Washington DC. Boston, Massachusetts. Denver, Colorado. Seattle, Washington. Trenton, New Jersey
Thousands of researchers and supporters of science protested in more than 30 cities across the United States and Europe today against actions taken by the administration of US President Donald Trump to cut the US scientific workforce and slash spending on research worldwide.
US science is under threat ― now scientists are fighting back
The mood was defiant at many of the rallies, where chants of “Scientists will not be silenced”, “Facts over fear” and “What do we want? Peer review! When do we want it? Now!” were heard.
Quoting musician Bob Marley, Rush Holt Jr, former chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, told the crowd in Trenton, New Jersey, “get up, stand up”.
In the crowd at Boston’s rally, Ana-Maria Vranceanu, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School whose work helps people with dementia, chronic pain and other conditions, said: “This is the time to actually stop this, before things get really bad.”
Over the past month, “I’ve been waiting for someone to do something,” said Abraham Flaxman, a global-health metrics researcher at the University of Washington who attended the Seattle rally. But “it’s dawned on me: nobody is coming to save us. We’re going to have to save ourselves.”
Marie Walde, a biophysicist at the Roscoff Biological Station in France, posted about a rally she attended to the social-media platform BlueSky, saying: “In solidarity with our colleagues in the US, researchers and citizens all over France are protesting today for science and knowledge as a public good.”
‘A five-alarm fire’
The Stand Up for Science rallies are a response to the Trump administration’s siege of the US research enterprise. Since taking office in January, Trump and his team have laid off, and in some cases then tried to rehire, thousands from US science agencies, whose jobs involved nuclear safety, bird flu surveillance, extreme-weather forecasting and more. The administration has also attempted to freeze research grants at science-funding agencies including the US National Science Foundation. And it has tried to slash ‘overhead costs’ awarded to biomedical research institutions by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) — although federal judges have since blocked this action. This week, Nature revealed that, under Trump, the NIH — the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research — has begun mass termination of active research grants for projects studying topics, including transgender health, that do not align with the administration’s political ideology.
Protesters took to the streets in Paris, to stand in solidarity with US scientists.Credit: Mohamad Salaheldin Abdelg Alsayed/Anadolu via Getty
Bewildered by these moves and wondering why people weren’t visibly ‘standing up for science’, five US scientists decided to organize today’s rallies. “This is a five-alarm fire,” says co-organizer Colette Delawalla, a psychologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. “If we don’t set down our work and turn attention to these matters”, and try to make policy changes, “there will not be science for us to come back to,” she says.
But the organizers know from past protests, such as the international March for Science in 2017 — which was organized by researchers critical of policies from Trump’s first presidency — that rallies alone will not effect change. “It’s not a one-and-done thing,” says Samantha Goldstein, who studies women’s health at the University of Florida in Gainesville and is one of the Stand Up for Science organizers. She adds: the organizers will continue to “be around, making sure our policy goals and demands are fulfilled — that’s what’s important”.
A generation lost
At a number of the rallies today, speakers and attendees worried about the chilling effect the Trump administration’s actions will have on future science and scientists.
In Boston, Nancy Kanwisher, a cognitive neuroscientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, told the crowd: “You can’t just fire everyone and then rehire them when you need them. A generation of scientists will have been lost.”
A demonstrator holds a sign at the rally in Washington Square Park, New York City.Credit: Charly Triballeau/AFP/Getty
Atul Gawande, a public-health researcher and former assistant administrator at the US Agency for International Development (USAID), told the crowd in Washington DC that he has watched scientists holding their careers in boxes as they leave the dream jobs they have been fired from. (The Trump administration has fired thousands of workers from the USAID, which funds health programmes and disaster relief overseas, saying that it had been run by “radical left lunatics” and is party to “tremendous fraud”.) Scientists are being targeted, because “science doesn’t always give the answers that power wants,” Gawande said.
Others expressed anger at the way scientists are being treated. “I’m a scientist and I’m pissed off,” says Carolee Caffrey, a behavioural ecologist at Rider University in Lawrence Township, New Jersey, who was welcoming people to the Trenton rally. “I’m all the ‘D’ words: Dismayed, depressed, disgusted.”
Some viewed the rallies as offering a safe outlet for scientists to voice their feelings. Valerie H., who declined to give her full name for fear of reprisal, is a software engineer who works in crop science. Recent mass firings at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other agencies have had a huge impact on Valerie’s research. “I know hundreds of people on LinkedIn who are looking for work,” she said at the Denver rally. “People are glad to have a place to come say something.”