An unlikely group of protesters will take to the streets of Trenton later this month: Scientists.

Students, teachers, doctors, engineers and scientists representing all fields will gather at the Trenton War Memorial on Saturday, April 22 - Earth Day - to express their deep-seated terror that centuries of accumulated knowledge are being sacrificed on the altar of partisan politics.

Among the leaders of the march are Matthew Buckley, a professor at Rutgers whose web page describes him as a theoretical physicist researching particle physics and the nature of dark matter, and Elizabeth Meyer, a founder and lead organizer of the Women's March on New Jersey in January.

The city's version is one of an estimated 280 satellite events corresponding to the national March for Science that will be taking place the same day in Washington, D.C.

More than 1 million people have already expressed support online for the national effort's guiding principles, including most importantly respect for "robustly funded and communicated science as a pillar of human freedom and prosperity."

Since our founding as a nation, the rest of the world has looked to the United States as a leader in scientific progress in all fields: medicine, technology, innovation.

Breakthroughs in the treatment of deadly disease and in the exploration of space have come from our nation's laboratories - many of them in New Jersey.

Science has given us vaccines against smallpox, engineered the interstate highway system and brought us the technology to heat and cool our living spaces.

The war on science is not new, sadly, but its warriors have been empowered by their chief spokesman, President Donald Trump, whose disdain for the realities of climate change - a Chinese hoax, he declared - was well documented, and likely helped drive him into office.

Within days or weeks of Trump's inauguration, all references to climate change had been banished from the official White House website, and the terms "climate change" and "global warning" were forbidden at the Department of Energy.

Gag orders went into place at the Department of Environmental Protection, the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture, and proposed budget cuts to the EPA and the National Institutes of Health further threatened to further undermine scientists' ability to carry out their worthy missions.

One of the most frightening headlines we've ever read ran in The Atlantic Magazine last month: "Scientists Brace for a Lost Generation in American Science."

As a state, as a country, we should be celebrating science, not censoring it.

This is not, in the end, a partisan issue. It's a humanitarian issue. Without solid support for evidence-based scientific principles, we might as well crawl back into our caves, huddle around the fire and curse the darkness around us.

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