PHILOSOPHER’S CORNER
Street-fighting mien
Should scientists be getting political? THE AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION’S annual meeting is usually a quiet affair. But not last December. Many of the attending scientists moved from the meeting rooms to the streets of San Francisco, to protest president-elect Donald Trump’s plans to pull out of the Paris Climate Accords.
Likewise the start of the academic year in US science departments is a low-key affair. Professors chose their new graduate students and quietly teach winter- quarter classes. But not this year. Since January, scientists have been exchanging email petitions and planning a March for Science in Washington. A prominent climate scientist, Michal Mann, called for a “rebellion” against Trump’s “assault” on climate science. These are not ordinary times. Climate scientists are not the only ones protesting. NASA astrophysicists are protesting planned cuts in the budget. Environmental researchers and civil engineers are protesting changes at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Nobel prize winners are circulating a petition with thousands of signatories denouncing new travel restrictions.
In February, at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the talk in formal panels, seminar papers, over lunch and in every corridor was about Donald Trump. Senior scientists and policy makers spoke about “defending science”, and shell-shocked Washington science policy veterans told stories of encounters with Trump supporters who denied global temperature change, or the need to regulate mercury in waterways.
In a nearby square, one could see what has become a familiar sight: hundreds of white-coated protesters holding signs like “Science trumps alternative facts” and “Didn’t die because of an infection? Thank a scientist”.
The protesters’ fears are not unfounded. During the transition period, Trump staff sent a five-page memo to the EPA with 74 items that included questions about who attended the UN Climate Summit in Paris and who was involved in developing the social cost of carbon metrics. The man appointed to head the EPA is Scott Pruitt, who consistently sued the agency while Oklahoma’s attorney general. Trump has also met with a prominent anti-vaccination activist and appointed a surgeon general who seems not to “believe” in human evolution.
In an interview with the BBC, the head of the AAAS, Rush Holt, explained why scientists are concerned.
“It is partly because of the previous statements of the president and his appointees on issues such as climate change and vaccination for children, which have not been in keeping with good science,” he said. But mostly it had to do with the new administration’s seemingly willful ignorance about science: “Very few appointments are filled by people who understand science; [there are] very few comments about the importance of science; there is no science adviser in the White House now and we don’t know whether there will be one; and the silence is beginning to sound ominous.”
One of those omens was realised in mid-february. Scientists woke up to a new reality with an executive order halting entry from seven largely Muslim countries. One by one, American university presidents had to defend their researchers in every field, and wonder if they could continue their work without the foreign students and post-docs so central to American science.
Since the Enlightenment, science has worked to position itself apart from the dictates of Church or State. Fact, causality, verification or falsifiability are supposed to be the only things that drive science to deliver a method by which we understand how the world works. That’s why societies fund science.
But what if that essential bargain is threatened? What if “alternative facts” and ideological passions drive policy? Is it ethical for scientists to protest? Yes. For there is a time when neutrality is not enough, and that is when the basic premise of science as a search for verifiable truth is at stake.
So now to the streets to defend the great institution of American science.
THERE IS A TIME WHEN NEUTRALITY IS NOT ENOUGH