Science for the People began in the political upheaval of the 1960s, when scientists started reevaluating the relationship between their work and government power. “I wrote this letter to the editor of Physics Today saying how we physicists should pay attention to the Vietnam War, we are involved, we ought to discuss it at least,” University of California, Berkeley physicist Charles Schwartz told the American Institute of Physics, in an oral history interview in 1995. The letter was rejected, and soon Schwartz, along with other colleagues, was organizing to create a radical caucus of the American Physical Society, which publishes Physics Today.
In short order, groups in Berkeley, Ann Arbor, Boston, and other progressive strongholds started working under the same banner. In 1970 they began publishing a magazine of their own, Science for the People, which was also used as their most common name. (Some members also used Scientists and Engineers for Social and Political Action, or SESPA.) Covers of early issues of the magazine showed a raised red fist, with a white hand holding a beaker in front of it.
Scientists, Science for the People argued, could no longer maintain a posture of objectivity. Their research, however purely intellectual in conception, was being coopted for political and corporate ends. “In many ways discovery and application, scientific research and engineering, can no longer be distinguished from each other,” they wrote.
“They had a quite distinctive approach,” says Kelly Moore of Loyola University-Chicago, author of Disrupting Science: Social Movements, American Scientists, and the Politics of the Military, 1945–1975. After World War II, scientists were often seen as servants of the nation, who provided facts and technologies for use by other institutions. Scientists who objected to weapon-making, it was thought, could simply refuse to participate. “Science for the People was not interested in this ongoing story that the scientist was merely a technician that someone else used,” says Moore. “They were asking about production of knowledge, capitalism, profit, and racism. They were not assuming that scientists were neutral actors. They assumed scientists were deeply implicated.”
In practice, this meant that the members started reconsidering how they should direct their scientific energy and expertise. An ecology lab might turn its focus from theory to agricultural production, or physicists and engineers might expose a secretive group of academics who consulted with the Pentagon on weapons used in Vietnam. Activists involved in Science for the People also worked with social movements, channeling their expertise into activism, such as providing farm workers with information about the dangers of pesticides.