the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, which investigates disease outbreaks and health threats in the United States and globally, is facing job cuts even as bird flu spreads.
Communications researcher David Karpf of the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. urged scientists not to be afraid to talk about how the attacks on research affect them. “State things directly and publicly,” he said in a talk. Just stating the facts is enough. “The risk to individual scientists is relatively low if you stick to saying, ‘This is what happened, and this is what was lost.’ Hold to the frame that you are reasonable and your opponent is absurd.”
Some researchers are still watching their words, in light of executive orders targeting language about diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as gender, race and climate change.
Dhara Patel, an internal medicine doctor at the Harvard School of Public Health, researches climate change and racial inequities. When applying for new grants or grant renewals, “What do I say my project is on? I don’t know what words I’m supposed to use.”
She also wishes for more collaboration among scientists. “A lot of organizations are trying to fight in their own way, but they’re siloed,” Patel says. For instance, efforts to preserve data that have been deleted from federal websites are happening in many different places at once. It would be useful to centralize that data and work together, she says.
There is precedent for collective action. In March 2017, after the first Trump inauguration, scientists organized a global March for Science in Washington, D.C. and around the world that was attended by more than a million people.
“I was just asking myself, where is that? What is everyone doing? Where is everybody?” says JP Flores, a graduate student in biology at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.
So Flores decided to start one. He connected with other graduate students who wanted to organize a march over BlueSky. The group is planning a rally called Stand Up For Science on March 7 in Washington, D.C., and in at least 30 other cities around the country.
“I felt like there are actions that individuals can take, but collective action is where you can really bring change,” says Cold Spring Harbor’s Courtney, one of the co-organizers.
The group is gathering a lot of support from individuals, but having a harder time getting sponsorships and material support from institutions and universities. That’s different from last time, Flores says.
But the stakes are different now. In 2017, the prevailing feeling was that science as an abstract entity was under attack. The current executive actions are already affecting scientists’ day-to-day lives. Established researchers whose labs rely on federal grants may be more afraid to speak out than they were before, Courtney says. Students like her have more flexibility.
“It’s becoming more personal than just an attack on the enterprise and belief in science generally,” Courtney says. “I think a lot of people have really similar goals right now in trying to protect the American scientific enterprise from the current executive orders,” she says. “But I think institutions are having a hard time trying to navigate that uncertainty.”
Deputy Managing Editor Cassie Martin contributed reporting to this story.