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Nine years ago this week, the RN&R mimicked a famous Time magazine cover for the lead feature, headlined “Is Science Dead?” and written by then-editor Brad Bynum:
Here is the introductory section of the story:
This week’s cover image is a spoof of a classic, controversial 1966 Time magazine cover, which asked, “Is God dead?” It’s a cover that’s been parodied and aped many times over the years. Time itself remade the cover earlier this month with the question, “Is truth dead?” But here’s the implication: an entire way of understanding the universe is being threatened.
Like Muslims, Latinos and many other groups, scientists have felt threatened by the current presidential administration. This isn’t just a shift toward business development and away from environmental regulations, as might be expected during a Republican administration—it is that, but it’s also a far-reaching general move away from funding science, especially alternative energy and science without practical applications. About the only science assured continued federal support during the Trump administration is weapons technology.
Science, of course, is not dead. Unlike some deities—we’ll just say Tinker Bell, to pick an innocuous example—science doesn’t stop existing just because people stop believing in it. Science is simply a system for organizing and applying knowledge. That knowledge includes, but is not limited to, facts about the natural world and the known universe. Science itself is not a fact, but a catalog of facts—and any given fact can be refined or refuted without the system falling apart. Inversely, even if the current system of science collapses for some bizarre reason—most, if not all of the facts will remain.
So why do scientists feel threatened?
There are the sizable cuts to the budgets of science-oriented federal programs like the National Institutes of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency, and there are other threats: climate change deniers, anti-vaccinators and the media outlets that give voice to those views. There are businesses, corporations and politicians that benefit from the repression of science.
In response to these threats, scientists are mobilizing. They’re writing letters to congressmembers and organizing rallies. At 10 a.m. on April 22, the Northern Nevada March for Science will occur on Virginia Street from Liberty Street to city hall. It’s just one of hundreds of such demonstrations slated to occur that morning across the country and globe.
The marchers won’t just be scientists. At a March 11 meeting, held at Bibo Coffee Co., near the University of Nevada, Reno, organizers discussed their communications with organizations like NAACP and ACLU, church groups, community groups, student groups, leaders from both major political parties, different UNR departments, professional societies, farm associations, rural county residents, high school science teachers and more. The organizers repeatedly mentioned an inclusive attitude—and although that’s a disparate group, with some conflicting ideals, they all use science.
The meeting drew about 40 people—many of them professional scientists, from a number of different disciplines. They were all there to discuss the goal, messages and methods of the march. A few people mentioned that it’s important to remember that a rally like this one is a patriotic event. One woman in the crowd said she thought it was important that marchers carry American flags. “I don’t like the concept that all those other people are co-opting patriotism and co-opting the flag,” she said.
In the nine years since this story was published, we’ve endured the rest of the first Trump presidency, the COVID-19 pandemic, and now the first 15 months of the second Trump presidency—and to say the threats to science and scientists have increased would be a massive, massive understatement.
Unless you’ve been avoiding all local and national news for the last year in a half, you already know about the myriad ways in which the second Trump administration has attacked science—through massive budget cuts, actions against major universities, harmful cabinet appointments (led by infamous anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr.), and so on.
Just yesterday, The Washington Post published a piece headlined “Where U.S. science has been hit hardest after Trump’s first year.”
A snippet:
American science is shrinking.
A Washington Post analysis found that through March 31, halfway through this fiscal year, the number of competitive grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health is down by more than half compared with the same period last year. Biomedical funding has also undergone a shift, the analysis found, cutting the U.S. research footprint across nearly every major disease area — including fewer grants focused on women’s health, cancer and mental health.
Overall, the NIH supported over 2,700 fewer scientific projects in fiscal 2025, about a 15 percent cut in the number of competitive grants compared with the previous fiscal year. In (endometriosis researcher Katherine Burns’) field, women’s health, there was a 31 percent drop in the number of projects funded in 2025 that included the word “women,” after years of steady growth in competitive awards.
As for vaccines … The New York Times posted this piece late last week (gift link):
Over two dizzying days in Washington this week, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared to change his tune on vaccines. The nation’s loudest vaccine skeptic conceded that the measles vaccine was safe and effective for “most people” and put forth a slate of doctors who support vaccines to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But whether those shifts are merely cosmetic, or will produce real policy change, is an open question.
Mr. Kennedy is still surrounded by allies, notably the lawyer Aaron Siri, who are pushing him to roll back existing vaccine policy. Last week, apparently in response to a petition by Mr. Siri, the C.D.C. published a new charter for a vaccine advisory committee that enables Mr. Kennedy to sidestep a federal court ruling barring changes to the panel.
Mr. Kennedy’s department is fighting the lawsuit, filed by six major medical organizations, which produced that ruling. The suit seeks to prevent the government from putting into place a series of vaccine policy changes, including the elimination of a longstanding recommendation that infants be vaccinated against hepatitis B at birth.
As Brad Bynum wrote nine years ago, “Science doesn’t stop existing just because people stop believing in it”—but scientific advances in the U.S. are being heavily curtailed because those in charge either don’t believe in a lot of proven science, or simply don’t give a damn.
—Jimmy Boegle
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