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From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
David C went to the Stand Up for Science Rally in DC on Friday, and he put this together for us.
Great photos and great commentary, thank you! WG
It is not an understatement to say that science has been under siege the last few years, and especially in the last few weeks. On Friday, March 7th, various “Stand Up for Science” rallies were organized, with the main one being in Washington, DC, at a time when Congress was in session and in a region where science, and the organizations that fund science research, are found.
It is fitting that the main rally stage was located at the Lincoln Memorial, with Abe Lincoln, who signed the Morrill Act establishing land-grant universities across the country and the Act of Incorporation that established the National Academy of Sciences to provide advice to the US government, standing guard.
This really captures the spirit of the day. A well-made sign and a goofy costume. The rally-goers used their best nerdy imaginations to come up with great signs, even if the humor would need some explaining to normal people.
This gives some idea of the crowd size. Estimates were in the couple of thousand. There were a lot of students and early-career investigators and some established scientists and retirees. The speakers were engaging, and besides scientists known for their public engagement, like Bill Nye, the Science Guy, climatologist Michael Mann, and former NIH Director Francis Collins, were patients who benefitted from scientific advancements, like Emily Whitehead, the first pediatric patient to receive CAR T-cell therapy, and Greg O’Brien, a journalist who currently has progressing Alzheimer’s disease. These patients, or former patients, were among the most moving speakers.
A lot of the rally was focused on biomedical research. Francis Collins is an amazing person, who happens to do great science, and ably led the NIH for 12 years. He spoke about Lincoln and the ending of his Gettysburg Address; that science was of the people (we study and help ourselves), by the people (all kinds of people—professions and backgrounds—and support by the federal government), and for the people (so many new discoveries that help people). He also sang, and being a choir member, I joined right in.
I was restless and made my way around the crowd, sometime talking to people next to me (and later, on the Metro). Many were students who felt like the rug had been pulled out from under them. Michael Mann has been under attack by powerful interests for almost 30 years, and has written books about his work and the opposition. From this location I just saw the back of him and this set of speakers. What I’m trying to show, though, is the “Fund or Die” sign, which was a take-off of the Franklin “Join, or Die” cartoon, but featuring the cut-up nematode Caenorhabditis elegans instead of a snake. C. elegans has been used as a model organism to study neurological development, and, um, it gets nerdier from here. But I liked it!
There were a bunch of signs: “Vaccines Cause Adults,” “Make America Think Again,” “Don’t Bite the Hand that Cures You.”
I liked this one. Another one that was nearby was “Literally just trying to cure multiple sclerosis, but okay…”
I moved from the back to the crowd just to get a picture of this sign.
Before the rally I was walking around and saw a familiar person, and one woman talking to him, so I thought I would go up and say hello. The woman, perhaps somehow knowing my selfie skills, offered to take the picture. One of my career highlights. Oh, and I had on lots of layers.
I’ve spent the last 45 years of my life being paid to do science – in academia (as a laboratory technician and then a graduate student), big pharma for my post-doctoral research, biotech, and government. Whether at the bench or directing research, I’ve been excited not only about the discovery, but how each bit of information fits into the big picture. I have always been interested in translational research, and navigating the sometimes-arcane world of rules and regulations, to find cures for or to prevent diseases.
The pauses and funding and personnel cuts are throwing a wrench into our scientific enterprise. There are processes that take time, and cutting staff, adding new layers of review, and creating a backlog of approvals risks missing out on funds appropriated for this year, not to mention cuts to existing grants and contracts because of words found in the applications or proposals. As bad as it looks on the outside, those who are on the inside are even more alarmed.
I had time to sightsee, and having grown up during the Vietnam War era, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was a big deal.
This is a pretty good news article about the rally: Link
No One of Consequence
Pressed for time, and I want to put something here relevant:
Didn’t Newt Gingrich abolish a science/tech advisory panel that was financed by the Congress to advise them on complicated science and or technical matters?
What would it take to re-establish that? I am beginning to suspect that some of our elected representatives do not, in fact, do the reading…
-NOoC
Steve LaBonne
I want to again share this podcast interview that my sister, a prominent scientist in her field, recently did with Bloomberg News. She does a great job of explaining what’s at stake.
WereBear
@No One of Consequence: Good point, though even if it was required, they wouldn’t.
trollhattan
Excellent, all around. Kudos to you and everybody who showed.
The memorial wall–having seen hundreds of pictures I was unprepared for the real item, which is supremely emotive.
MattF
OT. Kevin Drum died on Friday.
Old School
Nice!
What is the goofy costume in the second picture supposed to be? I do not recognize it.
trollhattan
@MattF:
Oh no, so sorry to learn this. The man was fighting the fight, literally to the end. Will miss him and his thoughtful insights.
CaseyL
@MattF: Heartbreaking news. He fought so hard for so long.
schrodingers_cat
@WereBear: Could Ds have put it back in when they had the gavel.
schrodingers_cat
@Old School: Dino?
rikyrah
@MattF:
RIP. He fought a long fight. :(
Betty Cracker
Thanks to all of our hard-working NIH scientists. They don’t deserve to be harassed by the ignorant, greedy fools currently in charge of the government. And thanks to everyone who showed up for science
ETA: So sorry to hear about Kevin Drum. Condolences to his family, humans and furballs.
David_C
@trollhattan: Thanks.
Old School
@schrodingers_cat:
It’s not the pet from The Flintstones. Is there a different Dino?
David_C
@Betty Cracker: Thanks, Betty. These things are tiring for an old guy! But it’s time to represent.
David_C
@Old School: The costume was a fish. No, I don’t know why, either.
schrodingers_cat
@Old School: Some sort of a dinosaur.
Elizabelle
@MattF: Rest in power, Kevin Drum. What a loss
I am glad he got to see how much he meant to so many of us, with the responses and blog posts once his health took its turn for the worse. That has to be comforting to Marian, too.
Elizabelle
Love the signs. Especially the Science Makes America Great, and the 5 bullet points.
Well done, scientists and fans of science. You had a good day for the protest, and you turned out.
Old School
@David_C: Thanks!
Chat Noir
I love the picture with the five bullet points. The little picture of the earth denotes “Gulf of Mexico”!
So sorry to hear about Kevin Drum passing.
A Ghost to Most
Time for a Science Lysistrata event.
Matt McIrvin
I was reading Kevin Drum way back when he was Calpundit. He was always thoughtful and insightful and he will be missed.
trollhattan
Profiles in discourage.
Baud
@MattF:
RIP. He was a stalwart figure.
Eunicecycle
@MattF: oh no! I thought he was doing better!
rikyrah
Chicago Tribune (@chicagotribune) posted at 0:16 PM on Mon, Mar 10, 2025:
For decades, the Presidential Management Fellows program was seen as a building block for the civil service with the expectation that the few who earned the position would one day become leaders in the federal workforce. Now the road ahead is uncertain. https://t.co/Q75pQq3Lue
(https://x.com/chicagotribune/status/1899147275563135007?s=03)
Gretchen
There was a comment on social media yesterday about a scientist who’d lost her job. Idiot says he’s sure she’d get another job, and if not, it’s because industry doesn’t value what she does enough to hire her so she must not be that good. The science illiteracy is just appalling – like someone who has been studying multiple sclerosis for decades could just slot into an Alzheimer’s project and keep working. Or that interrupted projects could just be picked up years later, after all the mice and cell lines are dead.
Ozempic happened because some guy was studying an enzyme in iguana saliva. Can’t you just hear Mike Johnson and Elon Musk chortling about cancelling millions of dollars into iguana spit research har har har?
Gretchen
@Gretchen: these guys are so ignorant they don’t even realize how ignorant they sound. Like Nate Silver saying Covid must be a lab leak because there’s a virus lab in Wuhan, didn’t you know? Har har har! Completely ignorant of the virologists who have RNA sequencing of viral genomes from the market, early patients, lab, comparing tiny variations in sequence, and the lab leak people are too stupid to understand why that’s important and just ignore it.
trollhattan
And it’s only fucking Monday.
David_C
@rikyrah: The AAAS Science and Technology Fellow program is similar. All of that is suspended, along with the Summer Pathways program.
There is a lot more internal angst because of the New Rules, but it’s harder to convey bureaucratic pain when that’s the goal. Nevertheless, we persist.
schrodingers_cat
Our media is made up of fools who went to elite Ivy League schools are illiterate and innumerate where math and science is concerned.
trollhattan
The North Sea ship collision gets better: tanker was carrying jet fuel and the container ship has sodium cyanide. Both are burning. Party in the UK.
WaterGirl
@MattF: I let Cole know about Kevin Drum; I imagine he will want to put up the post.
Kevin Drum being who he was, it feels to me like the post should come from the blogfather himself. Unless someone else puts up a post first.
Elizabelle
@trollhattan: Learned a new word today. Allision.
Meaning, when a ship hits something that is NOT moving. Different from a collision.
Why yes, it was the company controlling the MS Stena (jet fuel ship), which was at anchor, that used “allision.” They are making the point that sodium cyanide vessel sailed into their ship, and it is a possibility.
Saw mention that it can take an hour to raise an anchor on a ship of the Stena’s size. Interesting.
Also that radar will show a ship from 24 miles out, but that it’s just the last 4 miles that seem to be critical.
Kosh III
@No One of Consequence:I am beginning to suspect that some of our elected representatives do not, in fact
, do thereading…Fixed it!
trollhattan
@Elizabelle:
That’s a fascinating bit of of language trivia: Allision* vs. Collision “No ‘CO’ about this wreck, buster!”
*The act of dashing against, or striking upon.
This remains an erudite blog. I will find myself allisioning (alliding?) against Trump the next four years.
No One of Consequence
OK, from the Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/the-much-needed-and-sane-congressional-office-that-gingrich-killed-off-and-we-need-back/264160/
It goes on. I don’t subscribe, but was looking for the name. Newticles killed this. Loudly and proudly.
We need something like that back, multidisciplinary, with agreed-upon data sources and data integrity, peer-reviewed please. Seriously, with the brainpower we (should) still have in this country, we ought to be able to gather a handful of learned opinions about anything, including rebuttals from equally learned people. Among the number here needs to be a statistician and a logician, as well as an established mathematician, and perhaps most importantly: a competent graphic designer specializing in info-graphics.
For your consideration. If we cannot manage to elect adult-level intellects, then we at least need to alter the approach to educating our elects, to something more effective and less subject to manipulation. There are only a couple of them that can argue in good faith that they have difficulty with more than one digit at a time, and sumtymz dunt reed er spel so gud. The rest I would like to see defend, really, illogical stances and opinions/policies, if we have agreed-upon data.
Once we agree upon the givens, logic and reason will lead us to proper conclusions. I understand the difficulties about consensus on the givens, but we must begin somewhere. Even if it is with base mathematics that we must begin.
Would anyone of us, ANYONE HERE, want the actual truth of knowing FOR REAL the number of voting adults who don’t realize we aren’t sending cargo palettes of hundred dollar bills to Ukraine all this time? That we gave them our old stuff, and paid US WORKERS to create new stuff to fill the hole? Double-dipping on the benefit, getting more bang-for-the-tax-dollar that way?
Well, we COULD have something like that. I think we are going to NEED something like that. And, perhaps most difficult will be that the office/group itself AND the members will need to be as apolitical as possible.
That might be hard to get, I realize. Ah, but a boy can dream, right?
Anyway, fuck Newt. One of the two bastards most responsible for the flying of US politics into the ground. Him and McTurtle. I hate those two fuckers a great deal, and wish their memorial sewage treatment plants to be well-funded.
-NOoC
Stella Lynch
I was on MS-4 Treatment for Multiple Sclerosis from Uine Health Centre for 6 months. The treatment relieved symptoms significantly, even better than the medications I was given. Reach them at uinehealthc entre . c om
Gvg
@No One of Consequence: we did a bunch of cash waste to iraq, so maybe its not surprising that people think we are doing the same to Ukraine. I would consider Ukraine to be considerably more important to our interests even though i wanted iraq to succeed once we broke it. I thought we were obligated.
In fact why haven’t we done more for Ukraine
There used to also be an impartial budget analysis office for congress too. Republicans killed that because it said tax cuts would increase the deficit too many times.
Marcopolo
@Gretchen: Hey now, that was a Gila Monster from New Mexico, not an iguana! I actually used this story at one of the Stand Up for Science rallies in St Louis to highlight how stupid it is when conservatives complain about weird basic research studies…that wind up having a major impact (for the good) for us. Like bar codes/readers are the far downstream result of a little research experiment to see if computers could differentiate the thickness of lines.
Oh, and it was a scientist working at the VA who first looked at Gila Moster saliva a couple decades ago. Why? I have no effing clue. Did they patent it. Nope, there seemed to be no commercially viable application at the time.
Two last things:
1) I’d like to challenge every BJer who is physically able to find a protest (don’t care what really) happening nearby & commit to trying to attend 1 every month. Like there are Tesla Takedowns happening all over the country every Sat—something like that.
2) call your congressperson this week and ask them to start holding physical town halls 1/month. I’d tell them while it’d be nice if they could attend, they could also have some home office staffers run them.
trollhattan
@Gvg:
IDK what part of our military equipment and ordnance support were either retired or past their “blow-up by” dates but it is significant. Stuff already charged against the books isn’t charged a second time. (Not to mention de-commissioning ammo and chemical weapons is complicated and expensive, ask me how I know.)
As we’re learning, withholding intel is costing Ukrainian lives–civilian and military–and losing territory. And guess what, we’re gathering intel anyway so no real cost to sharing.
trollhattan
Duplicate
Elizabelle
@trollhattan: Erudite and pedant-filled!
David_C
@Marcopolo: Thank you for representing!
More about basic research: each discovery is one more brick in the foundation of knowledge, whether it is knowledge for its own sake or how the world works, or that could lead to a serendipitous discovery. The intellectual pursuits are like art – they show the beauty of the natural world and satisfy our desire to discover and to learn what makes the world tick.
There will be more events coming up, as well as opportunities to contact our representatives.
As far as newspeople coming from fancy Ivy League colleges – so did I, and I was lucky to attend when tuition was more affordable for my dad, who worked in a factory (and for me when I went on a sabbatical to earn money for my last two years). The main problem is the attitude that there’s a story in conflict and that coverage should be balanced.
We’ll see how much longer I have a job.
trollhattan
@Elizabelle:
Fun fact: pedant-filled Pop Tarts are their best seller.
Tenar Arha
@Old School: I thought looked like a floppy shark costume.
Elizabelle
And: what those alarmist scientists are protesting: breaking from the WaPost:
NIH to terminate or limit grants related to vaccine hesitancy and uptake
The order covers about 80 awards to researchers seeking to understand why vaccine acceptance has declined.
No One of Consequence
@Gvg: We did blow stupid, truly bonkers cash in Iraq, true. But the pallets of cash thing was a 9/12/2001 CIA thing into Afghanistan. They had several millions in cash on pallets, buying up any warlord who offered them a price tag.
I would love an accounting department. The GAO is supposed to do these things, but I would really like a genuine, legit, accurate data pipe that was publicly available, (edited to add: validated) in order to allow data scientists to do things with it. (I realize a great deal of this may have been available before the Ketamine Kids got spun up, or may be available now, dunno)
But the science advisory, and the statistician (for spotting figures bullshit and weighting bullshit) and the mathametician (for spotting math bullshit) and the logician (for spotting fallacy and logical bullshit) — man, we could really start to make some progress on just getting back to ground zero with the trust and common figures/data we are all working from. So we can stop entertaining everyone having their own facts.
That shit pisses me off. Like objective reality is debateable. Get all sorts of down with your metaphysical bad selves, and your glorious golden souls a shining with arguments of faith. Have at it and may it bring you the peace and understanding you seek.
But those of us inhabiting the empiracal universe need to get on with our moving the ball forward. Please stop impeding our progress, as the answers are out there, and we would like to keep finding them so we can ask more interesting questions.
YMMV, peace,
-NOoC
Kayla Rudbek
@schrodingers_cat: seconding this.