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?
ReplyDelete