Issue 21 Editor’s Pick: ‘All of Us‘ by Lou Hurst
by Kevin D. Vallejo
Chaos lives where order is being pushed out the door. Those who practice science know that it is a team sport, and sometimes even a contact sport: the process to establish yourself as a scientist, after having gone to school for close to a decade, is grueling. Finding a niche in which to explore those things that feel both interesting and important is exhilarating, and then learning how to articulate these feelings in a compelling manner to convince a group of people to help you achieve these goals is exhausting.
But people do it. Scientists do it. Every day, battles occur outside of the laboratory and field so that science can thrive in the classrooms. And those battles have never been on such a grand scale as they seem to be today.
In the poem ‘All of Us’, Lou Hurst invites us to take an intimate look at the state of affairs in the U.S. scientific enterprise in the midst of budget cuts and changing priorities. A research initiative carried out by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (homonymous to this poem) aims to collect data that will increase the visibility of patients whose ethnicities or backgrounds made it hard to enter into databases: this meant that doctors and researchers would not have enough data to compare symptoms or pathologies that could have already been solved in a different part of the population. The importance of data, and data availability, privacy, and responsible dissemination requires experts working tirelessly to make sure health is accessible to everyone.
Imagine the feeling of having this valiant effort truncated, unable to move forward without warning. In her poem, Hurst invites us to imagine the chaotic feelings that currently trouble the scientific community in the U.S., as it faces an uncertain future.