There’s a concept called simultaneous invention, which holds that many scientific discoveries are made at the same time by different people. That’s almost exactly what happened with the upcoming March for Science.
The idea started percolating through Reddit in late January, and University of Texas postdoc Jonathan Berman grabbed the URL and set up Twitter and Facebook feeds. Around the same time, health educator and fellow co-chair Caroline Weinberg thought a march would be a great idea and started poking around Twitter for likeminded scientists.
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Pretty soon, Weinberg, Berman and University of New Mexico doctoral candidate Valorie Aquino were planning a march. They wanted to be careful and deliberate, but a strategic retweet propelled the idea into hyper-drive.
“It just exploded,” said Weinberg in a phone interview. “Within five hours, we had 5,000 Twitter followers and a 100,000 Facebook likes. In four days, we had 40,000 people volunteer. Not just sign up for an email list but actually volunteer their time to help.”
Coming hard on the heels of the successful Women’s March, the March for Science struck a nerve with people around the world. Many are concerned that honest scientific inquiry is being co-opted by politics.
“I saw that before scientists at the EPA can release their peer-reviewed data, it has to cross the desk of a politician,” said gastroenterologist Loretta Jophlin, who is helping organize a march in South Carolina, in a phone interview. “I take offense at politicians who think they need to look at the purity and process and cherry-pick what they want to be widely disseminated.”
Though the march is aimed at countering a perceived anti-science bias in the Trump administration and Congress, Weinberg pushes back on the charge that it’s a partisan effort.
“The problem is that this shouldn’t even be a discussion,” said Weinberg. “Science has been mischaracterized as a partisan issue, that’s the problem. People associate anti-science with one group; but there are a lot of Democrats who are anti-GMO, which flies in the face of all available scientific evidence. Anti-science policies are bipartisan.”
With the march locked in for Earthy Day, April 22, organizers have a big job, and a steep learning curve, ahead of them.
“We all come from a science background and this is aggressively outside our skillsets,” said Weinberg. “But if there’s one thing that people who’ve spent a lot of time in school know, it’s that professors are there for a reason. We reached out to people who could fill the gaps in our knowledge and help make it a success and both teach us and participate.”
People on the national committee are spending a lot of 20-hour days getting ready, and dozens of other marches are springing up in cities around the world, but they’re also looking forward to what happens afterwards. With around 53,000 volunteers, they see green shoots for an emerging movement.
“Even if we have one percent of those 53,000 who want to work with us after the march, that’s still a huge number of people motivated to do something,” said Weinberg. “Our plan is to talk about science more and get researchers to talk about their work in a way that people connect with, so they understand how research affects their daily lives.”
Photo: pe-art, Getty Images
