Holden Thorp, a chemist and longtime university administrator, became editor-in-chief of Science and five other journals published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science last October, just two months before Covid-19 started spreading around the world.

Now Thorp’s editorial page is at the forefront of a movement—with scientists casting aside the old stereotype of apolitical disinterest.

WIRED: So how bad are things, really.

But none of those things ever really became the dominant story of what we were publishing in the journal and what the rest of the country and world were thinking about.

It's pretty hopeful that in another year we’ll have people vaccinated and we’ll be able to go back to the way things were, but the situation—both in terms of the virus and the ways in which the administration has tried to undermine scientists and scientific research—is something we’ve never seen before?

Well, there’s that, but there’s also just the constant drumbeat that scientists and science are somehow out to get the administration.

They go home, they’re exhausted, they turn on the news, and their president is on TV saying the opposite of what they’re finding, and trying to imply that somehow they're hurting the world by doing what they're doing.

Is what’s happening to scientists now really any different than the gaslighting that anyone who studies climate change might have felt, though.

I think what is different here is the speed of it and the degree to which the president is willing to go into the Rose Garden or the briefing room and just say things that are blatantly untrue?

The first really tough editorial that I wrote about Covid-19 was called “Do Us a Favor.” It was in March, when Trump sent out the tweet saying, you know, Covid-19 is just the flu, and Kellyanne Conway and Larry Kudlow were on TV saying the virus was contained.

And Trump had a meeting with pharmaceutical representatives where he said of vaccine research, “Do me a favor, speed it up.” And to me that “Do me a favor, speed up a vaccine” was one of the worst things a president could say to scientists—even corporate scientists at pharma companies.

That’s not something you can just say and expect to have it happen.

And I think the president thinks that he can just say something forcefully enough and make it true.

That’s not really how science works.

And still he was saying all those things that he was saying in March.

To hear that in his own voice, I think, was one of the most devastating things that has ever happened to science.

All the snark that scientists have been putting up with, from the news and from their family members who are Fox News people—all these things that we were supposedly doing to sabotage the world were all lies and knowingly delivered, planted, by the president of the United States.

But one of the arguments those Fox News people, as you say, will make is that when scientists voice political opinions, they call into question the motivations behind the research they’re touting?

Now you’re just in the political fray, right.

These are all costs of scientists saying, “Oh, we’re just going to sit over here in our white coats and let people conclude what they want to.” You know, there is no apolitical science.

That’s why Bob Woodward having the president on tape saying, “I’m trying to play this down, it doesn't just affect the old”—no one’s trying to argue that he didn’t say those things.

You couldn’t just show them a really good PowerPoint and bring them around.

I think that's what we all suspected, but the force of hearing the president’s voice confirming it is, like I said, psychically devastating?

Have you gotten pushback about taking a more aggressive posture, becoming overtly political, from other scientists.

I think that what I’ve been trying to do is to create a voice for science.

Of course, there’s not one single voice for science, but I think there’s a large amount of coherence among scientists about all of this.