Stand Up for Science: In Defense of Curiosity

It should come as no surprise that a President who lies constantly wants to censor science. If you have no regard for the truth, then it follows that you should have no interest in a system designed to reveal that truth.

This is, at its core, a failure of curiosity. You see it when the President calls an endangered species of smelt in California a “worthless fish.” You see it when he calls Lesotho a country “nobody has ever heard of.” The President, and the administration he has erected around himself, lack the humility required to take an interest in understanding the world around them.

Yet curiosity is the bedrock of modern society. None of the science and technology that make our lives easier today would be possible without curious people. People willing to try something new. People willing to question authority. People willing, eager even, to be wrong — if it means getting closer to learning some beautiful and irreplaceable new fact about our world.

Curious tinkerers learned to tame fire, to track the movement of stars, to prod and cajole a few humble species of grass — corn, rice, wheat — into filling the bellies of billions of humans with easy calories. Curious tinkerers invented paper, the airplane, the smallpox vaccine and the internet. Other tinkerers built on these discoveries, adding layers and texture and depth.

And while we’ve always been a curious species, in the last 200 years we have built a gleaming curiosity machine that ingests knowledge and patterns and spins out wonders at an increasingly breakneck speed. The mechanics that nurture this machine — scientists, inventors, engineers – have pushed the boundaries of knowledge faster and farther than ever before. We have eradicated diseases and doubled our life expectancy. We have traveled to the moon. And we have learned foundational truths about the nature of our universe, from the birth of stars to the complicated billiards of the subatomic world.

The U.S. system of science, for all its flaws, has led the way in creating the conditions under which the curiosity machine can flourish. We have prioritized the funding of basic and applied research. We have established leading institutions for cultivating new generations of curious tinkerers. Most important, at our best, we have created a culture of academic freedom where scientists can follow their nose in the pursuit of new knowledge wherever it may lead, even if it’s surprising or inconvenient.

Now, suddenly and for no discernible reason, we find ourselves throwing wrenches into the curiosity machine. In the last month, universities have stopped recruiting students. Research funding has been cut. Thousands of federal scientists have been fired, and terabytes of data, painstakingly collected and compiled at taxpayer expense, have been inexplicably deleted.

In Boulder, a hundred researchers from NOAA were fired. Across Colorado, scientists who have been working on the National Nature Assessment for the last year, including myself, woke up one morning and saw that the entire initiative had been canceled. Most troubling, free inquiry, the fuel powering the curiosity machine, is being throttled. I have been in meetings with other scientists speaking in hushed tones about whether they should censor themselves to protect their student researchers. Climate scientists are scared to mention climate change in federal grants. Whole lists of banned words are being circulated among researchers — like we’re Winston Smith trying to evade the Thought Police in 1984.

This is not an environment in which the fruits of the curiosity machine thrive. And for what purpose? Because institutions that aim to speak impartial truth grounded in curiosity about the world are either irrelevant or downright threatening to a group of people with no sense of wonder. People don’t like to encourage the birth of ideas when they see themselves as the beginning and end of truth.

This has consequences. Revolutions in medicine, neuroscience, engineering and agriculture, hinge on the accumulation of small discoveries across the web of scientific knowledge. Penicillin, a drug that has saved millions of lives, was discovered by a single scientist who noticed something odd growing on a plate of bacteria. The development of Ozempic to treat diabetes can trace its roots to basic natural history knowledge about how frequently lizards in Arizona eat. Astronomers analyzing the patterns of radio waves are the reason we have wifi today.

And we get all this at quite a bargain. The National Science Foundation, the engine of basic research in the most scientifically productive country in the history of the world, costs about three-fourths of a single aircraft carrier every year. The National Institutes of Health, which sets the global standard in funding and developing new treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s and other diseases, could be funded singlehandedly by one auto salesman and rocket aficionado for seven years...and he would still be a billionaire after that. If we put barriers around what we’re allowed to study, cut off funding sources and fire scientists, then we close ourselves off from new possibilities.

But beyond strangling our scientific productivity, censoring and dismantling science is simply counter to the impulses that motivate and enrich the human experience. People — at least most of us — have a fundamental need to discover.

Attend a science fair, and you’ll see that curiosity on the faces of children prodding their world for answers. Travel to Ukraine and see the biodiversity monitors I work with, who are dedicated to protecting and understanding the birds and trees of their country even in the midst of a war. Meet any of the many citizen scientists in Colorado without an academic pedigree who have dedicated their free time to developing expertise in weather monitoring, mushroom identification or the 3D structure of proteins simply because they find it interesting.

The value of science to people is seen through the earnest commitment of people to science. The current effort to dismantle science is degrading that value.

And so I call on the new administration to end government censorship of science, restore public access to scientific information, reinstate researchers fired without cause, and mandate legal safeguards against political interference in the integrity of science. No more banned words! No more throwing wrenches at our curiosity machine.

But even more important, I call on professional scientists, as well as those who simply enjoy learning about the world, to share your curiosity with others – especially people with whom you might disagree. While it might not land with the addled minds of the people running the current administration, the everyday people to whom that government is ultimately beholden are fundamentally curious people. The antidote to the partisanship dividing our country around the importance of scientific institutions is re-engaging, together, with the sense of wonder that is the reason these institutions exist.

Tonight you can sit outside and watch rocks the size of a penny exploding miles over your head as the Earth plows through space dust. You can visit Morrison and see the clear footprints of dinosaurs, millions of years old, ambling up the ridge. Or you can walk to the dry ponds on top of North Table and watch as chorus frogs emerge from the mud like little buried stones with the first warm rains of spring. These beautiful, indelible moments are what make life worth living. And the knowledge that science affords to us makes those experiences all the richer. It’s a magical world, and we deserve the unbridled freedom to be dazzled by it.

Bradley Allf is a postdoctoral Researcher at Colorado State University. He delivered this speech at the Stand Up for Science rally at the State Capitol Building on March 7.

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