Sarah Braverman

Jess Phoenix was standing at the edge of an active volcano, trying to get some work done.

Phoenix, then 26, had just begun her career as a volcanologist, a scientist who studies volcanoes to better understand how they erupt. At the edge of the Kilauea volcano in Hawaii — one of the world’s most active peaks — she peered down into the bubbling lava lake, which measured 1,800 degrees. She and her team were installing the volcano’s first webcam, a dangerous mission that took them just a few hundred feet from the sputtering, searing-hot lava.



As she worked, the more senior scientist sized her up. “You know there’s a very real possibility that we could die, right?”



She knew. This is what she’d signed up for. “OK,” he said. “Hand me the wrench.”



Given her line of work, Phoenix is no stranger to treacherous situations. Now, she’s embarking on a different kind of risk: running for office.



In April, Phoenix, now 35, launched her campaign for Congress, in California’s 25th congressional district. If she wins her Democratic primary, she’ll challenge Rep. Steve Knight, a Republican who has called his state’s attempts to thwart climate change “rash.” Her campaign, she says, was a reaction to President Donald Trump’s election and how his administration views science: his decision to pull out of the landmark Paris climate agreement, his theory that climate change is a hoax, his unsubstantiated belief that humans are born with a “finite” amount of energy.

“When you have somebody who has managed to get hold of the highest office in the land who doesn’t have basic understanding of science…” she trails off, seemingly still in disbelief. “If we have a leader of one of the strongest countries on the planet saying, ‘Yeah, you know what? We don’t have to deal with this whole climate change thing. Drill, baby, drill,’ that’s incredibly problematic for us as not just an American society, but as a global society.”



Since Trump took office, the normally apolitical scientific community has risen up in opposition to his administration. In April, thousands converged in Washington for the March for Science, and many more protested at satellite events around the world. Since January, the science activism nonprofit 314 Action — which is named for the first three digits of mathematical constant pi — has recruited more than 5,000 scientists interested in running for office. They expect to launch eight congressional campaigns this cycle, and hundreds more at the state and local levels.

"There has been more of a push for scientific thinkers, and even active scientists, to get more engaged politically, whether that means running for office or just being more outspoken than they were historically," says Cara Santa Maria, a science journalist who spoke at the Washington March for Science. "We're living in a post-truth era, as they say, and so I think a lot of scientific thinkers are realizing how important it is to stand up for evidence."

A protester at the Washington March for Science in April. Getty Images

Shaughnessy Naughton, a chemist who founded 314 Action last year, says that in the past few months, there's been a clear spike in scientists willing to run.



"The attacks on science didn't start with the Trump administration but it certainly has been a catalyst for getting them involved in the electoral process,” she says. “What I hear from the candidates that I talk to over and over again is that ‘I no longer can just sit by and wait to be tapped for my expertise. I can't just sign another letter or polite petition. I need to actually do something.’”

Naughton was inspired to start 314 Action after she lost her race for Congress in Pennsylvania's 8th District in 2014. (She also lost her race for the same seat in 2016.) Along with its political action committee, which raises money for candidates it endorses, the group is designed to be a support system for Democratic politicians with scientific backgrounds, and a way to identify and train promising candidates.

One of those candidates is Allison Lami Sawyer, the 32-year-old co-founder of Rebellion Photonics, which developed new camera technology for detecting gas leaks on oil rigs and refineries. In 2018, she plans to run for state representative in her Houston, Texas, district, in part because of the pervading “anti-truth” culture in government. Until someone recommended her to 314 Action, she had never even considered running for office.

“I don't want to do politics. It's a miserable game,” she says. “You have to be shamelessly asking for money all the time. But, I mean, what are the other options?”

Scientists have long shied away from political activism, Naughton says, because they've considered their work to be above partisan politics. "Part of it was the view that politics was dirty and science is pure. The tendency was for scientists to just kind of put their research or the facts out there and think that the facts were going to speak for themselves."

The reality, she says, is that sometimes that research needs more explanation — and more scientists in all levels of government would facilitate that understanding.

"We look at the data, we look at the science, and we make decisions and come up with solutions that are based on facts and based on good data," says Mai Khan Tran, a pediatrician running for Congress as a Democrat in California's 39th Congressional District. "That unbiased participation is really important at a time when the political environment is so heated. The calm and the coolness of scientists are really what's needed right now."



Tran, who's 51, came to the U.S. as a refugee from Vietnam when she was 9 years old. As a pediatrician, she says, she's seen firsthand how people are affected by health care laws forged in Washington. The morning after the election, in November, her first appointment was with a little girl who had a brain tumor. Until the Affordable Care Act passed, her mom, who worked in a nail salon, couldn't afford health insurance, and the family feared what would happen if Trump, who vowed to repeal and replace the law, were elected. When Tran saw the patient and her mom that morning, she broke down. "We sat in the office and we cried together. Because I think we realized it was going to affect her life very drastically."

That was the first time she considered running for office. When the House passed the GOP bill to replace the ACA in May, she made up her mind. "If we, with our training and our background and our experience, don’t get involved and speak for truth, or science, or facts," Tran says of her fellow scientists, "others will do it for us."

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Rebecca Nelson Rebecca Nelson is a magazine writer in New York.

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