On Feb. 8, Colette Delawalla, a graduate student in psychology at Emory University, nervously announced to the online world that she was planning a national protest in defense of science. “I’ve never done this before, but we gotta be the change we want to see in the world,” she wrote in a post on Bluesky, a social media platform.
A team of scientists quickly coalesced around her and formed a plan: a rally on the National Mall, satellite protests across the country, March 7. They threw together a website so rudimentary, initially, that visitors had to type the “www” manually, or else the web address raised an error. Within days, the (improved) site received so much traffic that it crashed.
The event, dubbed Stand Up For Science, is something of a revitalization of the March for Science that took place in cities around the world in April 2017, not long into President Trump’s first term. But this time, in a greatly sharpened political climate and a post-Covid world, the protests are being organized by a completely different team, and with a distinct vision.
“The spirit of it is the same,” Ms. Delawalla said. But, she added, “now we are in a position of being on defense as opposed to offense.”
Many of the threats that mobilized scientists during the first Trump administration, such as the widespread deletion of federal databases and deep slashes to the science budget, never came to pass. But this time, within weeks of the presidential inauguration, Mr. Trump has already reshaped much of the federal scientific enterprise, which funds a significant chunk of academic research.
Often through executive orders, his administration has terminated funding for global health programs, fired disease screeners at the nation’s borders, gutted climate policy and attempted to suspend funding for nuclear protection. More than a thousand workers across federal science agencies, including the National Park Service, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, have been laid off. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., widely seen as a vaccine skeptic, is now the health secretary.
Some scientific associations applauded Mr. Trump’s swift appointment of Michael Kratsios, an expert in technology policy, to the position of science adviser, rather than leaving the position vacant for more than a year, as he did during his first term.
Still, the barrage of changes landed as “gut punches,” Ms. Delawalla said. On that Saturday morning in February — her coffee growing cold as she doomscrolled on her phone — Ms. Delawalla was drawn to her bathroom mirror, where she contemplated her reflection with resolve.
“Are you somebody who lives by your values?” she asked herself. “If I really believe as a scientist that science is important for America, what am I going to do about it?”
Marching for Science
The tradition of science activism stretches back through the environmental movement of the 1960s to the antinuclear protests at the end of World War II. “Historically, when scientists’ interests and livelihoods are threatened, they mobilize,” said Scott Frickel, a sociologist at Brown University who studies the relationship between science and society.
But the March for Science in 2017, which attracted an estimated one million people to protests in cities around the world, was distinct from past movements, Dr. Frickel said, because it was in reaction to a specific presidential administration, not to U.S. policy.
Some scientists worried that taking that step would heighten the perception of science as partisan. In 2017, Robert Young, a geologist at Western Carolina University, published an essay in The Times expressing concerns about the march. “Those who want to characterize scientists as just another political interest group will use that as evidence for that case,” he said recently.
A growing body of evidence suggests that scientists and scientific institutions engaging in political action does affect the way they are perceived by the public. One study found that trust in scientists among supporters of Mr. Trump declined after Nature, a prominent scientific journal, endorsed Joe Biden for president in 2020. Another concluded that conservative attitudes toward scientists became more negative, and liberal attitudes more positive, as a direct consequence of the March for Science.
The organization held additional marches in 2018 and 2019, but they drew much smaller crowds. The movement ultimately fizzled, in part because of competing perspectives among a diffuse set of leaders about what structure the organization should take, what goals it should tackle next and the politicization of science.
Eight years later, Jonathan Berman, one of the leaders of the March for Science in 2017, said that the Trump administration had “moved from the theoretical to the experimental in terms of direct attacks on science.” Dr. Berman also expressed mixed feelings about the legacy of the movement that took place during Mr. Trump’s first term.
“There are some things I wish I had done differently,” he said, like leading with an explicit mission and policy goals, meeting with members of Congress and a having clearer message about the political nature of science.
“I would have more regrets if they hadn’t started organizing this,” Dr. Berman said, referring to the new movement. “They’ve indicated to me that it opened the door for a way of seeing the ‘scientist-activist’ as a kind of scientist you can be.”
‘Everything Is Political’
One of Mr. Trump’s executive orders in particular struck a chord for Ms. Delawalla: the removal of diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs across the government, many of which supported the work of scientists from historically underrepresented backgrounds. That mandate led the National Science Foundation to review currently awarded grants that contained certain words commonly associated with those programs.
“‘Woman’ and ‘female’ were on that list,” she said. “They were my words. I’m a woman. I’m female.”
Ms. Delawalla had little experience in political activism. Through Bluesky, she connected with four other researchers, and together they formed Stand Up for Science. Those scientists were Sam Goldstein, a graduate student studying women’s health at the University of Florida; Emma Courtney, a graduate student studying disease at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York; Leslie Berntsen, a psychologist based in Los Angeles; and JP Flores, a Ph.D. student in bioinformatics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who had already been gathering organizing tips from the 2017 march leaders.
Stand Up for Science is distinct from its 2017 inspiration. The team is small, and the members share a consistent vision, with similar views about how to achieve it. The website lays out a clear set of policy demands, including the expansion of science funding, the restoration of public access to scientific information and the reinstatement of dismissed federal scientists. They chose to protest on a Friday when the U.S. Senate is in session, because they have a clearly defined target audience: American policymakers. And there is no question among the organizers about the political nature of science.
“Everything is political,” Dr. Berntsen said. “We did not get to the current moment by accident.”
But in their movement’s tagline, the group also emphasizes that the benefits of science extend across the political aisle: “Science is for everyone.”
“The law of gravity works for you, regardless of who you voted for,” Ms. Delawalla said. If you used your cellphone today, or knew the name of a bird outside your window or brushed your teeth last night, she added, “it’s because of a scientist.”
Since Feb. 8, Stand Up For Science has amassed more than 50,000 followers on Bluesky, has been endorsed by Hank Green, the popular science YouTuber, and recognized by Mark Cuban. Volunteers have organized satellite protests in more than 30 cities.
The organizing team filed a protest permit in Washington for a crowd of up to 10,000 on Friday afternoon, although they aren’t sure how many people will show up. That event has attracted speakers such as Bill Nye the Science Guy; Gretchen Goldman, the president of the Union of Concerned Scientists; and Francis Collins, the recently retired leader of the National Institutes of Health.
“We are standing up for science because we feel like our backs are against the wall,” Mr. Flores said. “March 7 is not the end goal for us. It’s the beginning.”
