Via Chemical and Engineering News, this letter:
ACS Comment on supporting science
The March 24, 2025, edition of C&EN had a report by Wayne E. Jones Jr., chair of the American Chemical Society Board of Directors (page 41). Dr. Jones, you are complicit in your silence: the elephant in the room is Donald J. Trump. The president has single-handedly destroyed one of the greatest science enterprises the world has ever seen. I am reminded of Germany circa the 1930s. Things are not OK.
I have been a member of ACS for nearly 50 years. It seems that the organization is a clique whose mission is to give one another awards, ensure promotion and tenure, and receive grants. Thanks to the attack on science by this administration, the clique is about to crumble. Your colleagues will lose grant money, their students won’t get jobs or even graduate, the international postdocs you thought you would hire won’t get visas, and universities won’t get funding for overhead. In short, the research environment in the US is in shambles.
Jones’s report is spineless—unwilling to take a risk, timid—and irrelevant. If ACS won’t stand up now, it should stand down.
Larry LewisNiskayuna, New York
Well, I can't say I disagree much.
When a political party is specifically going after you, you no longer have the option of being non-partisan.
ReplyDeleteThe ACS folks can keep writing 7-figure paychecks for themselves right?
ReplyDeleteHow many ACS members very recently received an e-mail that was titled „ Workshop: Your Guide to Landing a Government Job in Chemistry“? None of the announced moderators appear to be government employees. There was no response to my asking about those circumstances.
ReplyDeleteThis is the best example that I can think of the ACS being unwilling to confront reality. Maybe trumpf has somehow designated a de-facto chairperson to the ACS Politburo?
Yeah I read that and thought ...... meanwhile on Planet ACS..... The author of the letter to the editor is from Niskayuna, in other words likely they're GE staff. Entry to that facility is highly regulated by the federal gov't so I hope he still has a job, let alone not in Guatanamo.
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