QUANTUM LEAP
Last Saturday scientists went through with an unprecedented protest. They “marched for science” in 600-odd cities across the world. The March for Science was prompted by the Trump Administration’s actions in cutting budgets for scientific programmes and actively opposing research in some areas.
The Trump administration has forbidden public discussion of climate change by federal agencies. It proposes massive budget cuts to throttle the National Institute of Health, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Department of Energy.
Trump himself refers to climate change as a “Chinese hoax”. He also supports the anti-vaccination movement. In addition, cutting-edge research into areas like stem cell and gene sequencing/splicing could be stymied by religious fanatics who are close to this administration.
American scientists started a pushback with rogue “unofficial” social media accounts. The March ratchets up the volume. Scientists walked around with nerdy slogans and “injokes”. For example, protesters carried posters saying, “Protons, neutrons, electrons and morons”. There was a man in caveman dress labelled “Trump's Science Advisor”. There was a Sikh with a sign saying “Are you nervous because I'm on your flight? See Other Side of this” and the other side said “Worry not! The software I wrote for Boeing is bug-free”.
The March is overtly political and it will change little in the way of US government funding trends, or Trump's policy stances. But this is a signal that a very smart segment of civil society has gotten very interested in politics. Students of history will recall that this is unusual. Scientists tend to be apolitical as a group even if individual scientists have strong political views. Working scientists prefer, in general, to focus on research without being bothered by extraneous stuff like who is in charge of the country.
But a very large proportion of key research is government-funded. Private research is mostly directed into areas like drug development, faster modes of computing etc, which produce quick tangible payoffs. Blue sky research like the Large Hadron Collider or the LIGO project must be supported by government resources.
Policy advice in areas like environmental protection and climate change can only be acted upon by governments. Nobody else has the required legislative powers. For that matter, implementing vaccination programmes to eradicate diseases like polio is also impossible without active government involvement. If government resources are withheld, science and its researchers suffer.
The science community turned political in the 1930s in response to the rise of Nazism and Stalinism. Germany purged Jewish scientists. Nazis wrote tracts against “Jewish science” and burned textbooks written by Einstein. Science in the Soviet Union was taken over by Trofim Lysenko, who had weird ideas about what was genetically inheritable. It was literally a penal offense to question him.
Scientists fled Germany and the USSR in droves, headed for more liberal climes. Germany lost key scientific battles during World War II after it had driven its best and brightest out. Einstein was one of those who persuaded President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to fund the Manhattan Project, which developed the atom bomb. Some of those who developed the bomb also lobbied for Nuclear Disarmament in the 1950s and 60s before science turned apolitical again.
The Trump Administration’s political inclinations make it impossible to acknowledge that environment and climate can be negatively impacted by industrial activity. But researchers believe that time is running out and Trump’s policies could cause irreversible damage to Earth.
Some scientists marched in India, in Hyderabad and Coimbatore. But the bulk of working Indian scientists remained aloof because they are government employees. However, the March signals a tectonic shift in attitudes and Indian scientists are unlikely to remain unaffected.
In private life, Indian scientists are as political as anyone else. They are also intimately connected to the US science establishment in particular. It is easy to find parallels with the US since India has its own nut-jobs who believe in strange things and divert funds to absurd projects.
It is a sign of how disturbed the current times are that scientists have started to get political again. It is hard to say where this is headed. But this is by definition, a very smart bunch of people. If they want to, they could change the world in unpredictable ways.