It wasn’t exactly what I’d pictured myself doing on a Saturday morning, least of all the morning of my wedding anniversary. 

Still, sitting with my fist clenched, arm splayed across a table as a nurse searched for a vein seemed like the right place to be. 

Like a number of Sullivan County residents, I’d received an email from researchers at New York University, asking if I might be willing to participate in a study of our rural food desert and the impact it has on diabetes risk. All they’d asked was that I drive to the county’s Public Health offices and spend a few minutes having my blood drawn and offering a urine sample, followed by a survey and a few more urine samples collected at home. 

Me? Help science? 

Even if they hadn’t dangled a small Visa gift card (which they did), my answer was an immediate and very enthusiastic yes. 

The field of science hasn’t exactly had it easy these past few years, has it? In a Pew Research Report released in early 2020 – before the pandemic delineated bold lines in the sand between those who strongly believe in the power of scientists and those who doubt them at every turn – only 35 percent of Americans reported feeling a great deal of confidence that scientists act in the public interest and four in 10 said scientists should steer clear of public policy debates that focus on scientific issues. 

By the time Pew released another report in 2022, faith in scientists had eroded significantly with just 29 percent of Americans reporting they felt a great deal of confidence that the nation’s scientists act in the public interest, dropping overall levels below pre-pandemic totals. 

At the same time, of course, scientists have kept on chugging along despite the hate, bringing us the first-ever vaccine against a parasitic disease (malaria), unearthing new species of early humans, developing human heart replacements out of titanium and, well, thousands more big and small innovations and discoveries in the past three years. 

And many of those innovations and discoveries have been made possible by people like you and me, so-called “citizen scientists” who are willing to give even just an hour or two to provide science with the data needed to move forward on a path to discovery. 

Without people willing to give up a little time (and in this case a vial of blood and a bit of urine), science doesn’t move forward. Change doesn’t happen. 

And in a county ranked as one of the unhealthiest in the entire state (as a reminder, we rank 60th out of 62 counties), change is the one thing we may need the most. 

I’ll give over a Saturday morning for that. How about you?