By Seth Borenstein
Washington (AP) – Researchers, doctors, patients and supporters have ventured laboratories, hospitals and offices on Friday to resist what they call a blitz on vital science by the Trump administration.
In the national capital, a few thousand people gathered at the Stand Up scientific rally. The organizers said that similar rallies were planned in more than 30 American cities.
Politicians, scientists, musicians, doctors and their patients had to argue that layoffs, budget and reductions in health, climate, science and other government research agencies in the first 47 days according to the Trump administration does not only take the future, but the present.
“Science is attacked in the United States,” said Colette Delawalla, co-organizer of Rally, a doctoral student in clinical psychology. “We are not only going to stay here and take it.”
“American Scientific Progress and Forward Movement is a public good and the public good is coming up at the moment,” said Delawalla.
The progress of health and sciences occur faster than ever, said the former director of the National Institutes of Health Francis Collins, who helped map the human genome. Funding reductions have endangered progress on Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes and cancer, he said.
“It’s a very bad time with the whole promise and the momentum,” said Collins.
“I am very worried about my country right now,” said Collins before separating from an original song from his guitar.
Emily Whitehead, the first patient to obtain a certain new type of treatment for rare cancer, told the crowd that at 5 years old, she was sent to a hospice to die, but T cell therapy “learned to my immune system to beat cancer” and she has been without illness for almost 13 years.
“I defend science because science saved my life,” said Whitehead.
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Friday’s rally in Washington was in Lincoln Memorial, in the shadow of a statue of the president who created the National Academy of Sciences in 1863. Some of the giants of the study of expected speakers are collision of galaxies, the small genetic plan of life inside humans and the warming atmosphere.
“We are examining the most aggressively anti-scope government that the United States has ever had,” said astronomer Phil plaster at the crowd of mud which had worn panels that were decidedly cheesy and attackers Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The panels included “Edit Elon out of DNA in the United States”, “in evidence we trust”, “science is the vaccine for ignorance” and “checked the epidemiologist”.
The biologist winner of the Nobel Prize, Victor Ambros, Bill Nye, the scientific guy, the former NASA chief, Bill Nelson, and a crowd of other politicians, and patients – some of rare diseases – had to take the scene to talk about their work and the importance of scientific research.
7 million kilometers from the earth, NASA has proven that science could divert asteroids potentially killing the planet, said Nelson. On his flight of the space shuttle almost 40 years ago, he looked at the earth and had a “feeling of fear that you wanted to be a better steward of what we have been given,” he said.
The rallies were organized mainly by graduate students and scientists at the start of their career. Dozens of other demonstrations have also been planned worldwide, including more than 30 in France, said Delawalla.
“The reductions in scientific financing affect the world,” she said.
Protesters gathered in the town hall of Philadelphia, which is home to prestigious and recognized health care establishments and where 1 in 6 doctor in the United States has received medical training.
“As a doctor, I defend all my transgender and non-binary patients who are also targeted,” said Cedric Bien-Guund, infectious doctor at the University of Pennsylvania. “There has been a lot of fear and sinety, both among our patients and among all our employees. And it’s really discouraging to see.
Isabella O’malley contributed from Philadelphia.
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