In this op-ed, particle physicist Yangyang Cheng explores why she chose to participate in the March for Science on April 22, 2017.
On April 22, I will be marching for science.
As a particle physicist, I wish I had been able to say this earlier, or with ease. Since the idea of a march for science was first suggested in late January, I mulled over the feedback about the event, which included criticism from the scientific community. Will a march for science help science if it reinforces the narrative that scientists are a special "interest group"? Can I march for science with a clear conscience knowing the historical injustices and structural disparity within the science community, when members of underrepresented groups, including myself, still face higher hurdles and narrower paths in our careers in science?
Interestingly, both of these criticisms reflect a common misconception: that science is the elite pursuit of the privileged few. However, I know that if I were a white man born and raised in America, I might not have become a scientist. The opportunities and resources America would have offered me might very well have led me to pursue another career path from my broad interest.
I grew up in a medium-size city in southeastern China, an only child raised by a single mother. At an early age I knew I had few options for personal advancement. The pursuit of science was the easy choice, not because the subject is simple, but because — even with gender biases in society and discouragements from my family — science demanded the fewest prerequisites for entry, as well as the broadest opportunities from the knowledge and skills obtained. In fact, I grew up hearing a popular saying: “Study well math, physics, and chemistry, and you can walk around the world unafraid.”
That saying — a succinct, rhyming 12 characters in its original Chinese — was passed down from my parents’ generation, a group haunted by the memory of the great famine of the late 1950s, when basic agricultural science and factual evidence of crop production were twisted and ignored by the government to fit a political agenda. Tens of millions of people starved to death. That same generation came of age during the Cultural Revolution, when education ground to a halt and science was seen as a Western conspiracy. Schools were closed. Intellectuals were persecuted. Books were burned. Some of the bravest souls kept the spark of science alive from dying embers. They studied math and science late at night under dim oil lamps after a long day of labor, using textbooks smuggled into farms and factories at great risk. After a decade of turmoil and destruction, many of the survivors became leaders of science, education, industry, and government in a recovering and eventually rising China; some of them became my college professors.
I graduated from college in 2009, and came to the United States to pursue my PhD in physics at the University of Chicago. In some of the darkest periods of my personal life before then, the idea of America kept me alive. The pursuit of science lit my path across the Pacific. Along with the generation before me and many of my peers, I scienced my way out of the limiting circumstances of my upbringing — and into the American dream.
As a young Chinese woman working as a physicist in the United States, I am constantly reminded of my privileges and my vulnerabilities, both within my profession and in society at large. I see a parallel between the idea of America and that of science: acknowledging the tainted history and current flaws does not mean compromising my unwavering faith in its power as a great equalizer. Science not only empowers the individual, but also lifts whole communities. It is often less-developed regions that more acutely suffer from the lack of access to science — and more significantly benefit from science’s equalizing power.
Unfortunately, science — its results, its methods, and its necessity — has been under attack from different ends of the political spectrum. Supporters of science cannot stay silent and let the other side frame the debate. With anti-intellectualism encroaching on the very fabric of our society, and the biggest challenges of our times demanding scientific solutions, the fight for the preservation and advancement of science bears particular urgency, and calls for support from people of every age, color, and creed.
Young people have a special role to play in the defense of science. Whether or not one aspires to a career as a scientist, science will shape the future of our world that the young will one day inherit, and the attitudes and efforts of the young toward science will determine the future of science itself.
There are few simpler or more explicit ways to demonstrate unified support for science, as well as science’s equalizing power, than a global march for science. A march is where size matters. People put their bodies in the street, and use their very presence as a political statement. The fact that the March for Science has become a global movement, with more than 500 satellite marches around the world, shows that support for science is a unifying message that transcends geopolitical boundaries.
I am the great-granddaughter of women with bound feet, for whom learning to read was a revolutionary act. I am a particle physicist at an Ivy League institution, working on the most powerful particle accelerator in the world. On April 22, I will be marching for science, and so should you.
A version of this story was originally posted in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists as part of its Voices of Tomorrow series.
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