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While traveling to the July 2025 ALS and Related Motor Neuron Disease Gordon Research Conference (GRC), I scrolled social media and was confronted with numerous images of emaciated babies in the arms of emaciated parents. My mind went to my mother’s adult cousin Lola, who weighed 65 pounds after being liberated from Auschwitz. I reflexively opened my computer to add a Palestinian flag to my acknowledgment slide, alongside the words “Never again is for everyone” and “Stop starving Gaza.” During my GRC presentation, I made no mention of this content, but it was present for all to see alongside my acknowledgment of co-authors, collaborators and funding sources.
Days later, I was informed by email that several attendees had complained about my presentation in conference evaluations because my silent expression of grief for Palestinian suffering made them “uncomfortable.” I was told that GRC policy precludes presenters from making “political” or “personal” commentary, which is “a distraction” from the science.
Ultimately, I was not charged with a conduct violation. Indeed, the GRC code of conduct says nothing that precludes displaying political or personal content. Despite there being no written policy upon which to base the complaints made against me, I was asked to “exclude political slides from future presentations” and was warned that “future conference leadership and community members will ultimately decide through the invitation and acceptance process whether a future slide was too distracting” for me to be permitted to participate in subsequent conferences.
The GRC is not unique. Across academia, those who have dared mention the destruction of Palestinian people in Gaza, in what most experts characterize as a genocide, have faced censure and even job termination. Students and faculty alike have been punished for constitutionally protected speech critical of Israeli policies. To name a few prominent examples, recall the fates of Michael Eisen, eLife’s former editor in chief; Steven Thrasher, who was denied tenure at Northwestern University; and Katherine Franke, former faculty member at Columbia University.
Like eLife, Northwestern, Columbia and many other institutions, the GRC opted to censure political speech about Gaza on the grounds that it may make some people uncomfortable and that it is a “distraction” from the scientific content. But the argument that political speech has no place at a scientific conference contradicts a beautiful history of scientists engaging with pressing political issues. In fact, scientists of conscience have often taken part in social justice movements.
Academic researchers actively participated in protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s. For example, the 1970 Biological Regulatory Mechanisms GRC featured sessions on the Vietnam War, the People’s Park at Berkeley and the Black Panther Party. Similar political discourse and even protest took place at the 1970 Cold Spring Harbor Symposium and the 1969 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
More recently, scientists have engaged to support the Black Lives Matter movement, the climate justice movement and in protests to defend science itself. Indeed, political activism among scientists has been surging in recent years.
But there is a dangerous Palestine exception to free speech in academia, which is being used to instill fear, to repress academic freedom and to chill freedom of expression. Censorship of academics for speech on Palestine has become part of a broader assault on academic freedom and the integrity of research and scholarship. We academics cannot allow our institutions to become unwitting tools of political repression. We must refuse attempts to silence our speech. Discomfort is not grounds for repression, and morality is not a distraction from our mission.
