Scholars Return Fire
by Misha Angrist
The Austrian zoologist and animal behaviorist Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989) once said that specialists—aka scientists—are people “who know more and more about less and less, until they know everything about nothing.” Which is why, as a grad student and postdoc in the 1990s, I never bothered to attend the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; there’d be very little chance of learning anything related to my (or anyone’s) tiny research niche. We were incentivized, by the nature of scientific inquiry in those days and how our bread was buttered, to pay attention only to those things that were likely to inform our next experiment or paper. But now, with science on its back foot in the United States, the incentives have changed.
I don’t think it’s melodramatic to say that the stakes for science writ large are existential now. To that end, I was curious to attend the conference this year.
The euphemisms gave the game away.
“Create Your Unicorn Career in STEM - Even in Uncertain Times”
“Voices in the Storm: Science Advisers in a Turbulent World”
“Science-Focused Foundations in Tumultuous Times”
“Rethinking Science Diplomacy in a Fractured World”
“Helping Global Science Thrive Under Pressure”
“Unconventional Science Outreach for Uncertain Times”
The oblique references to “turbulence” still failed to address, let alone indict, the federal government’s open attack on science (see here for some salient examples).
Keep us breathing fire!
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