. . .
When climate science is thrown under the bus, when lifesaving vaccines are painted as dangerous, when science is chewed up in the ugly machinations of partisan politics and when the most basic truths of our world are twisted and ignored, it weakens the entire infrastructure and threatens society as a whole.

Our investments in research have been so wildly successful that most people take science for granted in their daily lives. Until they need it. But you can’t just dial it up from nowhere. The treatments that bought my wife a year suffused with heart, that let my daughter focus more on monkey bars than MRIs, were born from years of painstaking research and a few surprise discoveries that span multiple scientific fields. That’s how science works. We don’t always know where the answers will come from, but we do know they are far more frequent in a diverse, trusted and well-supported environment. Our country built a peerless scientific enterprise from what was just a tiny piece of our national spending, an investment with enormous returns. But of late, each budget hit and each partisan attack punches a new hole in a system on which we all depend.

Next month, science will once more hold all my faith, hopes and fears, for my daughter’s tumor is growing again. As before, I will sort through a mountain of data to decide which new treatment she will endure, knowing all the while that science is not perfect — that it can fail, that data don’t always point to a clear choice. But without the science that produced those data, there would be no hope. Our past commitment to scientific research opens up a world of possibility for her, and for all of us, that our grandparents could scarcely imagine.

Many years from now, when my daughter’s hair is gray, may that still be true.