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A SCIENCE PROTEST OFFERS INSIGHT INTO THE SCIENCE OF PROTESTING  
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Dan Vergano
March 12, 2025
Scientific American
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_ The most important people may not be on the stage but in the
audience. Without social media, a big national march connected
activists and culminated the protest. “Nowadays ... protest becomes
the beginning of a movement rather than the end.” _

A protestor at the 'Stand for Science' event in Washington D.C.,
photo: Dan Vergano

 

WASHINGTON, D.C.—The crowd streamed down from subways and sidewalks
to the Lincoln Memorial, carrying signs on a bright, chilly day.

It marched for science. During the March 7 “Stand Up for Science”
protest in Washington, D.C., one of many nationwide
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including in Chicago, Philadelphia and other U.S. and overseas cities,
the crowd rallied “to defend science as a public good
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social, political, and economic progress,” according to the
organizers’ policy goals. Whether the gathering at the Lincoln
Memorial represented the start of a bigger movement or a mere gesture
in a nation turning its back
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science hung in the air, undecided, as the songs and speeches began.

The crowd brandished signs that were equal parts nerdy, clever and
full of outrage. Speakers ranging from former National Institutes of
Health chief Francis Collins to TV icon Bill Nye (and even
astronomer Phil Plait
[[link removed]], who writes a
column for _Scientific American_) spoke to the crowd, which consisted
of a few thousand people on that Friday afternoon. They condemned the
mass firings, extreme budget cuts and shuttered safety panels
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have been the result of actions undertaken at federal agencies since
January by the Trump administration
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its chainsaw-brandishing vizier Elon Musk. “We have a job to do,”
said Atul Gawande, author, surgeon and former assistant administrator
of global health at the United States Agency for International
Development (USAID). “We must bear witness to the truth. We must
bear witness to the damage.”

Yet the most important people at the protest may not have been on the
stage but in the audience. People like Sara Rouhi, who works in
research publishing and is a co-author of the Declaration to Defend
Research against U.S. Government Censorship
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steadily traversed the crowd, QR-coded sign and shirt at the ready.

“We’re trying to organize people across the board to push back,”
said Rouhi, who added that the group behind the declaration has signed
up 3,000 supporters so far. It’s looking to combine forces with
organizations like the Union of Concerned Scientists
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Rescue Project’s effort to collect and curate U.S. government
data erased from public view
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the Trump administration.

That kind of activism, mobilizing people to act, is the real business
at a protest, says American University sociologist Dana Fisher, author
of _American Resistance: From the Women’s March to the Blue Wave_.
“The big point of protests is to channel outrage into something
else,” Fisher said. “Give people a sense of identity and
engagement that’s longer-term and more embedded in a movement than
just showing up and holding a sign, right?”

Whether the protest marks the start of an effective resistance to
Trump’s moves starts with the crowd, then, not the speakers. It was
refreshing, though, to hear Collins
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politically adroit during his tenure as NIH chief that he mostly
avoided
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nonsense from Trump—criticize pharmaceutical companies for not
speaking out against moves to slash research spending. (Collins, a
guitarist, also played a science-tinged version of the folk song
“All the Good People” as the crowd sang along.)

In the U.S., protests have shifted substantially since the 1970s.
Decades ago massive organizing preceded massive protests. Without
social media, people weren’t centrally connected, so local groups
needed to decide to organize together and march on Washington, D.C.
Everything from renting buses to signing people up for those seats
took work that formed the glue that connected activists and culminated
in the protest.

“Nowadays it’s really very different. Protest becomes the
beginning of a movement rather than the end,” says Fisher, who added
that social media speeds organizing. The Women’s March in 2017, for
example—the largest single-day protest
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U.S. history—was a harbinger of a “blue wave” election a year
later that gave the Democrats control of the U.S. House of
Representatives. That march channeled the outrage that many people
felt over Trump’s behavior in his first term in office and turned it
into activism and engagement that led to the highest midterm voter
turnout since 1914
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“There’s a right way and a wrong way to do protests, especially
protests as a form of resistance,” Fisher said. The 2018 “March
for Our Lives
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organized by students after 17 people were killed at Marjory Stoneman
Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., that year, brought hundreds of
thousands of people to hundreds of events that often featured
celebrities and bands. But while it led to record youth voter
registrations
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played a role in the short-lived ban on rifle bump stocks
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last year by the U.S. Supreme Court in a fit of gun-fetishizing
bunkum
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any bigger movement to end gun violence is on its back foot
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the Trump era. In the 2024 U.S. election, younger men’s voting
shifted
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Trump even though they came of age in the March for Our Lives era of
school lockdowns and continued mass shootings
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such as the 2022 murder of 19 schoolchildren and two teachers in
Uvalde, Tex.

Scientists and their supporters now face a similar test. In its first
weeks, the Trump administration has targeted the U.S. scientific
enterprise
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the culmination of decades of attacks
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scientists
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panels
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officials
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Trump
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“It’s personal this time,” says Fisher, who is no longer able to
fund one researcher that she had supported because of the recent cuts
and still funds three others with federal grants. “I work with a
number of colleagues who believe they are on lists, who may be
fired.” Her team surveyed the protest
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a first protest for about 22 percent of participants. It was also a
highly educated crowd; 37 percent of people reported that they had a
Ph.D., M.D. or J.D. Only in Washington, D.C.

Today Stand Up for Science stands at a crossroads. Organized
mainly by graduate students
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the protests could mark a wider start of scientific resistance to the
“authoritarian offensive
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as Harvard University political scientist Steven Levitsky described
the actions of the new Trump administration in an Intelligencer
interview. But that’s only if people in the crowd do more than hold
signs and sing songs. They should join local community groups or
advocacy groups, Fisher said, or a data-recovery effort like the Data
Rescue Project. Even organizing a book club is a good thing, she says.
Only if the people protesting organize and draw in more people to
effectively resist Trump’s moves will all the signs and singing
matter. They are off to a good start: 45 percent of people sampled by
Fisher and her colleagues said that they had contacted an elected
official in the last year.

Rouhi said she is just getting started. “This can’t be the end,”
she said of the protests. “If it’s the end, it’s end for all of
us.”

_DAN VERGANO
[[link removed]] is senior
opinion editor at Scientific American, where he writes the weekly
column Argonaut. He has previously written for Grid News, BuzzFeed
News, National Geographic and USA Today. He is chair of the New
Horizons committee for the Council for the Advancement of Science
Writing and a journalism award judge for both the American Association
for the Advancement of Science and the U.S. National Academies of
Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine._

_This article was edited by Jeanna Bryner. JEANNA BRYNER is interim
editor in chief of Scientific American. Previously she was editor in
chief of Live Science and, prior to that, an editor at
Scholastic's Science World magazine. Bryner has an English degree
from Salisbury University, a master's degree in biogeochemistry and
environmental sciences from the University of Maryland and a graduate
science journalism degree from New York University. She has worked as
a biologist in Florida, where she monitored wetlands and did field
surveys for endangered species, including the gorgeous Florida Scrub
Jay. She also received an ocean sciences journalism fellowship from
the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. She is a firm believer that
science is for everyone and that just about everything can be viewed
through the lens of science._

_Founded 1845, Scientific American
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is the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States. It
has published articles by more than 200 Nobel Prize winners._

_Scientific American
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covers the most important and exciting research, ideas and knowledge
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