The dimly lit bar is an unconventional setting for a gathering of scientists. Gone are the white coats and clinical lighting of a lab. Instead, attendees in sweaters, jeans and keffiyehs—Arab scarves with detailed patterns commonly associated with Palestinian identity—commiserate with quiet laughter over coffee and tea. I listen intently as a woman speaks in English and Arabic, her voice projected into the room at Montreal’s Co-op Bar Milton-Parc over a laggy Zoom connection. A Palestinian medical student, she is talking to us from the Latin American School of Medicine in Havana, Cuba, where she studies. We take in her story as she describes the pain of learning to save lives as her people are dying.

This event was the launch of the “Science Under Occupation” issue of the magazine published by Science for the People (SFTP), an activist organization based in the US with chapters in Canada, the UK and South Africa. Originally published in the spring of 2020, the issue delves into the colonial structures of scientific research with articles about how science aids the dispossession of Indigenous land in what is now the US, the anti-government environmental movement in the Philippines and the endurance of astronomy in Palestine. Since the Canadian chapter of SFTP only formed in early 2022, this was the first in-person event held by the small group of organizers; its theme felt especially prescient last November, a month into an asymmetric colonial conflict defined by the brutal destruction of Gaza by Israeli forces. Just blocks away from the bar, McGill University loomed large in its power and inflexibility. Could the launch have been held on campus? Perhaps—but it wouldn’t have felt right. The views espoused here were too radical for an institution that had repeatedly quashed pro-Palestinian student initiatives. 

The magazine launch served as a site of discussion for how scientific innovation—such as precision weapons engineering and artificial intelligence—is central to the displacement, surveillance and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Presenters spoke of a revolutionary approach to research that cuts across disciplines—life sciences, engineering, biomedicine—and seeks to awaken researchers to the connection between science and politics. 

SFTP’s approach is rooted in a long history, but one that’s been kept from the mainstream and out of textbooks. Spearheaded by scientists and anti-war activists beginning in 1969, the organization cut its teeth by staging protests against the Vietnam War and publishing critical writing in its radical science magazine. The magazine was abandoned in 1989, but revived in 2019. Its articles, produced by an editorial collective whose members come from a wide range of disciplines, are often deeply reported features that seek to change the culture of scientific silence on political issues by exposing how research is anything but apolitical. Previous issues have centred around the exploitation of land through agriculture, conceptions of gender beyond the binary and the role of research in lethal military systems. 

The members of SFTP, an organization composed of science workers, students and artists, are connected with researchers in Palestine, Cuba, South Africa and across the US who agree that the practice of science is inherently political. The collective doesn’t distinguish between their research and their politics; instead, they see the two things as parts of the same whole. But a political consciousness is far from widely accepted in scientific research, Montreal-based SFTP organizer and postdoctoral student in neuroscience Jennifer Lee tells me. “[Researchers] have a brain for what they’re learning in class and what they’re doing in the laboratory. And then they have another brain for engaging with the political world and the social worlds,” she says. Showing young scientists that they don’t need to compartmentalize the two can open up the possibility of political action in the lab and beyond. 

Since the most recent phase of the Israel-Palestine conflict began on October 7, over thirty-five thousand people have been killed in Gaza. These deaths are connected to a military-industrial complex that starts in labs, conferences and classrooms across North America. Israel’s recent military campaign has, in addition to bringing a horrific death toll and mass displacement upon Palestinians, destroyed every university in Gaza. The statements in solidarity with Palestine issued by student unions at Canadian institutions like York University and the University of Toronto Mississauga show that many students involved in university politics reject Israel’s genocidal attacks, as well as the ongoing occupation. Student-led protests and encampments have swept the world, demanding that universities divest from Israeli companies and cut academic partnerships with the country’s institutions immediately. 

There remains an expectation that science workers shouldn’t involve themselves or their work in politics, in order to remain neutral and value-free. But the work of university scientists exists within a capitalist system of for-profit research, with a large portion of their research dependent on governmental or private grants. Despite the neutrality favoured by the scientific establishment, a political agenda is imposed upon scientists—that of the funding bodies they rely on and the institutions that house them. “The science that we’re being taught is already extremely highly politicized,” says Lee. “It’s just bad politics.” 

To buy into the myth of scientific neutrality, one must believe that research conclusions are untainted by who funds them. “Even the most avowedly apolitical scientist is, in their apathy, operating at the service of dominant institutions,” writes SFTP secretary Camille Rullán in the organization’s magazine. Looking to some of the most notorious examples of scientific abuse—the torture of Jewish and Roma people by Nazi scientists during the Holocaust; the deliberate infection of Black men with syphilis in Tuskegee, Alabama between the 1930s and the 1970s; the testing of birth control pills on asylum inmates and women in Puerto Rico without their consent—illustrates how scientific research is intimately tied to the political context within which it’s produced. Whoever’s in power can dictate what state-funded research looks like and manipulate ethics guidelines to suit their agenda. But the political aspects of science are obscured by the myth of the value-free discipline. 

Gaïa Guenoun, a researcher who spoke at a recent SFTP magazine launch for the “Gender: Beyond Binaries” issue, points to how the very nature of scientific inquiry models this myth, by looking at things within a silo. “That comes with the ways that we study humans and animals and nature, which is ... to remove them from their context,” she says in an interview with Maisonneuve. Gathering data on living beings often requires a controlled setting so that cause and effect can be isolated from the rest of the environment. Animals used for vision and perception research, for example, are confined to labs and may never see the natural world in their lifetimes. When organisms are removed from their context, natural behaviours can be stripped away, too; but findings from research on lab animals are still sometimes used to explain how these animals behave in their natural contexts. We can see the same pattern mirrored when we purge politics from science: isolating research from its political context risks erasing the fuller picture of how it can impact, and be impacted by, society. 

Within traditional science programs, there is rarely any mandatory coursework that connects the subject matter with the outside world. “You receive zero political education, you receive zero [input] of the world, right? It’s actually deliberate,” says Mostafa Shagar, an organizer with SFTP Canada and a PhD student in material physics at the Montreal branch of the Institut national de la recherche scientifique. “Science has become so detached from the world that studying science means detaching yourself.” 

This rings true to my experience. My undergraduate curriculum in biology suffered from a dearth of politics. When learning about the use of statistical tools to study genetics, we glossed over the eugenicist legacy of statistics. My only engagement with political content occurred in arts classes, which weren’t mandatory for my degree. In my view, this only exacerbated the distance between students’ work and our politics—and even the distance between our work and basic human empathy. For example, a 2021 report found that North American medical curriculum lacks education specific to the LGBTQ2S+ community, and that this disparity can worsen queer and trans patients’ health outcomes and standards of care. Certain textbooks used by Canadian pharmacology students also don’t have information about the US Food and Drug Administration’s role in sending out risky, experimental HIV/AIDS therapies to affected populations, instead discussing the drug mechanisms without information about the social context they were prescribed within. Learning about science in a silo, without getting into the real-world politics with which it’s intertwined, drives a wedge between researchers and the human impact of their work. And the publish-or-perish model, where researchers are encouraged to publish as frequently as possible to maintain grant funding, ensures that scientists ask few questions about the structures that govern their work. This detachment can cause direct harm to research subjects. 

Scientists are materially dissuaded from engaging with the politics within which their work is produced. No instance is more emblematic of this than the firing last October of Michael Eisen, an American biologist who was the editor-in-chief of the academic journal eLife. Eisen, who is Jewish, reposted a satirical article from the Onion titled “Dying Gazans Criticized For Not Using Last Words to Condemn Hamas,” on X, formerly Twitter. In the post, he wrote, “The Onion speaks with more courage, insight and moral clarity than the leaders of every academic institution put together. I wish there were a @TheOnion university.” Pro-Israel researchers swiftly contacted eLife’s funding bodies to have him removed from his position. Eisen used his platform to critique the unwillingness of academic leaders to speak out on human rights issues—and his willingness to speak out cost him his job. 

Since the consequences of political statements, official or otherwise, can adversely affect careers, like-minded researchers often have to look internationally to find each other, in organizations like SFTP. University administrations cannot be depended upon to align themselves with progressive issues, or to support their researchers and students in speaking up. Instead, over the past several months, university administrations have condemned and sanctioned pro-Palestinian student groups: McGill revoked the permission of student group Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights McGill to use the university’s name, then threatened to call the police on peacefully protesting students. In New York, Columbia University’s administration invited the police to descend on students protesting in an on-campus encampment, arresting nearly three hundred of them and attempting to suspend all those involved. 

Since October 7, several petitions and open letters have denounced the co-opting of scientific research for military ends—but these are grassroots campaigns not put forward by institutions or departments. One letter, signed by more than 1,300 scientists across forty countries last December, denounced atrocities against non-combatants, condemned Israel’s indiscriminate bombing and called for a ceasefire as well as a lasting solution. Notably, the signatories decried “a relentless rise in the funding of scientific and technological research for militaristic ends.” Though statements such as these may not immediately enact policy change within universities and research institutions, they are crucial to pushing back against the narrative that scientists need to stay away from politics. When scientists dare to speak up and take ownership of their research and its consequences, it becomes harder to silence them. 

Though the connection between science and politics is often glossed over, the two are intertwined in material ways. In February, investigative news site the Maple revealed that the Liberal government had authorized $28.5 million in military exports to Israel since October. The categories of goods included electronic equipment, aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles, ground vehicles, fire control and, most troublingly, permits for the category “bombs, torpedoes, rockets, missiles, other explosive devices and charges and related equipment and accessories, and specially designed components.” Governmental organizations like Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC), which maintains research partnerships in industry and academia, contribute to military technologies like these. Working relationships between academia and the Canadian military are omnipresent: the federal Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council has an agreement with DRDC to fund social science research related to military personnel readiness, improving military culture and increasing trust in automated systems—meaning humans ceding some control of technology to algorithms. Queen’s University’s Centre for International and Defence Policy contributes research about military and security policy while receiving funding from the Department of National Defence. Direct research funding, strong recruitment schemes and institutional holdings in weapons companies interweave scientific research and the arms industry, undermining scientists’ control over the use and direction of research.

One insidious way that militaries align themselves with research is through awarding individual grants: many of these grants are not associated with weapons development, but still guide innovation and policy that can be used for militaristic aims. For this fiscal year, the US Department of Defense awarded a whopping $221 million USD in funding to thirty teams across seventy-three American universities for various science and engineering projects. A sum that significant will help fund many students’ graduate degrees, but the money is only there because their research is in an “area of strategic importance” to the military, as the Department of Defense describes it.

A quick glance at the headlines will tell you where military priorities lie. Examples of science-driven war crimes abound: the indiscriminate bombing of civilians in Yemen by a Saudi-led coalition, fuelled by American and British weapons; Germany and the US shipping bombs, missiles, armoured vehicles and more to Israel as it imposes an apartheid system and military blockade on Palestinians. The military contractors behind these products, such as BAE Systems, Raytheon and MBDA, actively recruit from university campuses for defence technology roles. Now, as artificial intelligence is hailed as the vanguard of innovation, Israel is employing it to guide destructive campaigns. An investigation by +972 magazine revealed that an artificial intelligence-driven program, Lavender, is being used to target suspected Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad militants, despite an estimated error rate of 10 percent. The co-opting of innovation for nefarious means is ongoing; and as long as curricula in STEM fields gloss over the political aspects of research, students won’t be empowered to resist their work being used for harm. 

SFTP’s mission is simple: radically rethinking how we view science, not as apolitical, but as knowledge production performed within a capitalist framework and necessarily tied to the political interests of those who fund its performance. “What is this capital-centric view of research, that it must be done by and for profit? And if it’s not traditional profit, then it’s cultural profit,” Shagar says. “We have made the act of knowing an act that must produce value.” Cultural profit in this context is doled out through academic prestige, like the recognition of a university’s name or its number of successful alumni. This prestige comes with larger endowments, which in turn fund research. For many public universities facing funding crises, not all research subjects are created equal: knowledge for knowledge’s sake is not cost-effective, and research needs to bring with it some form of profit, be that traditional or cultural. 

This desperation for funding provides a window for defence industry partners to offer profitable contracts. Funding a scientific project—which includes things such as graduate students’ pay, travel expenses for conferences, publication fees and equipment—takes a considerable amount of grant money from provincial or federal bodies, plus institutional funding. It’s no wonder, then, that for years student movements have sought to stifle military partnerships by having their universities divest from holdings in defence companies. Since this money is behind so much of a graduate student’s livelihood, wouldn’t they want to feel comfortable knowing where it’s coming from?

McGill’s investments in Israel’s military occupation of Palestine in particular have drawn the ire of parts of its student body and faculty. A list compiled by the student groups McGill Hunger Strike for Palestine and Students for Justice in Palestine McGill reveals fifty companies that the university invests in, to a total of $73 million as of last December, with varying ties to Israel’s illegal occupation—from retailers with factories in the West Bank, like L’Oréal, to weapons manufacturers connected to the Israel Defense Forces. According to the group Divest McGill, as of 2021 the university had over $12 million invested across arms companies, including Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Thales and General Dynamics—all of which have supplied Israel with weapons used against Palestinian civilians. The Policy Against Genocide in Palestine, a proposed student union motion that earned the support of 78.7 percent of voting students last November, calls on the university to cut ties with and divest from “corporations and institutions complicit in genocide, settler-colonialism, apartheid, or ethnic cleansing against Palestinians.” The vote led to the university administration threatening to cut the student union’s funding should it adopt the policy. 

Student movements seeking divestment have a storied history. In 1985, the front page of the McGill Daily proclaimed the university’s complete divestment from companies doing business with South Africa’s apartheid regime—following  protests led by the McGill African Students Society and the Black Students’ Network. In 2016, a student-led campaign called Demilitarize McGill demanded the administration make public any active military contracts at the university. Despite resistance, the group eventually succeeded in receiving documents from the school outlining these relationships. In 2022, the campus group Students’ Society of McGill University ran an event that amassed support from students calling for McGill to divest from its over $15 million in holdings in companies with ties to Uyghur forced labour in China. 

Today, the McGill administration continues its historical pattern of stonewalling students. On April 27, students built an encampment on campus to force the administration to listen to their demands, which included the disclosure of all academic partnerships with Israeli institutions and divestment from holdings that directly or indirectly support Israel’s occupation of Palestine. At the time of publication, the encampment is ongoing, and the administration has filed two unsuccessful injunctions to have it removed through police force instead of engaging in meaningful negotiations about the students’ demands. Yet there are solidarity networks across the university, including with groups in the sciences: On March 21, the McGill Graduate Association of Physics Students called for a condemnation of Israel’s actions and McGill’s divestment from its financial holdings complicit in the genocide. The group also pledged to investigate its own holdings and report them, then divest from any complicit companies. 

The effort to transition university partnerships away from military interests almost mirrors the green transition: achingly slow but damningly urgent. The UK-based group Demilitarise Education (DED) envisions a multi-step process of cutting ties and reinvesting elsewhere, beginning with the signing of a treaty that calls upon universities to publicly disclose any current defence partnerships and commit to not signing any new contracts with military companies. No such pledge currently exists in Canada. “This lays out a process of transparency ... not taking up any new contracts of arms companies, then beginning to plan divestment,” explains Jinsella, DED’s co-founder and executive director. It opens the door to policy changes and eventual reinvestment in peaceful, sustainable industries, she adds. 

What comes after divestment? Even if institutions were to decouple from companies complicit in strikes on civilians, the underlying logic of extraction that enables this connection between science and war would remain. From mining projects on unceded territory to Western studies of Indigenous knowledge systems, academic research often involves taking something out of its context and presenting it as new information. Within the for-profit models of academia and industry, any scientist’s goal of knowledge for its own sake is superseded by what knowledge will make the most money. 

SFTP Canada supports complete divestment from Israeli companies, and has taken it a step further by denouncing scientific imperialism in a broader sense, writing on its website: “Futures of AI are experimentally tested in occupied Palestine; legacies of racial science live on in eugenicist anti-Palestinian slurs; technological research assumes the inevitability of capitalist domination of the globe.” Not all progress is good progress, especially when it depends on exploitation.

To decouple the sciences from this logic of extraction would require a lot of work. Lee, the SFTP organizer, says it’s necessary for “the way that we do science, the methodology that we employ as scientists” to be fundamentally overhauled. “We are currently engaging in a practice of science that is literally driven by capital and for capital extraction,” she says. Pivoting research away from combat-driven interests would be one way to start. For every targeted missile developed, couldn’t there be infrastructure built in Indigenous communities that still don’t have access to clean water? For every armoured vehicle exported from this country, couldn’t there be an additional public transit line? 

But before the greater overhaul, the immediate consequences of the current scientific model need addressing; the survival of Palestinians is on the line. At the Université du Québec à Montréal, strong student action has culminated in a rare show of solidarity: At the end of March, every student union adopted a mandate to boycott Israeli companies profiting from the occupation. It’s the first time this has happened at a university in Canada. Just one step in the direction of divestment, the mandate is a resounding call to resist institutional complicity in genocide. It chips away at the crushing myth of scientific neutrality, instead revealing how taking a side is liberatory—a movement toward true academic freedom. ⁂

Madison McLauchlan is a freelance journalist and a reporter at the Investigative Journalism Foundation. Based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, she writes for websites, magazines and elevator screens.