Guest edited by social scientist and MIT Chancellor Melissa Nobles, whose claim to fame is insisting that her employer is systemically racist, the October special issue of Nature details “egregious acts of violence and abuse“ experienced by under-represented minorities in science.

What does the lived experience of such egregious violence and abuse look like?

• Jackson has endured racially charged slights, such as showing up to a meeting to deliver a keynote address and being mistaken for an audio-visual technician.

• It’s getting on a plane to a conference, chatting to the person next to her and, after telling them what she does for a living, “they say I’m lying.”

• She was invited to write articles for a journal, but after peer review and legal scrutiny, the works were not published, and she had to find new venues for them.

• Some supervisors gave more time and attention to white male colleagues and “barely spoke to me”. 

By the ghost of King Leopold, have you ever heard of such brutal assaults!

Despite the fact that admissions offices and science departments in every American university are bending over backwards to recruit and retain any under-represented person of talent they can get their hands on, Science is clearly broken. It must be purged and decolonized until no perceived slight, however microscopic or unintentional, can befall the fragile ego of any member of ever-growing classes of protected identities. It must embrace mystical and untestable “indigenous ways of knowing” that bear no resemblance to the scientific method upon which the material bounty of Western Civilization was built. STEM must undergo the same woke transformation that turned our English, Sociology, and “Studies” departments into intellectual wastelands occupied not by scholars but by community organizers.

Thank you, Nature, for revealing your true colors. May your prestige reflect the consequences of publishing such rigorous scientific material.