My mother supports Donald Trump. She has concerns but believes all politicians are corrupt. According to my mother, the key difference is that Trump doesn’t hide his corruption.
My mother’s political disillusionment is not unique. As of 2023, only 4% of Americans believed the political system was working well. Americans’ trust that the government will “do what’s right” at least “most of the time” dropped by half between 2000 and 2008, continuing to decline to an all-time low of 17% in 2025.
As a scientist, I’m deeply concerned. Scientists are often encouraged to avoid politics. But this advice is outdated, if it was ever correct in the first place. Science relies on public support.
For about 80 years, most fields of science enjoyed bipartisan support, allowing scientists to cling to an “apolitical” fantasy. But the scientific community can no longer afford to avoid politics when science is under attack.
As a program officer at the National Institutes of Health, I witnessed this attack firsthand. When I saw clinical trials cut short with callous disregard for participant safety, court orders ignored to achieve political ends, and mission-critical colleagues fired based on false accusations of poor performance, I first spoke up inside the NIH. When it became clear that internal objections were not working, I chose — together with hundreds of my colleagues — to blow the whistle and make the American public aware of the harm. Our dissent took shape in June 2025 as the ...
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