A crowd turned out in New York City on 19 February to protest against the Trump administration′s cuts to research funding.Credit: Erik McGregor/LightRocket/Getty
Annika Barber felt like an impostor as she boarded a bus just before sunrise on 24 February, and settled in for the long ride from New Jersey to Washington DC.
Barber had studied neuroscience for years before she launched her own laboratory at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey. She had not trained to be an activist, yet now she was on her way to deliver a speech at a rally about proposed cuts to US research funding. When she arrived in Washington, she picked up a blank poster provided by rally organizers. “I would rather be in lab!” she wrote on it in big block letters.
Across the United States, researchers are navigating uncomfortable territory. Repeated threats to research funding and the mass firings of federal workers have pushed some scientists to take on unfamiliar roles as activists, speaking at rallies, calling legislators and forming new pressure groups. “Historically, scientists have done a really bad job of advocating for their own activities,” says David Meyer, a sociologist at the University of California, Irvine. “So this is a new challenge.”
Unaccustomed role
The events of the past six weeks have compelled many scientists to embrace that challenge. Soon after the second inauguration of US President Donald Trump on 20 January, the new administration attempted to freeze payments on federal grants; announced that it would review and potentially cancel any grant that mentioned terms it deemed indicative of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes; and issued dramatic cuts to the overhead, or ‘indirect costs’, paid on projects funded by the US National Institutes of Health.
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“All of the bad news and the chaos made it hard to know what the best action to take was,” says Melissa Varga, science network senior manager at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington DC. “Folks just shut down.” Fear of retribution for speaking out also played a part, she adds.
The courts temporarily halted some of the Trump administration’s orders, but a coherent message has broken through: federal support for science is in danger. Gradually, scientists began to stir, Varga says: “They’re realizing now that doing any one thing is better than doing nothing.”
That activism is taking many forms. On 3 March, the Union of Concerned Scientists and 48 scientific societies released a joint letter to Congress calling for legislators to protect taxpayer-funded research. “The actions of this administration have already caused significant harm to American science and are risking the health and safety of our communities”, they said.
US researchers in planetary science are talking about creating a new professional society to strengthen their voice in policy matters. Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, says he has been thinking about such a society for several years. “But the recent attacks, because that’s what they are, on science in the US have catalysed the need for it,” he says. “The more organized the planetary-science community, the more effectively we can stand up and push back against these actions.” Byrne and others will lead a discussion at an upcoming planetary-science conference about whether to launch such a society.
Individual researchers also have a bounty of petitions to sign, including statements against censorship of science, indirect-cost reductions, and cuts to space science and biomedical research. And professional societies have circulated tip sheets to guide researchers who want to call their elected representatives.
Taking action
For many scientists, the big event is coming up on 7 March, at ‘Stand Up for Science’ rallies slated to take place in 32 cities around the country. The main event, in Washington DC, is spearheaded by a group of five researchers, most of them graduate students, who came together to combat their own initial feelings of powerlessness. “It’s been inspiring, as this has grown, to see how many people were feeling the same way and to take action,” says Emma Courtney, a graduate student in biology at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York.
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Another goal is for each rally to spark local news outlets into covering the impact of science on that community, says Sam Goldstein, who studies women’s health at the University of Florida in Gainesville and is also co-organizing the Washington rally. Goldstein says that when she was interviewed by a Maryland newspaper, she researched the leading cause of death for the region, then came prepared with examples of how biomedical research could improve quality of life there.