A Radical ’70s-Era Group Is Relaunching to Help Scientists Get Political Under Trump
By Rebecca Onion,
Slate
| 08. 29. 2018
Advocates of science are in a bad place right now. Some days, in this Second Year of Trump, scientism—a blanket defense of science as a virtuous and almost holy exercise of objectivity and rationality—feels like the only natural response to the rising darkness. But, tempting as it might be, cheerleading for capital-S “Science” can’t be the answer. Science—as historians of science and practitioners of science and technology studies readily argue—is not an objective refuge; it’s shaped by politics just like any other human endeavor. How can we acknowledge that fact while still arguing for science’s authority and value?
From 1969 through 1989, the group Science for the People tried to do just that. Its members took “science has a politics” as a philosophical starting point and then used that understanding to push for radical change. Early on, the group protested weapons labs. Members worked with the Black Panther Party, helping with their free health clinics, and with the Young Lords Organization, assisting them in offering free lead-poisoning testing services. They sent equipment to Vietnamese scientists and helped Midwestern farmworkers...
Related Articles
By Dan Falk, Nautilus | 08.20.2026
The pseudoscience of eugenics, founded on the mistaken notion that nature envisions some “right” combination of genes, and that selective breeding can improve the human race, is making a comeback. While the heyday of eugenics was a century ago, the...
By Claire Robinson and Jonathan Matthews, Guest Contributors
| 08.25.2026
This is an excerpt of an article originally published on August 1, 2026 at GMWatch.
A six-year-old girl has died in a gene editing gene therapy trial in China that went wrong, the journal Science reports. Seven days after the girl's medical team infused trillions of viruses carrying the recipe for the gene editing tool – in this case a base editor – into her spinal fluid, she died of a severe immune reaction linked to the therapy.
Just...
By Lillian Kollross , Ms. Magazine | 07.25.2026
In 1937, the U.S. began one of the largest sterilization campaigns in modern history in its colony of Puerto Rico. By the 1970s, one-third of all Puerto Rican women of childbearing age had been sterilized, most without being properly informed...
By Brendan Borrell, Science | 07.23.2026
The young girl tugged on her mother’s hand as they pressed through the doors of the hospital in Shanghai. She was 6 years old, bouncing along in a pink jacket and blue pants decorated with cartoon bears. Behind them, her...
