Tolerance on trial.

Next year will mark the 100th anniversary of the Scopes trial, a 1925 court case in the US state of Tennessee on the teaching of evolution in public schools. John Scopes was tried for violating the Butler Act, a state rule that declared unlawful any teaching that denied the creation of man according to the Bible. The highly publicized event put an intense spotlight on William Jennings Bryan, a populist presidential candidate and religious fundamentalist who was counsel for the government, and on Clarence Darrow, a liberal agnostic and social justice advocate who defended Scopes.

The great work continues.

In the highly acclaimed 1991 play , which explores AIDS in the United States in the 1980s, one of the characters muses about the nature of knowledge and novelty: "Imagination can't create anything new, can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions." Although the scene's intent is to ponder the limits of human experience and how the constraints of day-to-day reality are inescapable, the description of imagination aptly describes the creative shuffling that can lead to breakthroughs, like the ones recognized by at this time every year. In naming the drug lenacapavir as the 2024 Breakthrough of the Year, acknowledges the next, but by no means final, step in the drive to fight HIV/AIDS, where the rigors of the laboratory and the needs of humanity are inseparable.

Trust edges up-slightly.

The Pew Research Center survey on trust in science and researchers is eagerly awaited every year by science policy experts and communicators. This year's results, released last week, give a small, but meaningful, reason to be optimistic: Trust in scientists, which took a substantial hit during the pandemic, is starting to recover. The survey, conducted in October 2024 with 9593 adults across the United States, estimates that 76% of Americans now have a great deal or fair amount of confidence in scientists to act in the public's best interests.