Political Quotes

“I thank Representative Tonko for holding this Special Order hour on preserving scientific integrity. Mr. Speaker, I am a scientist. For 25 years before entering Congress, I worked at Fermi National Accelerator Labs, smashing protons and antiprotons together to make particles that have not been around since the Big Bang. If you are a scientist and you stand up and deliberately say something that you know is not true or if you publish something fraudulent, it is a career-ending move. You will lose your position. Nobody will publish your papers. You are done. It should be that way, frankly, in politics. The reason that we scientists take truthfulness so seriously is that we are always operating on the frontiers of what is scientifically known. We are always operating with statistically incomplete datasets, with partially confirmed hypotheses, and defining the next experiments to perform to get to the next level of scientific truth. So we scientists simply cannot tolerate the additional uncertainty of whether or not the person that we are listening to is deliberately lying or even hiding parts of what they know to be the scientific truth. That is why it is so corrosive and demeaning when the Trump administration orders scientists to suppress their best understanding of the scientific truth, forcing scientists to choose between either their scientific integrity or potentially their jobs.…”