This year, 2025, is the 100th anniversary of the famous so-called “Scopes Monkey trial.”
John Thomas Scopes was a teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, who was charged on May 5, 1925, with violating Tennessee’s Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of human evolution in Tennessee schools. He was tried, found guilty, and fined $100.
Scopes challenged the Tennessee law forbidding the teaching of evolution. The case arose when, seeking to test the constitutional validity of the Butler Act, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) placed advertisements in Tennessee newspapers offering to pay the expenses of any teacher willing to challenge the law.
Seeking publicity for the failing town of Dayton, local businessmen recruited high school biology teacher John T. Scopes to teach the theory of evolution to challenge a Tennessee law that forbade it in public schools.
Famous attorneys joined the prosecution and the defense. Clarence Darrow was one of three lawyers sent to Dayton by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Darrow was a legendary lawyer. Before volunteering to serve as John Scopes’s attorney, Darrow had built a national practice by losing only a single murder defense. Labor leaders Eugene V. Debs and William D. Haywood, wealthy University of Chicago students and accused murderers Nathan Freudenthal Leopold Jr. and Richard A. Loeb (known more commonly as Leopold and Loeb), and Henry Sweet, a Detroit African American charged with murder in a civil rights upheaval, numbered among his most well-known clients.
William Jennings Bryan joined the prosecution as an expert on the Bible. He was an American lawyer, orator, and politician. He was a dominant force in the Democratic Party, running three times as the party’s nominee for President of the United States.
The trial was broadcast over the radio – the nation’s first such live broadcast. Reporters assembled from as far away as London and Hong Kong. H. L. Mencken chronicled the trial for the Baltimore Sun. The jury needed only nine minutes to find Scopes guilty. The Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the teacher’s conviction but upheld the law against teaching evolution.
As I read about this trial as a youth, I was highly critical of the State of Tennessee for being so backward and so anti-science. It never entered my frame of thought that 100 years after the monkey trial, we would have a national campaign – led by the federal government – denying our advancements in science.
But there it is in our face every day as the deranged Secretary of Health and Human Subjects campaigns to turn back the clock on the country’s successes in saving lives. If he continues, many more Americans will die.
Kennedy is a long-time leading anti-vaccine activist who has continued his unscientific work, unbelievably as head of the federal government’s health bureaucracy, including the unproven claim that vaccines cause autism.
In addition to dismissing scientific experts who review scientific programs, Kennedy is stopping key prevention research. He cancelled nearly $500 million in contracts for mRNA vaccines. This research produces the kind of shot that was first used during the Covid-19 pandemic, but the health secretary has been sharply critical of the technology.
It is the latest blow to research on this technology. In May, the Department of Health and Human Services revoked a nearly $600 million contract to the drugmaker Moderna to develop a vaccine against bird flu.
The new cancellations dismayed scientists, many of who regard RNA shots as the best option for protecting Americans in a pandemic. Unlike traditional vaccines, which can take years to develop and test, mRNA vaccines can be designed and tested within months. The technology won a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2023.
But vaccine skeptics have long distrusted it, and Mr. Kennedy has been sharply critical, once calling Covid shots “the deadliest vaccine ever made.”
“By issuing this wildly incorrect statement, the secretary is demonstrating his commitment to his long-held goal of sowing doubts about all vaccines,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health. “Had we not used these lifesaving mRNA vaccines to protect against severe illness, we would have had millions of more Covid deaths,” she said.
Anti-science de ja vu. This time with life-and-death implications.
