Our civilization is built upon empiricism and rationality. Any crisis of rationality is actually a crisis of civilization. And that is what we witness today: “alternative facts”, climate change denial, pseudoscience anti-vaxx movement have penetrated deeply into the core of western society, so deep that people on the highest positions are questioning evidence based science, making irrational decisions which will affect other aspects of life, such as education, medical care, drug testing, financing the research etc. Today, we have to #StandForScience – not only today, but every single day. We have to raise our children to embrace evidence, empiricism, scientific method and rationalism as a part of their daily life, to avoid such mess we see right now in the future. A world built upon irrationality, conspiracy theories, fear mongering is not a world we want for ourselves nor for our children.
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| Harry Truman, source:biography.com |
Harry Truman was the 33rd President of the Unites States of America (1945-1953) and he signed the decree for the establishment of the National Science Foundation.
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| Dwight Eisenhoover, source: history.com |
Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower was the 34th President of the USA. He was in the cabinet during the period 1953-1961. He was famous for his military career, but also for his role in the post-war period. After the USSR launched its’ first satellite into space – Sputnik in 1957, and after the confirmation from the US Congress – Ike supported the creation of a civil body for space exploration . NASA was formed on October 1, 1958. Today, it does not only engage in space exploration but in monitoring of problems caused by the climate change on Earth.
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| John Kennedy |
John Fitzgerald Kennedy – JFK, was the 35th President of the United States (1961-1963). He supported the creation and launching of commercial communication satellites (The Communication Act from 1962.). One of his more famous decisions was the 25thof May decision to send astronauts to the Moon, which was the beginning of the Apollo mission. All this happened after the USSR sent its’ first man to space, on April 12, 1961.
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| Lyndon Johnson |
Lyndon B. Johnsonwas the 36th President of the United States (1963-1969) and let’s remember that he was the “accidental President” who took the oath on an Air Force One, barely two hours after the assassination of President Kennedy:
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| Lyndon Johnson taking the oath of office |
Lyndon Johnson supervised the establishment of the ARPA network, set up by DARPA (Defense Research Projects Agency), which was a network of computers in the West coast – one of several precursors of the Internet (along with the CERN network – largely contributed by Tim Berners-Lee). ARPA was not particularly effective – the system was down shortly, however it is the grandmother of the Internet. Johnson renamed the NASA space center Cape Canaveral to Cape Kennedy.
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| Richard Nixon |
Richard Nixon, the 37th President of the United States (1969-1974), mostly notorious for the “Watergate” affair – but it is worthy of mention that he signed the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act. Nixon supported the growing movement of environmental protection. He signed the order which lead to the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This period’s legacy is under the biggest impact of the new administration.
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| Jimmy Carter |
James Earl “Jimmy” Carter was the 39th President of the United States (1977-1981). He could have been an engineer, but circumstantially, he wasn’t. However, he always showed interest in science and he was very fond of science. He supported the Space Shuttle Project, development of the Hubble telescope and the Voyager mission. He was privately a friend with the evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould, with whom he often discussed the fine details of Darwin’s theory.
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| Ronald and Nancy Reagan |
Ronald Wilson Reagan was the 40th President of the United States (1981-1989). Some named him the “Hollywood President”, some – a “cowboy”, but one wouldn’t make a mistake if, because of some of his statements, called him a clown. He listened to his wife Nancy’s advice, which were based on astrology, and he even managed to say that “trees are bigger pollutants than automobiles”, which is in a certain level partially true since the trees release terpenes and isoprenes in hot weather – molecules which cause photochemical smog. Reagan also removed the solar panels from the White House which were set up during President Jimmy Carter’s mandate. However, Reagan was not that bad with science: he was ready to create a cooperation framework with the Soviets on a joint space program, in that post – Cold War era and he was a big advocate for space exploration.
George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush as well as President Clinton didn’t particularly stand out: G. W. Bush administration even boycotted the efforts for environmental protection and biodiversity. Bill Clinton was preoccupied with “more important things”. Only Barrack Obama was distinctly on the side of science and science promotion.
Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Theodore Roosevelt were big friends of science (even though Roosevelt was a passionate hunter, he was also a biology and nature lover, as well as in a weird way a lover of living life preservation), while Franklin Delano Roosevelt embarked on the Manhattan project – a project that gathered some of the biggest physicists of the era (Oppenheimer, Fermi, Feynman, Szilard) and caused a lot of desolation and pain, but also opened a new chapter in Physics.
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English language posts
Author:
Jelena Kalinić, MA in comparative literature and graduate biologist, science journalist and science communicator, has a WHO infodemic manager certificate and Health metrics Study design & Evidence based medicine training. Winner of the 2020 EurekaAlert (AAAS) Fellowship for Science Journalists. Short-runner, second place in the selection for European Science journalist of the year for 2022.
