Friday, more than a thousand people began around the Savio Berkeley Savio stages in Sproul Plaza to protest against current or threatened cuts to federal research funds, part of a day of action organized by researchers across the country.
Bringing together under the warm sun, the crowd, wearing signs and signs in support of scientific research, heard by speakers who have excited the Trump administration for trying to close one of the most productive economic engines of all time.
The event was one of the almost three dozen “Defend science” Gatherings have organized nationally to protest against the dismissals of the mass government, the attempt to eliminate all the funding of the USAID, the proposed reductions of the research subsidies of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), and “the mass cancellation of research projects that the administration is opposed to ideological reasons” Miguel, one of the organizers of the event.
“This double attack on science and democracy is not aligned with the founding vision of our country,” said Miguel, professor of eminent economy of the UC Berkeley and founder of the Center for Effective Global Action. The founding fathers have created scientific societies, he added: “To promote scientific research and they considered it essential to our democracy. … And their vision has paid well. The United States has been the world’s unrivaled scientific and technological leader for 80 years. »»
Stanley Luo for UC Berkeley
“It is our role as researchers, researchers, artists, students and intellectuals to get up now and tell the truth, perhaps before it is too late for our scientific community. Destroying American science is not patriotic, “he said.
The winner of the Nobel Jennifer Doudna, one of the inventors of revolutionary CrisPR gene editing technology, deplored the attack on the financing of NIH, in particular, because of its critical role in the training of the next generation of biomedical researchers wishing to solve today’s main health problems.
“I would not be here without support from the National Institutes of Health. A training subsidy paid for me to go to higher education at a time when my family from a small town in Hawaii would never have allowed it…. I am therefore incredibly grateful to NIH, ”said Doudna, professor of chemistry and molecular and cellular biology and founding of the innovative genomics institute.
Stanley Luo for UC Berkeley
Threatened cuts would damage the “kind of science focused on curiosity and curiosity that we are all proud to do here in Berkeley,” she said. “We cannot take this support for granted. We must defend ourselves, we must inform our representatives of the congress how important it is and encourage them to reach out and defend what is right in science. And science can only be carried out with appropriate federal funding. »»
An engineering student, Negar Morshedian, who directs the awareness of the Society of Women Engineers of the campus, expressed her reluctance to speak on Friday for fear of remuneration. However, she felt obliged to do so by concern for future generations of scientists and engineers, the students she and the members of the company supervised. These include first generation students and “girls who have never considered engineering,” she said, but prosperous in UC Berkeley.
“In a few years, these children will be … standing exactly … where I’m right now,” said Morshedian. “The way things happen, they will enter a workforce, a world that has less accessible and less accessible research and education opportunities. With our efforts, with our plea, it will not become a reality. »»
Many in the crowd played signs highlighting the role that basic research has played in our lives: “Do you have polio?” Me neither. Science FTW (for the world) “and” fund science as your life depended on it. “Other signages have addressed some of the proven scientific advantages of research that the current administration has targeted:” Vaccines work. Climate change is real.
David JX González, assistant professor of environmental health sciences at Berkeley’s School of Public Health, addressed these questions in his remarks. González, who studies the effects on the health of climate change and the polluting industries that harm communities, mentioned recent fires in Los Angeles and said that it was impossible to challenge the fact that disasters are becoming more and more dangerous and more expensive, especially in vulnerable communities and among marginalized populations.
Glenn Ramit for UC Berkeley
“We need science to learn, when disasters like forest fires occur, how to protect people,” González told the crowd. “If we cannot study forest fires when they occur, more people will be injured when these disasters inevitably come back.”
He quoted research that he and his colleagues do directly who directly influence political decision -makers to protect communities nationally. Any interference from the federal government, he said, will have “real costs for real people”.
“We are here in Cal … today because we believe in our mission to promote long -term positive societal impacts,” said Emily Ozer, professor of community health sciences and director of the Institute of Human Development. “Let us leave together at this historic moment, get up to support the science and the communities that we serve. We are the ones we expect.