I’m marching for science today because I’m mad. Yes, I’m a mad scientist. I became a scientist because I wanted to help people. In my career I’ve researched gene therapy, how to engineer new antibiotics and how to make better cancer drugs. But now what I do and care about has come under attack. I’m mad at politicians for hijacking science for their own selfish interests.

I know that many people just love debating whether science should be political or not. But personally I’m not really too interested in spinning my wheels in this pyrrhic war. Science has always been political ever since we first used it to show that the Earth orbits the sun. And right now, we haven’t any time to waste.

The real question is who does science serve? When politicians are left alone to attack science with impunity, the answer is that science serves only the most elite, and is obstructed from helping all of us. As a result, real people get hurt, particularly our most vulnerable and marginalized communities. Look at lead poisoning in Flint. Or Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy. Or the Dakota Access pipeline. Or the rising seas of Tuvalu. Or the Ebola outbreak in west Africa. Or the measles outbreak in Europe.

I’m marching because science needs to take a stand and fight for justice with the communities who are harmed by bad science policy.

And while we’re here marching, we scientists need to recognize that we are extremely late – science has been under attack for a long time, not just in 2017. Our scientific community has been sitting on the sidelines watching in horror, afraid to get involved and be called biased. This strategy of ceding the floor has failed us terribly, as those with private political interests have gone ahead and polarized scientific issues anyway.

I’m marching because democracy is not a spectator sport. Not even for scientists.

Young people get this. Many of my young scientist friends are reacting to the assault on science by leaving the lab to work in communications, policy and advocacy. And they’re organizing the March for Science. Our generation is standing up right now because we are the ones who will suffer the most from bad science policy decisions.

It’s our cities that will be wrecked by climate change, it’s our bodies that will suffer from the dismantling of public health, it’s our jobs that will be lost to automation. We’re leading the fight because our heads are on the chopping block.

It’s also significant that the science justice movement is being led by the people. The march was started by strangers connecting over social media and has bloomed into a global movement, 600 cities and hundreds of thousands of participants strong.

In the past, the institutional structure of science advocacy has created a conservative bystander culture that has failed science abysmally. We need grassroots activists unfettered by protocol, and not content to just do better “outreach”. We need science advocates who can speak truth to power, organize in our communities, and to challenge problematic power structures with action. Scientists in the streets is a sign that politics as usual cannot continue.

And as we march for science, we are also defending the people who do science, because they’re under attack. Scientists are being gagged from speaking about research like climate change online (at the National Park Service and Department of Energy), and being banned from the country because of their background. This is especially troubling given our history of erecting institutional barriers that prevent prevent certain groups from participating in science (see Hidden Figures, Rosalind Franklin, or Henrietta Lacks).

The attacks hit close to home for me because I was born in a refugee camp. I am only a scientist today because I benefited from pro-refugee policies – why doesn’t the future generation have the same chance I did? When scientists face barriers, they can’t do their work in service of the public good, so we all suffer. That’s why the fight to stand up for scientists and science itself are one and the same.



We’ve been speaking to many historians and seasoned scientists, and they all tell us: the March for Science is poised to be the largest science event in history. That’s poignant because, right now, changing history is absolutely what is required.

We need another scientific revolution. The first scientific revolution transformed our understanding of the natural world and changed civilization as we know it, making us healthier, happier and more productive. Today, we have huge scientific challenges ahead such as climate change, genetic engineering and automation. And yet we are stuck with the handbrake on and unable to act effectively as a society, because a few privileged people are blocking progress at the expense of the rest of us.

That’s why we urgently need to transform the relationship between science, politics and society: our collective futures depend on it. That’s why I’m marching, because we need to change history. It’s time to join the revolution.

Lucky Tran is a science communicator based in New York, and holds a PhD in molecular biology from the University of Cambridge. He is also on the steering committee of the March for Science. These words and views are his own.