Scientists organize, unite to resist threats to US research

Isako Di Tomassi and Alex Lando worked across the hall from each other in a United States Department of Agriculture building on Cornell University’s campus. At least they did until their advisers were abruptly fired in February.Their advisers were fired as a part of the upheaval in federal science funding across the country. Di Tomassi and Lando were working with USDA staff as part of their PhD’s in the School of Integrative Plant Science at Cornell.

Since he took office, the Trump administration has cut science funding and terminated jobs in what some are calling an assault on science. 

“Even though on paper, it looks like one scientist is being fired, the 10 people that work for them are theoretically also being fired,” Lando told Scienceline.  

Di Tomassi posted about the federal employee terminations that led to her adviser’s firing on the neighborhood social media site Nextdoor and was surprised by the response. 

“There were a lot of responses. There were like 250 comments or something bonkers like that,” Di Tomassi said. “There were comments that were like, ‘were these people even hired? What were they even doing? What were they even working on?’”

That was an “oh, crap” moment for Di Tomassi as she realized people in Ithaca didn’t understand the research happening in their own town. 

While they figured out how to continue their PhD research, Di Tomassi and Lando also felt called to do something on a larger scale.

After a meeting of the Cornell Advancing Science and Policy Club, or ASAP, the group decided to formally organize the McClintock Letters. The plan was to help scientists, at any stage of their career but especially early career scientists, write and publish letters to the editor in their local papers about their work. 

The McClintock Letters are named for Cornell graduate Barbara McClintock, the first U.S. woman to win an unshared Nobel Prize in the sciences in 1983. Between her contributions to maize model systems, her willingness to speak out about being a woman in STEM and her support for the establishment of the National Science Foundation, she was the “perfect figurehead” for this project, the description page reads. 

“At its core, it is a science communication project,” Di Tomassi said. “We are getting federally funded researchers across the country to reach out to the public to say, ‘Hey, your tax dollars go to this really cool work that I do.’”

Organizers used society listservs to get their message in front of as many people as possible.

“All of us emailed out every single society — like Philly Herpetological Society, … and the Catholic Scientists [Society], … the paleontology and museum specimen organization,” said Hannah Frank, a PhD candidate in the School of Integrative Plant Science and member of ASAP. 

For the most part, the response from scientific organizations was positive, Di Tomassi said, but there were a handful of organizations that said they couldn’t share the initiative with their members because it was too political. 

“We were like, ‘okay, but your membership is made of scientists, and it’s really messed up that you think it’s too political to ask your scientists to talk about science to the public,’” Di Tomassi said. 

The campaign published about 200 letters over the summer. The crew organized a series of workshops to help people write about science effectively and to guide them through the letter to the editor process. 

“Scientists don’t necessarily have to learn science communication,” Lando said. “Many people feel forced into it because of what’s going on with science. They feel as though now they have no choice but to communicate what they’re doing if they want to get funding. And so science communication platforms are even more critical.”

As she edited articles from other scientists, Frank was pleasantly surprised with how well they were written. People generally stayed away from jargon, she said, and many people added a call to action at the end of their pieces. 

“Unfortunately, the existence of a lot of people in the scientific community, the existence of just a lot of people in the world right now, is radical and polarizing, unfortunately,” Frank said. “Talking about science is partisan in many ways. … But it has to be political, because we need a political system to fund science.”

The McClintock letters really were a community effort, Frank and Lando emphasized. The idea may have started at the Cornell ASAP meeting, but it wouldn’t have spread without the help of the Scientist Network for Advancing Policy, or SNAP. 

For Michelle Chen, an MD PhD student at the University of Iowa and member of SNAP, being involved in the McClintock letters gave her a chance to help her peers better explain and talk about their research.  

“Since I’m an early career scientist, I feel this sense of urgency because me and my peers are going to be the future of science,” Chen said. “I don’t know if we need to change the way that we talk about science or change what our outlook is, but now would be a good time to have the conversation.”

The letters were far from the only scientific advocacy and outreach happening at the time. From the Stand Up for Science marches in March, to the Bethesda Declaration and EPA declaration of dissent in June, to individual scientists speaking up all across the country, 2025 has been marked by scientific outreach and outrage. 

“It was just very clear that people don’t quite grasp how federal funding works and how it impacts research in a way that the industry is never going to do,” Lando said of the reaction to her piece. 

As labs and projects have had funding cut, federal employees have been fired and information has disappeared from federal science websites, some in the scientific community have felt called to make a difference using grassroots methods like the McClintock Letters.

“It feels like right now, this moment, there’s like an existential threat to the largest scientific endeavor in the world,” says Grace Lindsay, an assistant professor of psychology and data science at New York University who has been active both in the community and online. 

Inspired in part by organizations like Stand Up for Science and in part by her own rage and “sense of horror,” Lindsay has organized events like postcard drives in Washington Square Park where people can quickly write a postcard to their elected representatives. 

“Some people don’t appreciate the severity of the moment and the seriousness of it, and so they’re not going to take action on their own,” Lindsay said. “But if you lower the barrier, they might.”

Lindsay said she lets the students she works with determine their own level of involvement. One of the challenges of speaking up for science, Lindsay said, is that there are so many causes and topics drawing on people’s attention right now. 

“This is a time where we have to find radically new ways of being and new things to do, and I think sometimes people just need permission for that,” she said. “You didn’t think you could just go out into a park and start asking people to contact your senators, but did you know that you can and actually must?”

Both Lindsay and the PhD students at Cornell emphasized the importance of community effort as a way to move forward. 

“Getting other people in, making it bigger than yourself, is important,” Lindsay said. “That can be starting your own group of friends who commit to doing actions together. But it can also be joining organizations that have been taking action for a long time and know about organizing and all of that kind of stuff. Getting connected with other people is probably a big thing.”

Even as some of the funding cuts targeted at universities are deemed unlawful and paused, Lando, Di Tomassi, Frank and Lindsay all said they are committed to continued action. 

“In five years from now, we won’t have the result of the clinical trials that would have saved people’s lives. 10 years from now, we won’t have the technology that would have made AI safer, or something like that,” Lindsay said. “[Research is] this big train that if you stop it, you can’t start it up again that easily.”