Health Care/Joan Retsinas

Scientists: A Breed To Nurture

Where have all the virologists gone? The biochemists? The physicists? nnWe need people to probe the microbes that sicken us, the treatments that help us, the vaccines that safeguard us. Yet here, in this country that 60 years ago launched a “science” initiative to send a man into space, enterprising young students no longer study the basic sciences. The “space race” is an archaic term in Trivia Prursuit games. Instead, students grasp for today’s academic brass rings: business, negotiations, markets. More yearn to be venture capitalists than chemists. Evoking “The Graduate,” the mantra is not “plastic,” but leveraged buyout. We import a major contingent of scientists from abroad, where entreprising students seize different brass rings. (The scientists who developed the Pfizer vaccine are a Turkish-German couple.)

To accentuate the loss, a major swathe of the population rejects science. “Creationism” nudges beside “evolution” in school curricula. High schools, which no longer require the gambit of hard sciences, often focus on sports; and student-athletes see a direct path, from high school to college (with an easy major) to the pros, which can pay six-figure salaries. Plus, fans lavish not just praise, but barely legal perks on college athletes. Wealthy fans do not back schools’ chemistry clubs.

Indeed, our anti-science President argued that climate change was a hoax, that hydroxychloroquine with Clorox would cure COVID (which some people said was caused by demon sperm, but who knows?), and that the physicians within government, who argued for masks and “social distancing,” were idiots. He retracted the ban on the pesticide chlorpyrifos, even though data showed a link to birth defects. Early in his administration, he abolished the office for pandemics: who needed it? I kept expecting “Flat Earth” enthusiasts to flood the internet. We used to highlight solar power, water-saving toilets, eco-friendly lightbulbs. Not under the Luddite-in-Chief. He spurned them all.

Crucially, he encouraged his followers to tread that path. They too gleefully rejected proscriptions, not just about COVID, but about health, climate, the environment. We still have outbreaks of measles. We still want to burn coal. We still showcase mega-cars. We stripped all those Obama-era environmental safeguards on water, air, soil, in the name of “business,” though it is hard to build a vibrant economy upon Luddite fantasies.

At the same time, in a bizarre thirst for a homogeneity that never existed, the nationalists among us sought to seal our borders, particularly to darker-skinned immigrants and refugees. Ironically, this country was already morphing into a majority/minority nation. And many of those refugees and immigrants, as well as their children, were amassing the academic degrees that the Luddites scorned.

As the nation emerges from the COVID lockdown, we should thank those PhDs and MDs who studied science more than they played football. They merit hosannas.

We also should try to “incubate” more of them, with rigorous academic courses, with scholarships and fellowships, with grants for research. The National Institutes of Health is more than a line-item in a budget of taxpayer outlays; it is the backbone of progress. We cut that budget at our peril. We cut “education” spending at our peril. And, since so many of the scientists among us hail from outside our borders, we cut immigration at our peril.

This pandemic has forced a hiatus in professional sports. It has forced a speedup in the work of virologists et al. There will be another health and/or environmental crisis; the year 2020 will not usher in nirvana. But surely we can gear up intellectually. Once upon a time, we launched a man into space, and children dreamed of becoming astronauts. Maybe soon children can dream of curing the maladies that ail us. Maybe the pandemic will force another “science race.” We need one.

Joan Retsinas is a sociologist who writes about health care in Providence, R.I. Email retsinas@verizon.net.

From The Progressive Populist, January 1-15, 2021

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