In Age of Trump, Scientists Show Signs of a Political Pulse - New York Times
Youth is leading the way in rejecting the old view, Mr. Rosenberg said. “Early career scientists, younger scientists — that’s not an answer for them,” he said.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a cosmologist and particle physicist at the University of Washington, is one of those younger researchers. She has long been politically active — she comes from a family of organizers and attended her first demonstration when she was 2 months old — but for her the talk and actions of the Trump administration have led to a new level of concern.
Dr. Prescod-Weinstein said she was especially incensed by what she and others viewed as efforts by some science organizations to reach out to the Trump administration.
Immediately after the election, she took to social media to criticize a news release from the American Physical Society that urged President Trump to strengthen scientific leadership and quoted his campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.”
“What history has taught us is that collaboration doesn’t work for science,” Dr. Prescod-Weinstein said. “When we work with extremist, racist, Islamophobic or nationalist governments, it doesn’t work for science.”
The news release was quickly withdrawn and the society apologized for any “offense it might have caused.”
Michael Lubell, a physics professor who was director of public affairs for the society but who was terminated without explanation, said that “initially people were very worried that if anybody criticized Donald Trump there would be retribution.”
“People are now getting to the point where they are understanding that this is a guy in the White House who doesn’t have a firm grasp on science policy at all,” Dr. Lubell said. “Now they are mobilizing. But there’s absolutely no strategy.”
Dr. Eisen, the Berkeley biologist, would seem to have slim chances of winning a race for the Senate, since it is sure to be joined by several prominent Democrats if Dianne Feinstein, the longtime incumbent, decides not to run.
But Jacquelyn Gill, a paleo-ecologist at the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute, has been actively recruited to — eventually — make a bid for a congressional seat by 314 Action, ever since she was quoted in the journal Nature urging her fellow scientists to “do more than write letters.” Staff members at 314 Action (which takes its name from the number pi) liked her attitude, and she happens to live in a swing district.
Like many academic scientists, Dr. Gill employs several graduate students in her laboratory and has received grant funds for research that is still in progress. But the idea of public service, at what she considers an urgent time for climate science, is tugging at her.
“I came into this career wanting to do science that’s in the public good,” she said. “And maybe now that means something different than it did before.”
Correction: February 6, 2017
An earlier version of this article transposed two words in the name of an government agency. It is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, not the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration.
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