BOSTON — The official theme of the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, held February 13–15, is “Science Shaping Tomorrow.”
The unofficial theme is “uncertainty.”
With thousands of scientists, advocates and policy experts in attendance, AAAS is the largest science meeting to take place in the United States since the beginning of the second Trump administration. It’s happening against a backdrop of threats to funding that supports research, scrubbing public data from online sources and a purge of federal workers.
Even as the meeting got under way, thousands of employees across the federal government were being fired, including scientists at the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Protection Agency as part of Trump’s plan to downsize the government.
“We are gathered in a moment of turmoil. It’s turmoil,” said AAAS CEO Sudip Parikh in a Feb. 13 welcome address. “I don’t want to sugarcoat that.”
Noted AAAS board chair Joseph Francisco: “The unprecedented nature of the last few weeks have left many of us in the science and engineering community uncertain, anxious, and fearful… These feelings are valid.”
The researchers I spoke with used words like “chaos,” “confusion” and “insane” to describe the climate at their institutions.
“Right now, the prevailing sense is confusion,” says Miles Arnett, who is working on a Ph.D. in bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania. “I went to a panel today with people who recently worked in government. No one knows what is coming,” Arnett says. “It has a paralyzing effect.”
Some attendees distanced themselves from where they work when speaking about their experiences. One federal researcher turned his name badge around so I couldn’t see where he worked before he talked to me. Others declined to give their affiliations when…
Read the full article here
