So. In the United States, funding for science has slowed, mass layoffs have cut through federal science agencies like a chainsaw, and someone who doesn’t believe that germs cause disease is leading the country’s health agency.
Are we scientists reacting with anywhere near enough unity to fight back?
Christina Pagel wrote (lightly edited):
Another group who have done little to organise an opposition are scientists and scientific societies.
While there are ongoing lawsuits around pauses in grant funding or pausing international health programmes, these are being driven by labour organizations or non-governmental organizations, not scientists. Instead, some journals, organizations, universities are quietly censoring output of targeted terms like “gender.” Publicly funded bodies such as NASA, NIH and NSF have little choice but to comply. Individual scientists have spoken out, but many are also reporting self-censoring in fear of impact on their careers.Possible reasons:
- The scientific community is spread across universities, private research institutes, and government agencies and across very different disciplines, making coordinated action – or even agreeing on aligned interests – challenging.
- Large national grant making bodies are not independent of the federal government. Scientists often require a funder’s permission to publish and have little formal say in priority areas for funding.
- Most scientists just want to work and aren’t “into politics.” Most fields are relatively unaffected.
- Many scientists also feel an instinctive aversion to advocacy, worried that it is not scientific or objective enough.
- Some who benefit from changes in funding priorities will welcome the opportunity to further their own research.
We saw all these factors play out in the ideological bent to science in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia.
The stability of recent decades has left scientists unprepared for when their independence is revealed to be so fragile with few if any legal protections.
Pagels’s list is helpful start, to which I will add.
Point 1: That the scientific community is spread across institutions is one of the reasons we have scientific societies. Academic societies can represent thousands, or tens of thousands, of researchers in the United States and around the world. But the response of scientific societies to the catastrophic events of the last few weeks has been – at best – mixed.
Scientific societies have the potential to be critical advocates for science in the United States, and organize collective action – by which I mean protests – against the budget cuts and firings and all other forms of federal attacks.
But I think many scientific societies are too cautious, and have spent too much effort worrying about what the most reticent of their members would think. They will need their members to push them – hard – to take stronger actions.
Point 2: Yup. Many scientists are – or were – employees of the American government.
Points 3 and 4: I think these are variations of “Science isn’t political.” We saw this view promulgated late last year in an editorial by the head the National Academies of Science in the journal Science. I didn’t like it then and I think we have seen how badly misguided it was.
Point 5: Thankfully, I have not seen scientists pulling, “I got mine, so what?” I’m sure some exist, but I don’t think there are many.
I will add a sixth point. A few years ago, Randy Olson wrote:
Science is run by committees, top to bottom. Committees don’t lead, they facilitate. They don’t come up with good ideas and make them happen, they wait for individuals to come to them with good ideas that they can support or reject.
I’ve thought about this paragraph a lot. I don’t agree entirely that science is leaderless, but it surely tends to be run by committees. I don’t agree entirely that committees cannot come up with good ideas. But committees are slow and deliberative on purpose, and that is holding us back right now, where we need speed.
That makes the role of strong existing “committees,” like scientific societies, all the more critical. Let’s not waste time striking new committees. Let’s mobilize the ones we have already.
If we can get them to be strong enough.
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Okay, stop. Saying “science isn’t political” will not keep science safe from political attacks
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