“Eppur si muove”; “and yet it moves”. These words, supposedly whispered by Galileo Galilei at the end of his 1633 trial — held because he supported the Copernican ‘heresy’ that Earth moves around the Sun — have long been a byword for how scientists should behave in the face of ignorance, intolerance and ideological inerrancy. They come to mind now, during the all-out war on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) happening in the United States.

At the end of his trial, Galileo was made to swear that he did not believe in Earth’s motion. He was confined to house arrest and forbidden to write any more about the movement of the planet. If he had had grant funding and a website, I am sure that the Roman Catholic Church would have suspended the former and scrubbed the latter.

Yet, far from acting in courageous defiance, many scientists and administrators now seem to think that the best response to the war on DEI is to keep their heads low and wait out four hard years.

Trump 2.0: an assault on science anywhere is an assault on science everywhere

The American Society of Microbiology, NASA, the US Department of Defense, the US Department of Transportation and many prominent universities are among those that have been removing references to DEI from their websites, grants, papers, biographies and even histories.

More scholars must push back. The idea that scientists can keep doing what they know must be done to incorporate DEI into their work while adjusting terms to fit the demands of bigoted autocrats bent on hobbling science is to whistle loudly past a graveyard of avoidable error, continued financial cuts and censorship. That diversity matters to science is a truth — albeit one that has only recently begun to be accepted and applied.

First, clinical and social-science research requires diversity to be valid. Genomics has established that different groups of people respond differently to drugs and vaccines. The individuals recruited to and participating in clinical trials must be representative of those who will use those treatments in real life. Attention to DEI allows researchers to identify differences in safety and efficacy between groups early on in the testing process.

Likewise, social scientists are well aware that understanding behaviour and implementing desired change requires studying populations besides white, Western, university psychology students — the group from which psychologists have mainly sourced participants for decades. This is the case whether researchers seek to overcome vaccine hesitancy, prevent self-harm, improve reading skills, change recycling habits or prevent obesity.

Trump’s siege of science: how the first 30 days unfolded and what’s next