Latest news with #McClintockLetters
Yahoo
6 hours ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Researchers have a radical plan to thwart Trump's war on science: Talking to people
Scientists searching for a cure for cancer have no trouble finding public support. But for those studying potato disease, it's a tougher sell. The Trump administration seems to have banked on the idea that the public will see much of scientific research as wasteful or arcane. It has slashed — or proposed slashing — billions in research funding. Faced with this existential crisis, academics are seeking new ways to rally public and political support to fight the cuts and preserve their funding. Enter a group of Cornell University graduate students with an ambitious plan to change the way people think about science. They have recruited more than 500 researchers across all 50 states to write op-eds for local news outlets, to be published over the next week. The idea, said Emma Scales, a Cornell doctoral student involved in the effort, is to have scientists introduce themselves to the public. 'It's speaking to people who are angry about not knowing where their money is going,' Scales said. 'Like, 'Hey, I'm one of those people using your money. I'm sorry that we haven't talked, but let me tell you what I do.'' The McClintock Letters, as the project is known, is one of several efforts underway by graduate students and faculty members with the same goal in mind. They reflect a growing recognition that researchers can't take public support for granted. If they don't act now, many are starting to realize, public trust in scientists will continue to slide and the funding may never return. Science Homecoming, a letter-writing campaign, encourages academics to focus on the role government dollars play in science. Stand Up for Science, a new nonprofit, is planning a series of demonstrations at state fairs and farmers markets, along with teach-ins at churches and open lab days this summer. Another new organization, Your Neighborhood Scientist, publishes essays by researchers and tries to encourage community-based conversations about science. Audrey Drotos, a University of Pennsylvania neuroscience researcher who co-founded Your Neighborhood Scientist, sees efforts like hers as a way for scientists to share their own excitement. 'We don't want to just add more noise to the system,' she said. 'We're trying to humanize scientists — that's really the underlying goal.' The inspiration for the McClintock Letters took root in February, when Isako Di Tomassi, a doctoral student studying plant pathology, vented online about losing her Ph.D. adviser at the U.S. Department of Agriculture after widespread government layoffs this year. Some online commenters were sympathetic, Di Tomassi said, but one person insisted that the cuts had stopped 'stupid research,' and many others expressed confusion as to what universities were even studying. Few seemed to see the value in their work. Di Tomassi and Scales brainstormed with the Cornell Advancing Science and Policy Club about what to do in response and landed on the idea of having researchers tell their own stories. They named their effort after Barbara McClintock, the late Cornell cytogeneticist who won a Nobel Prize, and planned it around her birthday, June 16. Her research on the genes in corn changed scientists' understanding of heredity and laid the foundation for treating genetic defects in humans. 'Barbara McClintock is famous as hell,' Di Tomassi said, 'but maybe not to a nonscientist because she studied corn DNA. So most people will be like, 'Who cares about corn DNA?'' But that's exactly the point, Di Tomassi said: bridging the disconnect between what the scientific community knows and what the average person understands. Even mundane-sounding experiments can help fuel medical and scientific breakthroughs, she said. Researchers have signed up to write about breast cancer metastasis, how memories are formed and sustainable grape-harvesting, among other things. They are on track to reach 8 million potential readers, based on the organizers' back-of-the-envelope calculations of each news outlet's audience size. During a June 6 webinar, Katherine Xue, a microbiologist at the University of California, Irvine, walked some 100 people through how to write an op-ed. She showed them a 2015 op-ed by Newt Gingrich that called for more research funding as a template. Xue reminded them to avoid jargon and make it personal. She plans to write for a newspaper in her hometown of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, about how a high school internship got her interested in microbiology. 'As scientists, we're trained to stay impersonal and to take ourselves out of the equation,' Xue told NBC News. But there's a downside to that approach, she said. 'I think a lot of people haven't met scientists and don't know a lot about what we do and why, which means it's easy to distrust science as a whole.' Recent polling backs up her point. While 76% of Americans have confidence in scientists, that's down from 87% in 2020, surveys by the Pew Research Center show. Pew also found a majority of Americans believe that scientists are not good communicators, and that nearly half think scientists view themselves as superior to others. Silly-sounding research projects have long been a political punching bag. Some senators have issued annual reports flagging what they consider wasteful spending on science. During Trump's March speech to Congress, he rattled off a list of what he deemed ridiculous projects funded by the Biden administration, including research he incorrectly described as making mice transgender (it actually looked at the role of hormones in health and fertility). The White House defended the president's remarks. In response to questions about research cuts, White House spokesman Kush Desai said they were in line with what voters want. 'The American people gave President Trump a resounding mandate to realign government spending to better reflect their priorities,' he wrote in an email. 'The Administration is committed to delivering on this mandate.' For her new book, 'The Salmon Cannon and the Levitating Frog,' Carly Anne York, an animal behaviorist at Lenoir-Rhyne University in North Carolina, profiled a handful of scientists who have engaged directly with disparagers to defend their research. One professor profiled in the book responded to mockery of her work as 'Shrimp Fight Club' by joining other academics in setting up a mini-science fair on Capitol Hill, where she shared that the research into how shrimp fight had generated interest in designing new types of body armor for humans. 'I wish that more scientists would think that way,' York said. 'This is actually our burden to make sure the public understands why their taxpayer dollars go to us, what we do with it, and why what we do matters.' So will the McClintock Letters or other campaigns work? Students and faculty members planning to participate aren't sure, but many say that's not the only goal — and hope they go further. For Michael Lubell, a physics professor at City College of New York and a former public affairs director for the American Physical Society, their success will depend on whether there's an ongoing effort to connect with the public. Lubell said they should meet people in person as well — at Rotary Clubs, churches and temples, or in PTA meetings. 'If you're going to try to do something and get people to come to you, you're only going to get a sliver of the population to do that, and I don't think that'll move the needle,' he said. 'Go where they are — see what they value. You may be surprised.' This article was originally published on
NBC News
6 hours ago
- Science
- NBC News
Researchers have a radical plan to thwart Trump's war on science: Talking to people
Scientists searching for a cure for cancer have no trouble finding public support. But for those studying potato disease, it's a tougher sell. The Trump administration seems to have banked on the idea that the public will see much of scientific research as wasteful or arcane. It has slashed — or proposed slashing — billions in research funding. Faced with this existential crisis, academics are seeking new ways to rally public and political support to fight the cuts and preserve their funding. Enter a group of Cornell University graduate students with an ambitious plan to change the way people think about science. They have recruited more than 500 researchers across all 50 states to write op-eds for local news outlets, to be published over the next week. The idea, said Emma Scales, a Cornell doctoral student involved in the effort, is to have scientists introduce themselves to the public. 'It's speaking to people who are angry about not knowing where their money is going,' Scales said. 'Like, 'Hey, I'm one of those people using your money. I'm sorry that we haven't talked, but let me tell you what I do.'' The McClintock Letters, as the project is known, is one of several efforts underway by graduate students and faculty members with the same goal in mind. They reflect a growing recognition that researchers can't take public support for granted. If they don't act now, many are starting to realize, public trust in scientists will continue to slide and the funding may never return. Science Homecoming, a letter-writing campaign, encourages academics to focus on the role government dollars play in science. Stand Up for Science, a new nonprofit, is planning a series of demonstrations at state fairs and farmers markets, along with teach-ins at churches and open lab days this summer. Another new organization, Your Neighborhood Scientist, publishes essays by researchers and tries to encourage community-based conversations about science. Audrey Drotos, a University of Pennsylvania neuroscience researcher who co-founded Your Neighborhood Scientist, sees efforts like hers as a way for scientists to share their own excitement. 'We don't want to just add more noise to the system,' she said. 'We're trying to humanize scientists — that's really the underlying goal.' The inspiration for the McClintock Letters took root in February, when Isako Di Tomassi, a doctoral student studying plant pathology, vented online about losing her Ph.D. adviser at the U.S. Department of Agriculture after widespread government layoffs this year. Some online commenters were sympathetic, Di Tomassi said, but one person insisted that the cuts had stopped 'stupid research,' and many others expressed confusion as to what universities were even studying. Few seemed to see the value in their work. Di Tomassi and Scales brainstormed with the Cornell Advancing Science and Policy Club about what to do in response and landed on the idea of having researchers tell their own stories. They named their effort after Barbara McClintock, the late Cornell cytogeneticist who won a Nobel Prize, and planned it around her birthday, June 16. Her research on the genes in corn changed scientists' understanding of heredity and laid the foundation for treating genetic defects in humans. 'Barbara McClintock is famous as hell,' Di Tomassi said, 'but maybe not to a nonscientist because she studied corn DNA. So most people will be like, 'Who cares about corn DNA?'' But that's exactly the point, Di Tomassi said: bridging the disconnect between what the scientific community knows and what the average person understands. Even mundane-sounding experiments can help fuel medical and scientific breakthroughs, she said. Researchers have signed up to write about breast cancer metastasis, how memories are formed and sustainable grape-harvesting, among other things. They are on track to reach 8 million potential readers, based on the organizers' back-of-the-envelope calculations of each news outlet's audience size. During a June 6 webinar, Katherine Xue, a microbiologist at the University of California, Irvine, walked some 100 people through how to write an op-ed. She showed them a 2015 op-ed by Newt Gingrich that called for more research funding as a template. Xue reminded them to avoid jargon and make it personal. She plans to write for a newspaper in her hometown of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, about how a high school internship got her interested in microbiology. 'As scientists, we're trained to stay impersonal and to take ourselves out of the equation,' Xue told NBC News. But there's a downside to that approach, she said. 'I think a lot of people haven't met scientists and don't know a lot about what we do and why, which means it's easy to distrust science as a whole.' Recent polling backs up her point. While 76% of Americans have confidence in scientists, that's down from 87% in 2020, surveys by the Pew Research Center show. Pew also found a majority of Americans believe that scientists are not good communicators, and that nearly half think scientists view themselves as superior to others. Silly-sounding research projects have long been a political punching bag. Some senators have issued annual reports flagging what they consider wasteful spending on science. During Trump's March speech to Congress, he rattled off a list of what he deemed ridiculous projects funded by the Biden administration, including research he incorrectly described as making mice transgender (it actually looked at the role of hormones in health and fertility). The White House defended the president's remarks. In response to questions about research cuts, White House spokesman Kush Desai said they were in line with what voters want. 'The American people gave President Trump a resounding mandate to realign government spending to better reflect their priorities,' he wrote in an email. 'The Administration is committed to delivering on this mandate.' For her new book, ' The Salmon Cannon and the Levitating Frog,' Carly Anne York, an animal behaviorist at Lenoir-Rhyne University in North Carolina, profiled a handful of scientists who have engaged directly with disparagers to defend their research. One professor profiled in the book responded to mockery of her work as 'Shrimp Fight Club' by joining other academics in setting up a mini-science fair on Capitol Hill, where she shared that the research into how shrimp fight had generated interest in designing new types of body armor for humans. 'I wish that more scientists would think that way,' York said. 'This is actually our burden to make sure the public understands why their taxpayer dollars go to us, what we do with it, and why what we do matters.' So will the McClintock Letters or other campaigns work? Students and faculty members planning to participate aren't sure, but many say that's not the only goal — and hope they go further. For Michael Lubell, a physics professor at City College of New York and a former public affairs director for the American Physical Society, their success will depend on whether there's an ongoing effort to connect with the public. Lubell said they should meet people in person as well — at Rotary Clubs, churches and temples, or in PTA meetings. 'If you're going to try to do something and get people to come to you, you're only going to get a sliver of the population to do that, and I don't think that'll move the needle,' he said. 'Go where they are — see what they value. You may be surprised.'
Forbes
20-05-2025
- Politics
- Forbes
NSF, NIH Funding Cuts Spur Student-Led Science Communication Campaign
Scientists and students across the country are reeling after the DOGE-led mass layoffs, research and student fellowship funding cancellations, funding halts, and high-profile resignations of key leaders at many federal agencies that support science and technology research, including the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. In response, a student organization at Cornell University has launched a grassroots science communication campaign to encourage budding researchers to communicate the value proposition of their federally funded research. But their target audience is not policymakers in Washington, DC – it's local media the people voted them into office. Just as President Trump's first budget request to Congressional appropriators threatens to slash scientific research and education funding even more, Cornell University's Advancing Science and Policy Club has launched the McClintock Letters campaign to encourage and support fellow undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and early career faculty to articulate to communicate what they do to the public. Named after Cornell geneticist Barbara McClintock, who in 1983 became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in the sciences, the organizers aim to help their peers across the country publish over 1,000 columns, opinion pieces, and letters to the editor in hometown or local media outlets on or near June 16th, McClintock's birthday. The campaign website states that the participating authors should avoid partisanship, explain their federally funded research, its real-world impact, and how community contexts shaped their own decisions for pursuing careers as scientific researchers. According to 2024 polling from Pew Research Center, 76% of American adults express a "great deal or fair amount" of confidence in scientists to act in the public's best interest. However, that percentage is down from pre-pandemic times, and only 45% of polled respondents describe scientists as good communicators. A separate Pew study found that local newspapers have a circulation of around 15 million people and target a more diverse set of readers that may skip over national news outlets. Addressing both scienced communication and local media engagement gaps is a key goal of the McClinton letters campaign, says Isako Di Tomassi and Emma Scales, two second-year doctoral students at Cornell who lead the student organization coordinating the effort. "This initiative was born out of humility for sure. People generally are just not familiar with ongoing federally funded scientific research. That is not their fault," Scales shared during a phone interview. 'This is a science communication initiative. We're trying to come from the most humble place we can. We just want to tell you what we do.' The duo started the project after federal funding cuts enacted by the Trump administration led to the termination of Di Tomassi's doctoral advisor. Di Tomassi noticed that conversations on NextDoor, a neighborhood-based social media app, showed general unawareness or apathy among local residents about the implication of the cuts in their own communities. 'There were about 250 comments on the post about people at my research facility being fired. Some to the effect of 'a lot of stupid research has been stopped' or 'what were they working on anyway?'' Di Tomassi shared. 'I work for the public as a scientist, and they had no idea what I was working on. That was almost a failure for us as scientists to not communicate what we're doing with their money, their tax dollars.' Together with national coalitions like Science Homecoming and 500 Women Scientists, the organizers are coordinating complimentary science communication training webinars and providing editing services to contributors to the McClintock letters campaign. Science Homecoming, an effort founded by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of California-Berkeley, is coordinating a parallel initiative but geared at university faculty members. Their website lists a map highlighting published pieces from Maricopa, Arizona, to Charleston, South Carolina. Cornell University students are taking tracking the articles published as part of their campaign, which they hope to display in a similar fashion following the June 16th deadline. While federal research funding cuts inspired the undertaking, Di Tomassi and Scales hope that the McClintock letters campaign will not only increase awareness of the value of federally funded scientific research but also the need to hone students' skills in science communication and public engagement. Di Tomassi and Scales said they were heartened by the volume of support, and frontline science advocates in Washington welcomed the effort to help sound the alarm around the public impact of research. More than one hundred national professional science associations, including the Genetics Society of America and the American Association of Geographers have distributed the McClintock letters as part of the drive towards the June deadline. Reflecting on recent conversations with lawmakers on Capitol Hill, Jennifer Zeitzer, the deputy executive director at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, said that the need for the word to get out about the implications of the Trump administration's actions is only growing and local stories can help. 'Members of Congress need to hear personal stories about how their constituents are affected by what happens in Washington and the McClintock Letters campaign is a wonderful opportunity to bring these messages to Capitol Hill through the local press,' she told me. The federation, which represents more than 110,000 researchers worldwide, was one of the organizations that helped amplify the campaign. Tobin Smith, senior vice president for government relations and public policy at the Association of American Universities who co-chairs the Engaging Scientists and Engineers in Policy Coalition in Washington, DC, said that 'it only makes sense that graduate students speak up to promote the value of the federally funded research' given the volume of funding cuts at federal science agencies. As Congressional leaders weigh options before it sends a funding bill to send to President Trump's desk, Cornell's Advancing Science and Policy Club hopes it can turn career crises into a catalyst for more science communication training across the nation. Perhaps the next time that federal science cuts hit Ithica, New York, community conversations on the NextDoor app will look different from those that took place this spring.
