{"id":138,"date":"2017-04-11T13:47:57","date_gmt":"2017-04-11T13:47:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/infinity-press.com\/wp\/?p=138"},"modified":"2017-04-12T10:57:34","modified_gmt":"2017-04-12T10:57:34","slug":"why-im-marching-for-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/infinity-press.com\/wp\/?p=138","title":{"rendered":"Why I’m Marching For Science"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been living overseas, so I’ve missed out on a lot of the big marches and movements over the past few years and months. (But you bet your bottom I voted and write my representatives.)<\/p>\n

But, I’ll be in the US visiting family in Florida this year during the April 22 March for Science, so I’m going.<\/p>\n

Confession?\u00a0 This will be my first ever march.\u00a0 For a lot of reasons, good and bad.\u00a0 But at this point, I really have had it with both Trump and the Republican Party’s agenda.<\/p>\n

I’m a scientist, a cancer researcher.\u00a0 I do not want to politicize science.\u00a0 But the reality is, almost nothing can be entirely free of politics.\u00a0 (Heck, I just heard on the radio that bathrooms in North Carolina will be under State jurisdiction.\u00a0 Bathrooms need a jurisdiction?)<\/p>\n

Research is expensive and time consuming, and the best of it is not always profitable.\u00a0 That means that private funds alone will never be able to fully drive scientific endeavor.\u00a0 This means the government gets involved, as it should.\u00a0 What it shouldn’t do is try to use funding to select only science that fulfills partisan wishes or shut down scientific discourse with the public.\u00a0 This has ended poorly for every government that has tried it.<\/p>\n

So there, that’s why there’s politics.\u00a0 But I’m marching for more.\u00a0 I want money!\u00a0 Yeah, you heard me.<\/p>\n

The proposed budget makes deep cuts in science (among other things) while growing the military.\u00a0 Don’t get me wrong, we need a strong military.\u00a0 We need to take care of our soldiers, who are putting themselves in danger for our safety.\u00a0 But scientific endeavor, technological advancement, and intellectual daring made this nation great.\u00a0 Investing in research, investing in educating our children, investing in new technologies, these things build a great country.\u00a0 These things make jobs.\u00a0 These things make a future.<\/p>\n

When we drop environmental regulations, we aren’t just damaging our planet and our future, we’re damaging our economy.\u00a0 We lose ground on technological advances that other countries will be making, and we lose the markets of countries that don’t want wasteful, backward technology.\u00a0 In the long run, we lose jobs.<\/p>\n

One of our greatest assets is our university system.\u00a0 If we don’t fund it, all those bright minds from other countries will find elsewhere.<\/p>\n

And if we don’t fund basic scientific research?\u00a0 We lose early career scientists.\u00a0 We lose the knowledge we’ll gain.\u00a0 We lose potential treatments.\u00a0 We lose lives.\u00a0 My dad is dying of cancer right now.\u00a0 No, scientific research has not found a cure yet.\u00a0 But it has<\/em> extended his life from the few paltry months he might have had to years<\/em>.\u00a0 He got to see me graduate with a PhD, get married, have a baby.\u00a0 I’m still going to lose him to cancer.\u00a0 It’s going to suck.\u00a0 But research needs to keep moving forward so we can keep getting more out of our lives.<\/p>\n

Maybe a big border wall and a huge military* make you feel safe.\u00a0 But they don’t make you safe.\u00a0 They won’t build a country, they won’t make jobs for you, and they definitely won’t make jobs for your children.\u00a0 They probably wouldn’t have saved the 13 people that died in terrorist attacks in 2014, and they certainly wouldn’t have helped the nearly 2 million people that died that year from illnesses such as heart disease, cancer, infections, lung diseases, cerebrovascular diseases, and all the other things that scientists are working to fix.\"\"<\/a>And all that?\u00a0 That just scratches the surface of why I’m marching for science.<\/p>\n

*No, I don’t know what the answer to terrorism is, but I do know it has to involve more than the military, and it cannot involve alienating the billions of Muslim allies that we’ll need to understand terrorism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been living overseas, so I’ve missed out on a lot of the big marches and movements over the past few years and months. (But you bet your bottom I voted and write my representatives.) But, I’ll be in the US visiting family in Florida this year during the April 22 March for Science, so … Continue reading Why I’m Marching For Science<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/infinity-press.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/infinity-press.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/infinity-press.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infinity-press.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infinity-press.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=138"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/infinity-press.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":147,"href":"https:\/\/infinity-press.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138\/revisions\/147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/infinity-press.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infinity-press.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infinity-press.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}