Scholars Return Fire, by Misha Angrist

The Austrian zoologist and animal behaviorist Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989) once said that specialists—aka scientists—are people “who know more and more about less and less, until they know everything about nothing.” Which is why, as a grad student and postdoc in the 1990s, I never bothered to attend the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; there’d be very little chance of learning anything related to my (or anyone’s) tiny research niche. We were incentivized, by the nature of scientific inquiry in those days and how our bread was buttered, to pay attention only to those things that were likely to inform our next experiment or paper. But now, with science on its back foot in the United States, the incentives have changed.

I don’t think it’s melodramatic to say that the stakes for science writ large are existential now. To that end, I was curious to attend the conference this year.

The euphemisms gave the game away.

The oblique references to “turbulence” still failed to address, let alone indict, the federal government’s open attack on science (see here for some salient examples).

This year’s AAAS took place in February, in a pleasantly temperate downtown Phoenix. Amid all of the work on display on climate change and AI (so much AI—a great week to play the “data centers” drinking game), were sessions like those listed above, all communicating a veiled but still palpable anxiety—uncertainty, turbulence, tumult, fracture, pressure.

The other thing that struck me was the strange business-as-usual, whistling-past-the-graveyard vibe running through the conference (though there were a few notable exceptions.) At an invited workshop I attended, there were long discussions about state-level policy engagement (because federal level? fuggedaboutit), science communication strategies, curricular ideas, and grant proposal essentials. When asked for parting words, one of the panelists reminded us of how critical it was to be nonpartisan at all costs; the moderator doubled down on this, adding that she wanted to be able to do this kind of work “regardless of who is in the White House.”

This remark made me feel vertiginous and light-headed. In my mind’s eye I saw a shimmery psychedelic picture of a bulging Overton window. Our charge, according to these speakers, was clear: just as we had insidiously normalized suspension of habeas corpus and countless Orwellian changes to the English language over the last year, if we just dug deep enough, then surely we could also get used to measles, polio, cancer, HIV, and +2° C while we went about our business filling out fellowship applications, teaching our classes, and responding to reviewer comments on our papers. Because why not? Why couldn’t science just move forward in the Upside Down, same as it ever was?

A brief reprieve came on Friday the 13th in the form of a plenary session hosted by Science magazine editor-in-chief Holden Thorp. For the first time in its 178-year history, an AAAS plenary session would feature actual graduate students on the stage. Perhaps this meant that the olds had finally recognized that our shit was no longer working, and/or that the current fiasco and its future ripple effects were going to be somebody else’s problem.

After being introduced to raucous rockstar-level cheers, five young people en route to their PhDs spent the next hour describing what they were doing, or planning to do, as part of the Scientist Network for Advancing Policy. Last summer SNAP enlisted 200 people to write op-eds and visited 54 Congressional home offices in 29 states. This year they are asking political candidates science policy-related questions and grading their responses.

I could not imagine my 30-year-old self having had either the consciousness or the grit to take on these kinds of activities in between lab meetings, experiments, walking the dog, and binge drinking. But here was UCLA cognitive neuroscience student Erin Morrow, describing the “long game,” which entailed no less than “rolling up our sleeves and rethinking the system.” Like the rest of the audience, I was mightily impressed. I could imagine any one of these five people running for office.

And I suppose that that was part of my problem with the session. They were earnest, sensible, constructive. They were adults. They lamented that so many people had been fired, and that scientists were being censored and vilified (although there was scant mention of Those Who Must Not Be Named). But from what I could tell, they did not seem to be animated by rage.

One of them, JP Flores, I recognized as one of the organizers of the March 2025 Stand Up for Science event. We met at a Chapel Hill coffee shop on a damp Sunday morning a week after the conference. He is an amiable 26-year-old who is finishing up his doctoral work on gene expression at the University of North Carolina before heading off to do a postdoc. A first-generation college student, he grew up in Los Angeles, the son of a Filipino mother and Hispanic stepfather, both conservative. His political awakening came in the aftermath of the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd.

In early 2025 Flores connected with a handful of other people, including Emory psychology student Colette Delawalla, who had declared her intention to stage a protest. Four weeks later, Stand Up for Science held its first protest in D.C., with tens of thousands turning out to join them in cities around the U.S. Last year Flores left SUFS to work on SNAP and another group he co-founded, Science for Good. SUFS leadership wanted to be a political entity, he told me, and, to that end, had become a nonprofit 501(c)(4) social welfare organization.

“They wanted to yell and scream,” he said. “I understood why that was important, but I wanted to work more with the local communities that we had just built.” Science for Good focuses on storytelling and local gatherings; it is also partnering with scientific societies, all of whom are trying to figure out “what to do next.”

For her part, Delawalla, who continues to lead SUFS, seems to have leaned into the yelling and screaming, arguing that traditional science advocates are “still bringing white papers to a gunfight.” A few weeks ago on her Substack, she wrote:

SUFS openly calls RFK Jr. a menace to public health, and urges supporters to call their representatives and tell them to “Impeach the Quack.” This year’s SUFS events on March 7 reflected the same fire.

I asked Flores how long it would be before non-partisanship becomes untenable.

“We are actively having those conversations,” he replied evenly.

He expressed some misgivings about the diplomatic tone he and his fellow SNAPpers had chosen to strike at the plenary. Really? I wondered. Was he getting ready to start yelling and screaming?

“I just wish I had really spoken my mind,” he said. “We code-switch all the time. We go from talking to our friends, to our [principal investigators], to [politicians]. I think that [AAAS] was a time when we could have been a little braver. It was a time to be unmuzzled. We need to just be ourselves and not have to talk in this non-partisan tone.” He sighed.

“It’s science,” he said.  “We’re defending science.”

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A contribution by, Misha Angrist

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