Look out, Washington, here comes another march. Scientists are preparing to converge on the nation’s capital on Earth Day, April 22, for what they’re billing as a “March for Science.” The effort began as a campaign by scientists who fear the new administration in the White House may not be as supportive of certain public policies as they’d prefer.

The organizers of the march say it will be nonpartisan, but they intend for it to impact policymakers and to give credibility to scientific consensus. Some scientists, though, doubt the claims of nonpartisanship—particularly after the organizers stated their diversity goals on their website.

“We are committed to centralizing, highlighting, standing in solidarity with, and acting as accomplices with black, Latinx, API, indigenous, Muslim, Jewish, women, people with disabilities, poor, gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, trans, non-binary, agender, and intersex scientists and science advocates,” the organizers wrote in a statement they later removed.

Even evolutionary biologist and self-proclaimed atheist Jerry Coyne is concerned about such politicization of science. “After all, stuff like ‘immigration policy,’ ‘native rights,’ and many other issues of social justice are not, as the organizers maintain, ‘scientific issues,’” he wrote on his blog. “They are moral issues, which means they reflect worldviews and preferences that are not objective.”

Some scientists say they will support the march only if it stays out of politics. The CEO of the American Society of Plant Biologists told the ScienceInsider blog his organization would likely support the participation of its members in the march if the event maintained an emphasis on “a positive and apolitical message regarding empirical science and its role in decision making.”

Robert S. Young, a coastal geologist at Western Carolina University, believes that scientists marching in opposition to a newly elected Republican president will only reinforce a partisan divide. He wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times that the march could “turn scientists into another group caught up in the culture wars and further drive the wedge between scientists and a certain segment of the American electorate.”

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Researchers at the University of North Carolina and the University of British Columbia have developed a promising new method for treating glioblastomas, a common and deadly form of brain cancer, using reprogrammed skin cells.

Glioblastomas are difficult to eradicate because they grow rapidly and shoot tendrils into the brain that doctors can’t see and drugs don’t reach. The standard treatment is surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, but in many patients the tumor returns within a few months.

In a study published in the Feb. 1 issue of Science Translational Medicine, the researchers harvested skin cells from a patient and then reprogrammed them to become neural stem cells—cells with an innate ability to seek out brain cancer cells. Capitalizing on this ability, the scientists engineered the stem cells to carry therapeutic drugs: Once the stem cells reach cancer cells, they launch the drugs at them and kill them. Because the drugs are carried only by the neural stem cells, they don’t circulate throughout the patient’s body, so side effects are reduced.

Scientists already knew stem cells could treat tumors, but obtaining them was a difficult and lengthy process. “Speed is essential,” co-author Shawn Hingtgen said in a press release. “Brain cancer patients don’t have weeks and months to wait for us to generate these therapies.” The new technique is fast and simple, he said.

The researchers have used the technique only in lab dishes and on mouse models so far, but believe human clinical trials are just one or two years away. —J.B.