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In which we’ve lost the scientific argument

Posted on 7 March 2026 by Jennifer Rohn

Montage of the 2010 Science is Vital rally

From the archives: Science is Vital rally, London 2010 (RIP Colin Blakemore, being interviewed with me in the lower left panel) Most photos by Joe Dunckley

Today in the United States, researchers are marching in Washington DC and across the country in a Stand Up for Science National Day of Action. Their problems are admittedly a lot heavier than ours here in the UK, although a friend emailed yesterday musing whether something like Science Is Vital, the street rally and affiliated political activities I co-founded back in 2010, might be needed to protest the recent clumsy funding pause enacted by the UK Research Councils.

Sometimes I’m surprised people even remember Science Vital. But scientists marching in the streets, so commonplace now, was actually rather a rare thing back then. So perhaps it did stick in the mind.

I messaged back that maybe so, but it was definitely a younger person’s game. Besides, things have changed so drastically in the world in the meantime that the whole endeavour now feels rather quaint.

A decade ago, in my frequent university science communication lectures, I’d talk passionately about the need for scientists to connect with the public, to engage in dialogue, be open and transparent about how their work could help make the world a better place. Now (as recently as last week), I stand in front of the undergraduates – many glued to their phones as I speak – and admit that, actually, there no longer seems much point.

How can anything I say counteract the toxic deluge of misinformation that firehoses us on a daily basis? Politicians can look the camera in the eye and tell us that black is white, with absolutely no repercussions. A Health Secretary in one of the most powerful nations on earth can proclaim that vaccines cause harm, and peddle unproved snake-oil alternatives while preventable childhood diseases sweep through the land.

How can one well-meaning scientist counter that? Or even a million? The other side is bankrolled by dead-eyed billionaires.

So yes, it seems I’ve grown cynical in my old age. Having lost the rational argument against a bunch of grifters, we may now be beyond the point of no return. The pendulum will one day swing back, of course, but perhaps not in my lifetime.

In the meantime, ask the earnest undergrads in the front row who are actually paying attention, what can we do?

What, indeed?

Posted in Nostalgia, Policy, Politics, Science Is Vital, Science talking, students, Teaching | Comments Off on In which we’ve lost the scientific argument

Intimations of Mortality

Posted on 5 March 2026 by Henry Gee

Less than a week after the death of my friend, the palaeontologist Hans-Dieter Sues, I learn today that another friend, the zoologist Alan Wilson, has also passed. Hans died at home  — peacefully, but unexpectedly. He was 70. Alan died in a plane crash in Namibia. It is possible, even likely, that he was the pilot — and as far as I can tell from the pictures it was a plane he’d built himself. He was 62. Hans was a few years older than I am. Alan, a year younger.

So, my friends, seize the day. Don’t put off that project. That thing you wanted to do but keep postponing. Tell those you love how much. And hug your dog (other pets may be available). Do it every day. You never know, it may be your last.

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Blue Suede Shoes

Posted on 2 March 2026 by rpg

I’d washed the car for the occasion, but it rained again on Friday, liquefying the mud that had started to dry in the potholes, so that by the time I got to Lincoln I wondered why I’d bothered.

The day was grey with the drizzle interrupted only by periods of actual rain, and the cloudbase persistently low. There would be no Red Arrows; it wasn’t a day for flying.

I’d bought a silk RAF tie to go with the black suit; a purple rose in my buttonhole.

The funeral director told me where to stand, and then my Uncle John came over.

“Nobody told me… I want to carry, too.”

Then Uncle Bill walked up. “Yes. Me too.”

The director began his briefing again.

“When the casket comes out you put your hands here—” he said.

“No,” said Bill, “It’s not the ‘casket’. It’s our brother.” I nodded.

Then,

“Thank you,” and dad came out of the hearse, for the last leg of his final journey. We held him, then lifted him onto our shoulders.

Bill and I linked arms; John was front right, with the only professional pallbearer in front of me.

“Thank you,” again, then, “Left, right, left… good.”

We lowered him onto the catafalque—Bill is the tallest of all of us, so I had to take most of the weight for a moment, but we managed the job smoothly enough: the funeral director commended us at least three times for doing a good job. Writing this, I’ve suddenly realized why my right wrist—injured a month ago—suddenly is hurting again.

I found a place between my daughters on the front row, picked up the order of service. We sang I Vow to Thee My Country—at least, some voices were piped and some of the mourners sang; every time I opened my mouth to try to form words I cried and nothing more would come out.

Afterwards, I ran to fetch my umbrella, and sheltered mam as she leaned on my arm back to to my sister’s car. We drove past the Bomber Command memorial and into Waddington for the wake. Brown food and poor beer. But it was good to reconnect with my uncles, at least.

Then the long drive home, raining most of the way but with a brightening of the sky as I approached North Weald.

There were no Red Arrows on Friday. But they will fly again.

Bye, dad.

 

Posted in dad, personal | Comments Off on Blue Suede Shoes

Looking Back, Moving Forward

Posted on 2 March 2026 by Athene Donald

This post is crossposted from the Royal Society’s own blog, appearing on March 2nd 2026.

From March 2025 to March 2026, The Royal Society has been commemorating the 80th anniversary of the election of the first women Fellows and honouring the achievements of women in STEM.

In 1945 the Royal Society finally admitted its first female Fellows: the crystallographer Kathleen Lonsdale and the biochemist Marjory Stephenson. It had taken quite a while to reach this point after the first woman was nominated in 1902.  That was Hertha Ayrton, whose nomination was thrown out on the grounds that she was a married woman and therefore had no standing under the legal system of the time. However, even after the passing of the 1919 Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act, there was no immediate move to nominate other women. It took until 1943 for this subject to be seriously revisited, leading (after the Fellowship had been consulted, of course all men) to the election of these first two trail-blazing women in 1945.

Since then, the number of women in the Fellowship has slowly grown to its present percentage of around 14%. That is still a disappointingly low proportion, but looking at the rate of recent elections it can be seen that, averaging over the past five years, the percentage of women elected each year has been 27.6% to the Fellowship and 29.4% to Foreign Membership. Not yet good, not yet anywhere near parity, but a healthy increase. Sadly, these things take time and in many of the disciplines within the Royal Society’s remit, the pool of senior women who could be nominated also remains stubbornly low and well below 50%.

So, what needs to be done now, after 80 years of slow progression? There is a fundamental problem about the pipeline of female talent starting out. This is particularly acute in my field of the physical sciences.

The message conveyed to too many girls and young women is that subjects like computing, engineering or physics are not for them.  We need to counter this at all levels of society, but change has to start within the school environment.  . Everyone has a part to play in countering such unhelpful stereotypes, and demonstrating that everyone is welcome within the scientific community across all disciplines.

Talent needs to be celebrated wherever it is found, regardless of sex, skin colour or socioeconomic status.  The Royal Society, as an institutionhas to ensure it that principle: be it in the portraiture on its walls or the prizes it awards; the composition of its committees or its fellowships at every stage. .

Only then will the Royal Society be fully representative of the scientific population, ready to do its best for the future of science.

Posted in Hertha Ayrton, Kathleen Lonsdale. Margery Stephenson, portraits, Royal Society, Women in science | Comments Off on Looking Back, Moving Forward

In which I ponder: could scientific angst beat nuclear war in a fair fight?

Posted on 1 March 2026 by Jennifer Rohn

When you are a scientist, your daily concerns revolve around mundane issues, so mundane that most normal people would struggle to recognise them as urgent: primarily funding woes, like I wrote about last week. But also publications, teaching, the dozen new academic chores that sprout from the hydra’s bleeding neck each time you finally manage to chop off a head. (This metaphor is brought to you by a recent Bluesky exchange about the surprising goriness of Ancient Greek mythology.)

All this stuff is vital, urgent and ever-pressing to me in my little academic bubble. It feels, sometimes, like the most important thing in the world. And it can consume all of my emotional energy, until my tank is empty.

But there is a bigger world out there, beyond the lab. Most scientists I know are interested in many other topics: art, music, film, sport, theatre, literature. And politics – especially politics. Like me, they tend to list to the left on most issues, though of course not universally.

As I write, two countries with hefty nuclear arsenals are in the process of poking a lion with a very large pointy stick. A lion with a lot of powerful friends.

Perhaps some of us will shrug and think, well, nothing truly bad will come of it. After all, the pointy stick has been deployed many times over the past few months.

As a scientist, I can’t help wondering how we have all become so inured to violence – so inured that we forget that violence might well lead to serious consequences. We witness on our news feeds those rogue states (you know who you are) killing and bombing with limited oversight, so frequently that it sometimes does not seem as urgent as this grant, that scientific manuscript revision. It is so commonplace that some forget about cause and effect, in a way that people, like me, who grew up during the Cold War (think, existential dread punctuated by nuclear attack drills in school) never fully can.

But we do forget, as a society. We forget about the Butterfly Effect. We learned in school that World War I was catalysed by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. This event seems, today, almost quaint, that something so small could have led to something so catastrophic. Arguably, the person assassinated today was a hundred times more consequential. Yet surely these days we are buffered by so much news, by so much going on at once, so many small, daily insults, that one isolated act couldn’t really push us over the edge.

But what if, actually, it could?

It’s safe to assume that if the unthinkable does happen, the scholarly pursuit of science will be the first thing to grind to a halt.

And if this happens, it’s these funding and publication worries that will seem quaint, in the grand scheme of things.

Posted in Politics, staring into the abyss, The profession of science | Comments Off on In which I ponder: could scientific angst beat nuclear war in a fair fight?

What I Read In January and February

Posted on 28 February 2026 by Henry Gee

If my three regular readers noticed the absence of my usual monthly book blog, they did not see fit to remind me. If any apology is necessary, I have been very busy elsewhere, promoting The Wonder of Life on Earth; getting ready for the imminent release in paperback of The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire; working hard at the day job (by day I’m with the Submerged Log Company); and also developing a synopsis for what I hope will be my next book, working title The Taylor Swift Diet Workout. On occasion I have wondered why I continue this blog, as nobody reads it, except me, and, arguably, God.  I am wondering if blogs are old hat, and I should reinvent myself as a substack, if I could only think of it as anything other than a variety of club sandwich.

But I digress.

Given that I spend much of the day staring at text for a living, it takes a lot for me to stare at more text for pleasure, even if I had the time. So I listen to audiobooks. especially during the hour or so each day when my dogs drag me out for a walk. Only two of the seven six seven titles below appeared before mes yeux as print on paper. The rest were imbibed via mes oreilles. So here goes.

Mark Gattiss: The Man In Black The Complete Series 1-4. Mark Gattiss is a gifted writer, actor and connoisseur of old-fashioned horror stories. Here he is the sinister compere of a number of radio dramas mainly set in modern times and I suspect originally broadcast on the wireless. None of them really did it for me, but I suspect that what with all the alpha-male shouting and female shrieking (the misogyny of some of these stories does tend to wear thin rather quickly), these tales are best listened to in small doses. I also listened to a precursor of this, a series called Fear on 4, in which the compere was Edward De Souza, which was rather similar but also dredged up some of the old classics including one of my favourites, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, narrated by Anna Massey, which was a treat.

Steve Brusatte: The Story of Birds Following his books on dinosaurs and mammals, the man known affectionately chez Gee as ‘Dinosaur Steve’ has written this page-turner on the amazing and improbable story of the evolution of birds. Bird evolution is a hot issue in science right now so it’s great to have an up-to-the-minute popular account, written with Brusatte’s usual brio. DISCLAIMER: Steve is a personal friend and the publisher sent me a pre-release copy for a puff quote. It’s published in June.

John Le Carre The Spy Who Came In From The Cold Having become rather fond of Mick Herron’s Slough House spy thrillers last year, I sought to imbibe directly from the fountainhead. Set in the early 1960s very depths of the Cold War, veteran spy Alec Leamas poses as a defector to East Germany in order to infiltrate the East German apparatus and murder their brutal spymaster Hans-Dieter Mundt, who is apparently responsible for killing several British agents. While still in the UK Leamas forms a relationship with Liz Gold, a young British communist idealist, who also finds herself in East Germany as part of a Communist Party exchange mission. I won’t say more for fear of spoiling the labyrinthine plot, except to contrast Liz’s naive idealism with the pragmatism of Leamas and his handler, the self-effacing spymaster George Smiley and especially Smiley’s boss, the mysterious Control, through whose character we see that the methods used by Western and Eastern secret services are equally horrible. Excellent, if somewhat dispiriting.

John Le Carre Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy Here the action takes place  in 1973. Control is dead, Smiley has retired, and the Secret Intelligence Service is in a state of collapse. Karla, the Soviet spymaster, has broken every British spy-ring behind the Iron Curtain. Suspecting a mole at the heart of the Service, Smiley is brought out of retirement to plug the leak. The discovery has devastating consequences for all concerned, Smiley not the least.

David Mitchell Number 9 Dream This is an author whose works defy categorisation, though if I were forced to try, they would be fantasy. I have enjoyed two so far – The Cloud Atlas, and The Bone Clocks. Number 9 Dream is set entirely in contemporary Japan, and concerns Eiji Miyake, a twenty-year-old from an out-of-the-way island, who travels to the Big Bad and Bonkers city of Tokyo in search of the father he has never met. Thoroughly enjoyable, very funny and occasionally ultraviolent (Miyake gets mixed up with the yakuza) it is so intense that I could only manage a few pages at a time. If ever there were a novel that deserved the epithet ‘picaresque’, this is it. Mitchell does love his literary games, and the ‘Number 9’ in the title makes its appearance in several forms, either as nine, or 333, or in other ways. Loved it? I pitched headfirst into my ramen.

John Le Carre The Honourable Schoolboy This is the second novel (after Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) in the so-called ‘Karla’ series, but it can be read quite happily in isolation. The mole in the Secret Intelligence Service has been exposed, but at terrible cost: the credibility of the SIS is forever ruined, and the CIA (known as ‘The Cousins’) is muscling in. Everywhere the SIS is in retreat, which comes to the notice of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong, which discovers that the house where the spooks used to inhabit is deserted. One of the journalists is Jerry Westerby, occasional newshound, failed novelist, broke aristocrat (he is the ‘Honourable Schoolboy’ of the title) and undercover SIS agent, who George Smiley brings out of retirement to investigate the business of Hong Kong high-roller Drake Ko, OBE. who seems to be in receipt of a large amount of Soviet money. It also turns out that Ko has underworld connections throughout Southeast Asia — including a very highly placed source in ‘Red’ China that the SIS and the CIA would both love to get their hands on. It’s set just as the Vietnam War is ending, and in many locations — Tuscany, Cambodia (where the Khmer Rouge is in the ascendant), Laos and Thailand, as well as Hong Kong and dismal early 1970s London, and the settings are very evocative. Smiley is once again brought in to sniff out the target, but his relations with the Cousins are nearly as problematic as those with the erratic Westerby, the result being somewhat mixed. I’ve been listening to all the Smiley novels narrated by Simon Russell Beale, and they are a joy, making sense of an occasionally dense and over-elaborate style, transforming what might have been a hard read into an immersive experience. The Honourable Schoolboy is the best so far, nd I’d be surprised if it doesn’t make my end-of-year list.

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The Doing of Science

Posted on 25 February 2026 by Athene Donald

In my retirement I have more time to read than ever used to be the case, and I enjoy reading books about science, scientists and the way they have, both in the past and currently, approached their science and their lives. There are comparatively few autobiographies out there; I understand ‘memoir’ is not a popular genre with publishers right now, so we aren’t likely to see a flood of these hitting the shelves any time soon. Few books like Venki Ramakrishnan’s personal account of unravelling the ribosome, Gene Machine, or the somewhat harrowing account of her early life by Lindy Elkins-Tanton, A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman, describing how she surmounted many odds. Nor others like the sad story of Erin Zimmerman essentially being forced out of science by circumstances beyond her control in Unrooted. I find these books fascinating reading, but clearly publishers feel there is no money in them so, for scientists young and old, there are few accounts to get their teeth into, nor narratives to impart to non-scientists about how scientists go about their life and work.

I like picking quotes out of these books that either resonate with me or strike me as telling. This proved very helpful for quoting in my own 2023 book, Not Just for the Boys. In Venki’s book there is the wonderful description of the excitement and joy of research going well (in this case placing a protein in the 30S subunit, for those fascinated by the ribosome), that it was ‘like eating crisps. Once he did the first one, he couldn’t stop.’ Visions of a tube of Pringles spring to mind, to keep one going while dealing with some knotty problem. Or Donna Strickland’s slightly tongue in cheek description after winning the Nobel Prize:

“It is truly an amazing feeling when you know that you have built something that no one else ever has and it actually works. There really is no excitement quite like it — except for maybe getting woken up at 5 in the morning because the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation also think it was an exciting moment for the field of laser physics.”

Looking to a much earlier literature, I am currently reading the book Gary Wersky wrote in 1978, The Visible College, describing a ‘collective biography’ of five famous left-wing/communist scientists who flourished both before and after the second world war. In this book he spells out part of his motivation at the time:

“Scientists, by contrast, are almost complete strangers to most of us, because we do not know where they come from or how they spend their time. Indeed, having been denied access to their history and culture, we are often tempted to regard them as pretty uninteresting people.”

It seems to me that the general public gets little opportunity to gain insight into a scientist’s life: what makes us tick and what keeps us going when the going is (inevitably) tough, or spurs us on the way when finally things start going right. We probably do seem like ‘complete strangers’ to the majority of citizens. I think this is a gap in the published world. I believe it is a mistake, both because so much tax-payers money is put into science in one way or another, and democracy demands that people understand why this is money well spent (and it’s not just because science has to be instrumental), but also because science is a central part of our culture. Books on history, geography and allied topics are allowed to get quite technical, relying on much background knowledge to be fully understood. Yet somehow they are still regarded as suitable for mass markets (I would cite both Peter Frankopan’s The Earth Transformed and William Dalrymple’s The Golden Road in this category). Science isn’t treated in the same way. The publishing world seems to hold science to a different standard, or perhaps I mean holds the public to a different standard of knowledge so that only ‘popular’ science, assuming little prior knowledge, gets published as a trade book.

Science is a human endeavour, done by humans with all their faults (think Jim Watson, for instance) or virtues (Jocelyn Bell Burnell is a shining example of someone who gave away a vast prize – the Breakthrough Prize – to support scientists of the future who lack means to pursue their dreams). Why should the reading public, the typical citizen, not have access to accounts of what actually goes on in the lab to help them understand if it’s a career for them or their family? Science is too often treated as a strange place inhabited by nerds.

The mantra of ‘follow the science’ used during the pandemic by those who almost certainly had a poor grip of any of science’s constituent parts, was a somewhat dangerous mantra in that there is no ‘the’ in science. The uncertainties that accompanied early advice, the continuing lack of clarity over Long Covid, highlights that following ‘the’ science can be of limited use when knowledge itself is limited, but pushing against those limits is exactly how science progresses. Scientists today need to keep fighting against those who rail against, for instance, vaccinations and climate change. (This brings to mind another salutary recent book I’ve read: Science under Siege, which highlights the challenges scientists in those fields face as politics and money trumps knowledge and expertise.)

But if science is to be bundled away in the technical press, not opened up to the wider public as history so readily is, then much of the way that science proceeds – with taxpayers’ money – will be rendered obscure and therefore potentially ‘suspect’ or ‘not for me’, or just plain odd and irrelevant. I wish there were more books out there that talked about the actual ‘doing’ of science, that a teacher could read to enthuse their classes with some reality not some curriculum-based dry facts implying science is a solved problem not a wonderful puzzle. (And yes I know there are some fantastic books designed for young learners in the classroom about the science itself.) But we need more books that bring to life the life of science, that tell it like it is in the career of a researcher and which are accessible to the non-expert.  However, to date my own approaches to agents to try to pitch a book to help to fill the void have so far fallen on stoney ground. I will keep trying….

Posted in Books, Communicating Science, Donna Strickland, Research, Science Culture, The Visible College, thrills, Venki | Comments Off on The Doing of Science

In which we watch and wait

Posted on 22 February 2026 by Jennifer Rohn

People chatting in a lab

The lab family: a snapshot in time

Precarity is the one constant of academic science. Themes of instability thread themselves through everything we do: experiments that inexplicably cannot be repeated. Once-sound theories that fall into pieces as a result. Job contracts that end after only a few years; even permanent contracts vulnerable to systemic university redundancy plans. And of course: the funding that underpins all we do.

Labs are such a patchwork: as the head, you cobble together a shifting-sand group of people who start and stop at different times, overlapping with one another sometimes for years, other times, just a few weeks. Every person under your care is the product of a grant you have agonised over, often for months, submitted into a pool that can be as competitive as tankful of sharks scrabbling over a single piece of meat.

Once you welcome that person into your lab family, the clock is already ticking: 18 months, two years, maybe three if you’ve been lucky. As soon as they start, you are already worrying about the next grant, as you’ll need to put in multiple grants to ensure that one will succeed.

It’s not just the lab head feeling the strain; it’s much worse for the individual researchers, whose continuity in the system absolutely depends on that next position. Unlike me, they have no buffer system. While I can function for a while with a smaller team, even on life support, there is no such safety net for the individual team of one.

Which is why the news that a number of UK Research Council grant schemes were being temporarily paused, ahead of a reshuffle in priorities, came as such a shock to the research community. One of my own grants in progress was labelled “rejected” on the system just days before Christmas (even though it wasn’t due until March). Hundreds of other grants suffered similar fates, most tragically those that had already successfully passed a stage-one application with positive reviews.

We are all of us on edge, as we have to wait a few more months until we find out exactly when we can apply for grants again, and what those grants will look like. On edge, and in limbo.

For me, it could be a lot worse. I have a team of seven, a few of whom are funded through to 2027. We have four papers under review and even more than that number nearly ready to submit, so any grants I do submit are likely to be well-bolstered with evidence. In my field, there are a few funding charities with whom I have had success in the past, and which remain available. The Almighty Wellcome, too, is still up and running – although much as a road closure diverts all the traffic to somewhere else, people assume that these alternative sources will only become overwhelmed.

But the people I really worry about are the early-career researchers (ECR), the ‘teams of one’, who need to find their next post-doc, fellowship or faculty position. Anecdotally, I understand that the bleak scientific news from the United States has already driven an increase in overseas applicants to the UK and Europe – themselves saturated job markets that can ill-afford yet more contenders. A common way of taking on post-docs in my field, for example, is via the ‘project grant’ route: one of the paused schemes.

Even if I am able to submit a project grant in the summer, such is the protracted nature of the process that any associated position will take another year to become available. What happens to all the ECR who are ready to move on now, or in the next few months? There is the very real possibility that this strategic pause will actively drive young researchers out of academia – perhaps forever. It is a tragedy, all the worse for seeming wholly avoidable. Surely this pause could have been worked into the system seamlessly? Surely live grants could have been grandfathered in? None of it makes any sense.

For now, I try not to worry, and I’m busy making strategic plans which will allow me and my collaborators to move in any number of possible directions once the way is finally signposted. While I am no stranger to imposter syndrome, I also know, objectively, that my grant success rate has been high of late and that my area has been remarkably fashionable. I can weather this, from the lab perspective. And I will do all I can to support my team to cling onto their academic dreams despite the odds – heaven knows I could write a master class on that particular subject.

But for now, I can only watch and wait along with everybody else.

Posted in academia, careers, Research, Science Funding, staring into the abyss, The profession of science | Comments Off on In which we watch and wait

Conflicts of Interest

Posted on 15 February 2026 by Athene Donald

Many years ago, before I was even a professor and still a newbie when it came to sitting on decision-making committees, I had a very disturbing experience at one particular grant-giving meeting. The details of what, who and where aren’t important, but the behaviour of the Chair and his (yes, it was a man, though that’s probably not relevant) pals around the table is what I want to discuss. I wasn’t the only woman on the committee, but the other woman was out of the room, as it was a grant from her husband that was under discussion. Again, although this couple were quite unknown to me and their research far from my field, it was clear some of the others – including the Chair, who I’ll refer to as Prof A – knew the couple well.

On the face of it, the grant application was not well received and the referees’ reports were not supportive. The startling thing was when Prof A said ‘ah well, we all know what he was trying to say’ and wanted to argue that the proposal should be funded. Others around the table nodded that the guy was a good guy and the grant should be supported. I sat there gobsmacked. I was not alone. I may, in those far off days, have felt too far out of my depth and of insufficient seniority to object, but someone else did. (I’d like to think if no one else had spoken up, I would have done, but who knows at this distance in time.) They pointed out that interpreting what the applicant wanted to say in this case but not in any others, was unreasonable. In essence, that the committee were attempting to rewrite the application mentally and on the spot.  After some discussion, the proposal was scored (appropriately) quite lowly and we all moved on.

It left a very nasty taste in the mouth. Up till that point I had regarded Prof A as a good chair. He was business-like in general, kept the discussions moving on without allowing anyone to grandstand so that we kept to time, and held the committee together when there were internal tensions between what one might term the old guard who had one view of the field, and the more modern quantitative side. However, his manoeuvring on this occasion really shocked me and it made me wonder how much other grants had been steered to success (or failure) in more subtle ways. I may say, Prof A went on to a senior leadership role in the UK, and I did wonder (although our paths never crossed again) whether he still had this blind spot about his mates. This would have mattered greatly in that subsequent position.

I would like to think conflicts of interest are handled better now, with more explicit guidelines being common. However, they are differently interpreted between different bodies. Sometimes a grant-assessing committee requires anyone from the same institution as the applicant to leave the room. If the application is actually from, say, three universities, then numerous people may leave the room. Those left in the room may not be the experts, and it is hard to believe the applicant(s) are getting a fair hearing. I’m not sure what the answer is to this problem, but sometimes excluding someone from a Zoology department because an application from Maths in the same institution has applied may feel a bit like overkill.

Then, particularly with fellowships of different sorts, there is the question of who can be a referee. Sometimes a collaborator, who knows the individual well, is excluded because they’ve co-written papers (often a time limit of five years is put on that), or a PhD supervisor is ruled out, either (or both) of which can leave, particularly if anyone from your institution is also excluded, the early career researcher scrabbling around to find someone suitable. Excluding those who know an individual well means that references may come in that are very bland, offering little more insight than the stuff already available in the submitted paperwork.

Moving up the career ladder, it may not be simply your science that is being judged, but also leadership skills, the ability to chair meetings or effect change. But, again, those outside your institution may not have had much opportunity to see an individual act in these capacities. A colleague you know well through your research may have little to say about your strategizing.

I am minded to think through this as I wade through a pile of applications for early career overseas fellowships. In this case, someone at the intended home institution has to write a reference explaining their willingness to host the person concerned. These letters are intensely variable, in ways that may have no bearing on the candidate. Obviously, it’s good if the applicant and the host have had some interaction, but not when it is the student’s recent PhD supervisor who has just moved overseas and wants to take their student with them. That seems to me to be missing the point of the fellowships of broadening experiences. On the other hand, if it is the head of the overseas department, however strong a bond may have formed between applicant and the group they are going to work with, all that may appear on paper is a letter promising to provide space and IT support. That may be the bare minimum required, but it is not helpful. Sometimes one feels one email between hosting PI and applicant is all that has so far transpired, which does not give confidence either. But none of this may have anything to do with the strength of the applicant.

I’m not sure what the answer to this broad-ranging conundrum is. The more I think about how we judge others in the sciences (and probably elsewhere), the less confidence I have that any assessment can avoid one kind of bias or unfairness or another. One certainly doesn’t want the kind of behaviour that I started this post off with. But whose letter of reference should one trust to be totally objective? And can one exclude oneself, the reader and judge, from having one’s own biases (as opposed to scientific judgement) about the particular group or sub-discipline that turns up on the application form?

Posted in bias, fellowships, grant panels, Research, Science Culture | Comments Off on Conflicts of Interest

A year of inaction: why has the Royal Society allowed itself to be hollowed out by Elon Musk?

Posted on 11 February 2026 by Stephen

Colourful image from the webpage of the Royal Society. Background is a mix of images of electronic circuits and silicon wafers. Text reads: "Welcome to the Royal Society. We are the independent scientific academy of the UK, dedicated to promoting excellence in science for the benefit of humanity."

Professor Sir Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society, would have you believe that concerns raised within and without the Society about the behaviour of their honoured fellow, Elon Musk FRS, are because some people think he’s a “bad person”. Nurse’s predecessor as President, Sir Adrian Smith, repeatedly sought characterise the concerns as differences of political opinion so that any attempt to bring Musk to book would amount to interference with the right of fellows to hold and express controversial views. Several other Fellows have, I understand, dismissed the concerns over Musk’s actions as a storm in a social media teacup.

If these various claims were true, the Royal Society’s inaction in respect of Mr Musk would indeed be warranted. There is of course some political character to Musk’s activities, since over the past several years he has been very politically engaged, campaigning enthusiastically for Donald Trump and even for a time worked within the Trump administration (as head of DOGE); and it is true that some of those who have objected to Musk’s continued fellowship within the Royal Society clearly don’t like his politics. 

But the heart of the matter is not to do with political differences. It is to do with the fact that Musk actions amount to clear contraventions of the Fellows’ code of conduct. Given the ongoing obfuscation and confusion around the issues raised by this troubling episode, I think it is important to put on record carefully and straightforwardly why the Royal Society’s failure to address Musk’s breaches of their code has so undermined the integrity and authority of our national academy of science. 

Why does the Royal Society have a code? It explains that in the preamble: 

“The Royal Society’s fundamental purpose, reflected in its founding Charters of the 1660s, is to recognise, promote, and support excellence in science and to encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity. The credibility of the Society’s work in pursuit of these objectives rests in large part upon its reputation. This in turn rests upon the reputation of the Fellows and Foreign Members of which the Society is composed, and their upholding of high standards in their work and conduct both inside and outside of the Society.”

And how exactly has Musk’s conduct fallen below the standards enshrined in the code? I want to focus here on what I see as the primary concerns, steering clear of those that arguably have some partisan or political character. They can be simply stated:

First: following Musk’s acquisition of X he removed the teams who worked to counteract the spread of deceptive material and by reconfiguring the algorithm to boost his own posts, has become one of the most prominent sources of misinformation on the platform. 

Second: as head of DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), he played a leading role in grievously, chaotically and at times unlawfully undermining federal research agencies and programmes in the USA. 

Third, and most seriously: also as head of DOGE he bragged about defunding USAID, an action that is reckoned to have killed tens of thousands people by suddenly depriving them of critical healthcare and to result in up to 14 million deaths by 2030, according to a study published in the Lancet.

It is difficult to see how spreading misinformation can “support excellence in science” given the long-established ethos of the scientific community that truth-claims should be consonant “with observation and with previously confirmed knowledge”; or how drastic and disorderly cuts to research and aid budgets that have cost some people their jobs and others their lives “encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity”. 

Musk’s actions appear to be diametrically opposed to the mission and values of the Royal Society. As the code makes plain, his Fellowship of the Royal Society is “a privilege predicated on adherence to particular standards of conduct.” By accepting the honour of fellowship he has agreed that he “shall not act or fail to act in any way which would undermine the Society’s mission or bring the Society into disrepute” (Section 1.5). The code also clearly explains that this stricture applies to statements or conduct inside and outside the Royal Society: “When speaking or publicising statements in a personal capacity, Fellows and Foreign Members must still strive to uphold the reputation of the Society and those who work in it, and be mindful that what is said or stated in a personal capacity could still impact the Society” (Section 4.19); and “When acting in other capacities (for example, as an employee of another organisation), Fellows and Foreign Members must be mindful that what is done in other capacities may still reflect on the Society” (section 4.20).

Fellows are also expected to understand the consequences that flow from breaches of the code; they must “acknowledge the responsibility and right of the Society to ensure this Code of Conduct is adhered to, and accept that if a breach of the Code of Conduct has occurred this may trigger enforcement action (including temporary or permanent suspension as a Fellow […]” (section 5.21)

To date, more than a year since concerns about Musk’s breaches of the code of conduct were first raised, the leadership of the Royal Society has failed to take any meaningful action or to explain how his actions do not, in their view, contravene the code. When Nurse wrote to Musk last year detailing the concerns raised by his actions, he got no reply. It is hard to imagine how this disregard for the Royal Society and its code could be any clearer, yet the Society took no further action. 

Arguably, the leadership of the Royal Society is now also in breach of its own code of conduct. As section 1.3 makes plain: “The Society strives to act in accordance with the highest standards of public life. In their work with the Society, all Fellows and Foreign Members are expected to follow the Nolan principles of public life, namely: selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership.” 

Where is the accountability, the openness, the honesty and the leadership? Nurse has claimed in his interview with the Financial Times that the Royal Society “should not start ‘making judgments’ about the ‘character and behaviour’ of fellows”, a statement that is in essence a denial of the Society’s code of conduct. In failing to call Mr Musk to account over his actions and in repeatedly declining to explain why they believe he has not fallen foul of their code, our national academy gives the very strong impression of having abandoned its values. 

This has gravely weakened the legitimacy of the Royal Society’s claim to speak on behalf of the wider UK scientific community. The seriousness of this failure should not be underestimated. At a time when we need reputable institutions so speak up for high standards of integrity and evidence in public discourse, the Royal Society has – for reasons still known only itself – spiked its own guns. 

This affair has dragged on for far too long and barely makes the news anymore. Instead the headlines are dominated by politicians riding to power on waves of misinformation and clinging to it – as in the case of the recent killings of two US citizens on the streets of Minneapolis – with flat denials of the evidence of our own eyes. In the face of the daily degradation of public discourse by lies, deceit and conspiracy theories transmitted across social media, many of them touching on scientific matters such as vaccines, climate science and the wealth of human diversity, the Royal Society stands almost mute. Instead of facing the most serious challenge to its values in decades, it has averted its gaze and now clearly wishes this whole Musk business would just go away. But it will not go away. The Society now faces the shame and embarrassment of the fact that a company run by one of its Fellows is being investigated for the creation and distribution of child sexual abuse material. 

It isn’t just on matters of science that we must push back on misinformation spread in bad faith. The bedrock of our democracy is being eroded, as Eliot Higgins and Natalie Martin have described so succinctly in a recent Demos report that warns of the “epistemic collapse” due to the loss of trusted information supply chains and the breakdown of relationships between citizens and the state. Their verification, deliberation and accountability framework offers a tools for diagnosing the strengths and weaknesses in our democratic processes. Simply put, they identify three foundational functions of democracy: 

    • Citizens must be able to know what is true. 
    • They must be able to see that their voices count in shaping public reasoning. 
    • And they must be able to hold power to account.

The Royal Society is hardly the main player when it comes to shoring up democracy, but it is an important one. Its failure to properly deal with Musk, particularly with regard to his spread of misinformation, has weakened each of the three pillars identified in the Demos report. Higgins and Martin are doing the hard thinking that we might once have looked for at the Royal Society. Our national academy should have a strong voice in the wider debates about truth, trust and accountability, but first it must put its own house in order. 

I offered suggestions over six months ago about how it might go about this. They will bear repeating and updating since so little has happened in the meantime.

First, the Royal Society needs to demonstrate that it is willing to deal effectively and proportionately with breaches of its code of conduct. Although President Sir Paul Nurse has raised his breaches of the code in correspondence with Musk, even going so far as to suggest that Musk might wish to resign his fellowship, when no reply the Royal Society did nothing. Their failure to respond to Musk’s indifference to their values sends the message that these values have little meaning for the Society itself. It is frankly intolerable that the Royal Society has allowed itself to be hollowed out in this way.

Second, the Royal Society needs to update its code of conduct to deal with cases where one of its Fellows pivots from science to more questionable activities, political or otherwise. The assumptions underlying the current draft – that Fellows would be practising scientists – clearly no longer hold. The updated code has to address cases where Fellows engage in behaviours that are divorced from evidence and truth-telling, while explicitly still allowing for freedom of speech, political pluralism and robust, good-faith debate.

Finally, the Society needs to deliver on its vague promises of action and communicate its plans to advocate for the value of science and scientific values amid the rising tides of misinformation. Having been mute for more than a year now, it has to rediscover a voice that truly speaks for the community it claims to represent.

 

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