Jessica Cantlon's 'Science Homecoming' Mobilizes Scientists to Advocate for Support

Across the United States, neuroscientists, botanists, chemists and Nobel Prize laureates are writing letters to the small towns they grew up in. While the stories told differ, the underlying message is the same:

Science benefits each and every one of us, no matter who we are or where we live. And right now, that science is under attack.

Recent federal actions have cut around $2.7 billion in research funding earmarked for the National Institutes of Health and proposed a $4 billion cut to the National Science Foundation, which is more than half of its typical budget.

“When we started seeing the cuts to science roll in, my colleague, Steve Piantadosi, who is a faculty member at UC Berkeley, and I were a little dismayed by the lack of a unified response from science,” said Jessica Cantlon, the Ronald J. and Mary Ann Zdrojkowski Professor of Developmental Neuroscience/Psychology. “We needed to stick up for ourselves.”

So Cantlon and Piantadosi set to work building a website that scientists across the country could use as a launchpad for communicating science’s value. Rather than targeting big, traditional media outlets, such as The New York Times or Scientific American, Cantlon said the goal was to reach out to small, local media sources that could speak to everyday Americans still living in the communities scientists come from.

Add them all up, and local newspapers have a circulation of around 15 million people, which is one-and-a-half times the circulation of the Times and six times that of The Washington Post, Cantlon and Piantadosi write on Science Homecoming, the one-stop-shop letter-writing resource they created in just a matter of weeks this spring.

The website includes a tool for finding small newspapers anywhere in the U.S., offers advice on how to reach out to those papers’ editors, and even assists scientists in finding statistics about the economic impact science funding has on any given state.

“Scientists are often in big cities and college towns, because that’s where the labs are, but most of them don’t come from those places,” Cantlon said. “We wanted to create a communication infrastructure that helps scientists send that message back home to the small towns they come from.”

The Crossroads of America

In Merrillville, Indiana, where the north-south-running Route 41 meets the east-west Route 30, there’s a little diner where everybody goes for a slice of pie after the big football game. Cantlon waitressed there all through high school, collecting tips and wiping down tables, dreaming about the world beyond.

“They call it the Crossroads of America,” said Cantlon, now a cognitive neuroscientist in CMU’s Department of Psychology and Neuroscience Institute.

Lots of folks in Lake County, Indiana — known locally as The Region — have been there their whole lives and affectionately refer to themselves as “Region Rats,” said Cantlon. That’s how she grew up, at least, and a region rat she may have remained, if not for a guidance counselor at her high school recommending she apply to Indiana University in Bloomington.

Cantlon was the first of her family to attend college, but once she set foot on campus, opportunities bloomed. A mixture of anthropology and psychology classes got her interested in human origins, which led to an invite to attend an archaeological dig in Belize’s Maya ruins.

“We were dusting off skeletons and pulling pottery shards out of the dirt,” she reminisced.

Next, she connected with a primatologist studying lemurs in Madagascar. And despite having leeches attached to the inside of her mouth and the whites of her eyeballs, she continued to fall ever deeper in love with science. Next, she’d spend a year and a half following gorillas on the side of a volcano in Rwanda.

Every step of the way, federal science funding helped Cantlon discover places, creatures and scientific ideas that she never could have experienced in her hometown. Today, she studies the brains of human children and adults by comparing them to non-human primates — probing ever closer to the evolutionary path that led to our own cognition.

“Federal funding helps people in all communities kick off a career in science,” she said. “And when a scientist goes from your community into a science career, they carry their home with them.” 

Science funding and the bottom line

Of course, the story of Science Homecoming is not just about emotional ties to the places Cantlon and other scientists hail from.

“Indiana will lose $69 million this year in critical research funding,” she wrote in her letter to The Post Tribune of Northwest Indiana. “The future of science is at risk in Indiana, along with the jobs, medical advances, and economic growth it drives.”

Jeremy Yoder, an evolutionary biologist and associate professor of biology at California State University Northridge, reminded Pennsylvanians that the NSF and NIH invested more than $2.5 billion in the Keystone State just in the year 2023.

“The single biggest portion of that money is not for chemicals or equipment, but for people: salaries and stipends for research staff and student assistants, who spend their money right in the communities where they live,” Yoder wrote in a letter to LancasterOnline. “And, of course, they build new knowledge, from medical cures to agricultural advances.”

Whether it’s new drugs for fighting cancer or diabetes or new treatments for those suffering from addiction, science funding benefits communities in innumerable ways that are often overlooked. What’s more, for every dollar the federal government invests in the NIH, the American public sees $2.46 in economic return.

“When it comes to addiction, everybody knows somebody that has struggled with it,” said Keanan Joyner, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. “That’s why addiction funding in particular has always been a huge, bipartisan success.”

Joyner researches addiction because he saw how prevalent it was in the small towns of Georgia where he grew up.

“Heartbreakingly, there were more than 1,800 fatal drug overdoses and more than 2,000 alcohol-related deaths in Georgia in 2020, and this number has only gone up since,” wrote Joyner in a letter to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “This is why NIH and NSF invest so heavily in topics like these — it’s paramount to prevent as much of this suffering as we can for every American.”

Refreshing memories

So far, Science Homecoming has produced more than 100 letters that have been published in small newspapers from Maine to Florida and out west to Washington and California. And the effort has garnered its own media coverage in outlets such as Nature, BBC’s Newshour and Psychology Today.

“One great thing about communicating to people about science is that people already love science,” said Cantlon. “It’s really a matter of refreshing their memory, I think.”

“When your life expectancy has been steadily growing over the last hundred years, you start to take that for granted, right? And when you’re battling a disease, you might not readily recognize that science is right there fighting with you,” she said.

Supporting science is nothing new, by the way.

“Even as recently as the last Trump Administration, it was widely agreed that funding scientific work and a broad, well-trained scientific workforce was valuable for this country,” said Yoder. “The people who can fix it are in the House and the Senate, and the people who can goad them into fixing it are everybody reading Science Homecoming op-eds.”