Hello my scientist friends.
The Dusoma brand has advice for you. Find your courage and resist. Do what you do best: think. Figure it out. Share Knowledge.
My suggestion, you talked about a strike. No, don’t do a strike – do an anti-strike. Refuse to leave. Refuse to quit.
And if they ask you why you’re not leaving your workstation (nay, leave the office and work from home), say, “as much as I’m scared of you, I’m scared of forces that will punish me for not making medicines that will save the lives of millions of people. We are on the brink of quadrupling the speed of drug development in oncology. And we do this through genomics, genetic research and AI. If I stop working, all that stops. For years.”
And if you don’t think the American public will be disturbed by images of families being ripped apart, imagine how they will feel about cancer researchers practicing civil disobedience and being carried out of wet labs – because they refused to stop working to cure your mom’s cancer! Think about phase 3 clinical trials with 10,000 patients … that just …. Stop … mid-way through someone’s chemo?
That will not go over well with the American public.
But I hope it won’t come down to that – the anti-strike. Call their bluff. If you’re wondering who would pay for it – I suggest we keep timesheets and keep working for 4 years, and the first politician who comes along and will pay all these invoices, they get elected president. And then we all get paid back.
We need to start to figure out the plan for the next president right now.
So I say this: the first tool in the resistance toolbox for scientists is Knowledge. We have to demand transparency. NSF is doing keyword searches in grants? Ok, let’s see every proposal that got flagged. I demand to see it. Every note, every comment. We make them broadcast their meetings, we insist on harm and risk assessments. We need to determine if a cut would hurt people. And if so, we have to remain to the commitment of “doing no harm” – so if defunding a project will hurt people, we don’t cut it. And if it is some kind of bunk study with no scientific merit, then let’s be honest with ourselves and cut it. Enough testing the effectiveness of crystals.
The scientific revolution meets the open source revolution meets AI
Hire 100 documentary filmmakers, they fill out timesheets and get paid back by the next president, too.
Have you read that short story in a college literary journal about someone who steals all the datasets out of a giant data lake, and all the scientists do a giant hackathon? When not having to worry about profit, and only the prioritized based on the priorities of humanity, they make amazing medicines. And then in the story they created AI tools to organize the data in the lake, so it was like a free, easy to use library? The open source ML people got involved, it’s a utopic. They cure neglected tropical diseases, and they’re a non-profit. Alpha Fold runs a free university with 200,000 students. Great story, not sure of the author.
It’s not about what we fear or boycott, it’s what we build. We need to build makerspaces, have giant online education programs, 1:1 coaches for people in the global south, close the digital divide.
Kind Regards,
The Dusoma Project
Dusoma.com
“We swing between the joy of creation and the joy of destruction.
That very oscillation is enough to bring power to its knees.”
- The Situationist International*
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