leadership roles with respect to the science mark which occurred on earth and you've heard and perhaps read all over the world you will are marching as well let's find out what started how they got involved and what made it happen in my first guest on my left is dr rob gholston who is a plasma physicist with princeton university and he's worked in the of control and nonproliferation nuclear and he's been on my show a number of times so i can verify that you are good and to my right is professor buckley and he's from rutgers university and he is one of the co organizers and founder of the march for science and trenton new jersey and next to him is nicole that sold and cock and she has been a work in the area of communication and back in education and these people we're part of a team of women's march a number of us in princeton i guess worldwide actually were inspired by this the groundswell of people that came out that day and  we heard that scientists were preparing to march after it looked like the new administration was was going to be really dismissive of the science  one of the satellite women's marches i think the one in westfield new jersey one of the smaller ones and still there are you know thousand people out there and then you know we get this news that the p a is gag orders and there's rumors that data is being taken off and you know in the american people paid for that data and my research you know i study galaxy formation in particle physics it's not it's not viewed as political but science is science and you know if people of other scientists are not being allowed to talk about their research you know that that is part and that hurts all of science and another thing i want to say actually is that i'm a professor at rutgers and like any other place science is international and we have students from all over the world and we have you know students from iran we have students from countries that these travel bans were coming out on and now we have students who can't travel and for science you have to travel you have to go internationally go to a conference and you meet new people and you can then you come back and we get students here and when you bring these smart people from the rest of the world the american students in the american professors like we get better because we had these people and that's what's made america science really really amazing over the last decades and so that was another thing that was happening right at the same time and you know i was talking to people who were directly affected and that was something that made me really really upset and felt like we had to do something so i contacted actually the woman who was the organizer and founder of the women's march in trenton and she was with meyer and she helped me out tremendously when it happened without her work wonderful i like this other researchers of the class of physics laboratory who recommended me as a potentially fiery speaker as so they reach out to me and i thought well this would be great and so i had a great time i was i got a chance scientists don't normally get this chance and my classes go five but generally speaking when i say something i don't get two thousand kids yelling back on your own a positive and i know we're not used to our staring at a parting when we're giving a lecture but i did sort of prepared my lecture to talk in my speech to talk about kind of two topics one is that how important sciences for us and how important it is for you know health and other things that how important science is for policy and so i sort of worked it out so i'd come up with some important thing that we we still wanted to learn about and so what do we need for that and i different things where we need more science and everybody's yelling back i felt like i was doing call and response and suddenly on policy it's just clear that that if you have a debate about policy if you disagree about climate science for way about some of the you know where the future is going to go what the risks are there what's the best mitigation strategy all that's complicated stuff and what you need if you disagree is more science it's not that the right answer is less science and that just seems so important very good very good and you had more than two thousand people at your march but you'd also didn't feel in trenton we got an estimate from the trenton police so we had about three thousand people there  we were pretty happy with that oh yeah and what were the messages that were delivered there i think i was told somewhere along the way in there with different interests and then they were in princeton i think we had spoken very early on in the planning and we organizing in trenton you know we were organizing in the state capital and so it was a more political statement which i don't think is a bad thing i mean science is part of the world and that makes it part of politics and if you want something changed in the world that means you have to make a political statement so we had politicians and we had governor jim florio yeah i know him and representative paul own spoke at the end but then you know we had also speaker we had a you know religious leaders speak a professor of mathematics from rucker's who is iranian and so he was speaking very personally  about being an immigrant to this country and coming from actually a country that you know had undergone a revolution in changed how they you know what was important and became a much less from the sierra club an environment new jersey and so we tried to you know science is a huge thing and we wanted to make sure that we captured as much of that as possible we had education as well and you know our educators i should say and you know we didn't cover everything there are things i wish we could have said like but we didn't get people talking about health care and that was i think the biggest gap that we can have we tried and just for one reason or another we c can get the right person and so we ended up not having that but you know as you're saying if you want to make a policy you can disagree about what should be done and what money needs to be spent and how you balance different people's opinions but you have to always know what you're going to be doing you're going to if you want to do x will happen five years from now and science doesn't give you guarantees and give the probabilities but you have to know that  what about health care was did not get mentioned that you think might have been important just things like the effect of pollution and the effect of you know what are safety and things like that the effect of climate change on health care but also just questions of you know with the health care bill the repeal of the health care bill what does that do you i mean you don't think that is science but it is you know it is a so what do you think those are the more that could have been covered well our march in princeton was slightly different we were trying to appeal to people who were maybe interested in the issue but for logistical reasons might find it more difficult to go to one of the bigger marches and so we conceived of a sort of a community education focused margin and  the first hour was we had science activities that kids could take part in and we also had speakers like rob so there was something for adults and also something for kids would be good for kids  and i i i'm sure we could've covered many more things in more detail because we only had an hour really to do this in our speakers each just had five minutes but i felt like we hit all the important marks and most important we got a huge number of people out on earth day to show solidarity with scientists to show that they support the free communication of science to show that they want you know data used to make the citizens in washington and that was really our our goal i was very impressed when i was the princeton march but i was very impressed by the diversity at the end we had kids who had good size come up to have their pictures taken with the scientists that was you had a lot of pictures taken rob and i had a sign contest that out that kids can participate in for past science prizes and so that was pretty yes well it is the think people are catching on that public health is connected to the environment which is connected to science i mean when you see that these are all interconnected and they affect your life if you look back you know there was one article i was reading about vaccines this a lot of contention about that seeings and not on using them or not using them but if anyone looks back they know that it's within a certain period in history you know recent history that many people died much younger ages because they didn't have protection from some of these diseases or else children children did not make it to adulthood childhood you know and childhood deaths were very high compared to where they are so i i told that story of my in my speech in part because it turns out that my great uncle was a medical doctor in boston in the beginning of the twentieth century and he he wrote a little autobiography that talks about going out on the ships they would have these kids the cholera epidemic or what have you and they put the kids on the ship to isolate them from everyone else and he have thanks to vaccines and so if people can't forget that and and that you know it wasn't just climate science that was sort of being dismissed by this administration there's been a movement for a long time to also dismiss that vaccinations that are really childhood about x nations and you know a few other things like that but  one thing i want to say about it because here you know there is this movement you know the anti tax movement and things like that and you know i think the people who are blood that you know have been demonstrated to be have have been acting in extreme bad faith and you know we're taking money from people who are profiting off of non vaccine pseudoscience but and mean as a scientist i'm i didn't do this march to say the rest of the world should just turn to scientists and ask us what should we do and  say that's not the point and you can see that problem where with vaccines where people are scared and about things and there i believe there is a an answer that science tells us what the right thing to do is but we have to engage with people and make sure that they understand why you have to make this choice we can tell you what to our best knowledge what will happen but then you have to and we live in a democracy people have to vote on what needs to be done with climate  vaccine with public health because we're asking people to give resources or or do things themselves and i think that was part of what i hope will come out of this is scientists getting out in the world and you know it's not that we haven't been doing this  we need to do it more we need to convince more people using on a science that this is what we think is going to happen with whatever the issue is that we're studying and this is why we suggest you do whatever needs to be done i actually didn't take bought this this and we work on we have hypotheses for how things are working and we can say with some pretty high probability that if you don't actually vaccinate you know millions of people you go these are these are coming back and we can say those facts but it's up to society to make the decisions and so is it so we have this kind of distinguish ourselves from decision makers or even recommending courses of action our job is to say as you were saying what's likely to happen if you do one of the goals of the march for science movement is to kind of put scientists out in public more and you may think you already are but but science is complicated especially astrophysics  physics and so the more scientists and the people who support them work to better communicate their what they're doing the better we all will be because then people will have more faith in the work they're doing and they will see it's value i mean in communicating science is a separate skill from doing science unfortunately and more fortunately i don't know  yeah i mean it's is it is difficult to do it is difficult to condense down what you're doing and why it is interesting down to something that you can explain but you know like i do science because i think it's really cool and hopefully other people can can appreciate that and understand not just why why should be supporting american science you know because of economics and because you know but also because like gives a way for the country to do really well yes and it's the history is very important because i can remember when they didn't have the polio vaccine and it seems to me i was just as you were talking that i was a very very young teacher in the high school in new york and they were giving maybe it wasn't a high school but they were going to give the polio shot for the first time and i went down there and i wanted to and i went down there and got it because we saw kids where i lived who got polio and i saw what happened to them so you knew that was something that you were afraid of and we also had all of the other things that you now have vaccines for my brother it would get in the measles i would get the measles my brother would get the mumps i would get the mugs my father got too m for us and scarlet fever we had that and we had a lot of these things and if children could survive it they would they would die and so we pressure we appreciated these vaccines we thought you know we had the stories i had story about a cousin i never knew she was much older i have a picture up with someone saved a picture of this little girl with blond curls and that was her and she died from one of those but  called favor something that was this family legend you would hear about the child that died and and we consider that unusual now and that's because we've been able to find ways to build resistance to these contagious diseases so why are we fighting it you know why aren't we saying yeah a let's keep going you know oh one thing i also want to say about that about you know medical advances in particular i mean it's sometimes called that i guess the red queen teresa like no matter what you do you know as we you know develop new antibiotics and new ways to cure particular diseases you know they those diseases of all and we have to keep up and you know america has this amazing research  program i don't know if people who are not familiar with it really appreciate just like if you go to america science is where people of the rest of the world come to to study to do the best science and that took decades to build and because of that we have a chance of keeping up with the evolving dangers that we that we face but if you cut science like when people are talking about a cut to the end i or cut to the p a or cuts to the department of energy which is where my funding would come from that doesn't really directly affect my paycheck i'm paid for by you know by record university the people in new jersey but what it does do is it prevents me from hiring student and paying them and prevents me from hiring postdocs people have gotten her ph d and are doing research before they become professors and those are the people who are doing amazing research now and will be doing missing research in five years and ten years and twenty years and so if in the next four years we're not paying for those people to study and work and develop new science then lose that we lose that generation because they have to go do something else and they won't come back when the if and when the money turns back on and so that was one of the things that scared me so much when i say you know this is why this has to be an issue right now because you can't just stop for a couple of years and start up again because you lose what we have and it will take a very long time to get back so there's generational and intergenerational issues there are political issues there are public health issues there are many many issues that should concern and affect everyone around us and yet for some reason they're being brushed with the tar brush i saw something this morning by the way about various environmental regulations that are being turned back now since the first hundred days of the administration and some of them have to do with energy having to do with the keystone pipeline and other issues where the water becomes contaminated now they're allowing those companies to let their contamination go into the water so they're there actually allowing things to degrade so it's also not only public health but connected also to energy and a lot of it having to do with the oil and gas industries and then of course the coal industry where perhaps you know there was a reason why the jobs and the industry declined it there were reasons part of it is that many things were sent many jobs were s another part of it was that they found that coal with people living in these areas where they burn coal it was day damaging to their respiratory system and so that's why we moved away from coal into less jersey cut our we never had a lot of coal in the last couple decades as our power source but we cut it but significantly i think by half or in the last decade or so and just because natural gas is much cheaper and it works out fortunately natural gas is a emits less greenhouse gases not perfect but that that helps so least in the short term and long term i think we still need to do more and again there are jobs there i mean there are jobs and solar energy there are far more than there are actually in coal and one of the things i should say is that you know we did this march and we don't want to be the end of things ok that is the next step i want to take with all of us here what is the next you know you're saying we don't want to just turn out and go away and that's what the accusation was against them the occupy wall street group they said well they were there for a while and then they went away ok and it's not actually something to blame them about because after all they were living in tents in central park and that had to have its limitations but what do you see the next step to be and where do you think we want to go to say in five years so let's start with that what's the  next step now that the march is over well we want to we want to keep the forward momentum going and keep people energized to stay in touch with their representatives whether they're local or national so they can be heard on on issues where science could be used to make policy i think one thing that concerns me there are all of these other smaller regulations that are either coming through executive orders or through the agencies that manage them like the e p a where they are rolling back and vironment regulations and i'm sure that it's going to affect health care too it's going to affect all different industries and those are going to be a lot quieter they're going to happen more quietly and i'm not sure actually what the best way is to to deal with that that i think it's going to demand all of us stay on top of what's happening in washington and just be ready to say over and over again what we want because the time for just simply voting and you know hoping that that's adequate for being we have less than a minute now so does anyone just want to have a last word one last word oh i'll say that you know building off with nicole saying was you know we want to continue to do something and make it turns out the state has particular vulnerabilities that we should address and we can address as a state and so you can go to our web site and you mark for science dot com and find our action plan and their suggestions we can live in the twenty first century and beyond thank you thank you