On Earth Day, hundreds of thousands of scientists got together and did something scientists rarely do — they spoke with one unified voice. That voice said science is vitally important to the health of our communities, the strength of our economies, the security of our nations and the soundness of our policies, and we should increase, not cut, public investment in research.
In a group of professional skeptics, such unanimous agreement as was on display in 600 cities around the world is extremely rare, and I’m so glad some of these voices were Elsevier employees.
The message seems to have been heard on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, where the recent budget resolution included $2 billion in additional funding for the National Institutes of Health.
It wasn't all serious business, though; we had plenty of fun. Our Cell Press colleagues in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had T-shirts printed up and a sign-making party.
After making some brilliant signs (see below), they joined the Harvard & MIT group for the march to Boston Common. One marcher of unknown affiliation was a woman, several months pregnant, who wore a shirt that read "Meiosis: results may vary."
In Washington, DC, Ann Gabriel and I marched with some colleagues from the Copyright Clearance Center who had printed stickers that read "Facts Matter." Then I set out to document the more obscure and nerdy messages on display.
In contrast to protests you may have heard about involving black-clad youth throwing bricks, this event skewed significantly towards professional scientists, not professional protestors.
Speaking of Cell Press, how cool are these t-shirts! I want one!
These folks were doing some science education about Maxwell's Equations, which explain the relationship between electricity and magnetism.
This woman brought some science data to the science march, LIKE A SCIENCE BOSS.
Of course we had to have a Pluto Truther in the crowd.
Overall, this woman best summed up the feelings of the crowd.
Read more about Cell Press in the science marches on the CrossTalk blog.
Dr. William Gunn is the Director of Scholarly Communications for Elsevier, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Dr. Gunn attended Tulane University as a Louisiana Board of Regents Fellow, receiving his PhD in Biomedical Science from the Center for Gene Therapy at Tulane University in 2008. His research involved dissecting the molecular mechanism of bone metastasis in multiple myeloma. Frustrated with the inefficiencies of the modern research process, he left academia and established the biology program at Genalyte, a novel diagnostics startup. He subsequently joined Mendeley to make research more open and impactful and now works at Elsevier on altmetrics, reproducibility and open access.