Four months after my open letter calling on the Royal Society to take action over Elon Musk FRS’s breaches of their code of conduct had attracted thousands of signatures from the scientific community, but only a very muted response from that most learned organisation, I was beginning to think I should let the matter go. After all, Musk is no longer part of the Trump administration, his relationship with the president having exploded in spectacularly bitter fashion a couple of weeks ago.
Perhaps the Royal Society was also thinking that Musk’s departure would allow them to draw a veil over all the unpleasantness stirred up by their failure to call Musk to account?
But then last week my friend Professor Andrea Stella reminded me why the issues at stake are so important. He announced that he had returned his 2014 Royal Society Faraday Prize in protest at their unwillingness to address Musk’s promotion of disinformation, his disregard for evidence, and his role in degrading the US research ecosystem. It was a bold, principled stand, inspired in part by the lecture given recently at the Royal Society by the 2024 Faraday prize winner, Professor Salim Abdool Karim.
Having now watched the lecture myself, I can see why Andrea was spurred to act.
Professor Karim is an eminent South African epidemiologist and virologist. But rather than speaking about viruses and public health, he took as his subject “Science under threat: the politics of institutionalised disinformation.” It was lucid, it was logically structured, it was evidence based, and it was a coolly devastating analysis of the tactics deployed by populists and would-be dictators (Trump, Erdoğan, Orban, Zuma…) – and their fellow-travellers – to seize power and wealth.
The major casualties of this “state capture” are truth and the institutions that exist to uncover and protect it – our universities and the wider enterprise of science. Many of us have watched in horror as this process of capture has slowly unfolded in the US in recent months, directed by President Trump and enacted in large part by Elon Musk FRS. But not, it would seem, the Royal Society.
The title of Prof Karim’s lecture “Science Under Threat” echoes the title of a statement that the Royal Society put out in the days following media reports of my open letter. But the contrast in content could not be starker.
Karim’s lecture brought a laser-like focus to the problem, naming Trump and Musk as major players in dismantling both US science and the American aid that deploys that science to save lives. By contrast, as the months tick silently by following the Royal Society’s promise “to look at potential further actions” in response to events in the US, its statement rings increasingly hollow.
It said it “will use its voice and the expertise of our Fellows to resist the various challenges to science,” but offered no comment on the fact that one of their own Fellows is the embodiment of those “challenges”. In opting not to deal directly with the concerns raised by Mr Musk’s actions, the Royal Society gives the impression of dispensing with the community’s values when standing up for them might involve difficult choices. It is this neglect of its responsibilities that has diminished the Society’s reputation among many within the scientific community that it claims to represent.
Defending the Royal Society’s stance over Musk, its President has asked the community to focus “on what unites us rather that what divides us” instead of getting embroiled in political matters. That’s an admirable sentiment, but it has to recognise that the unity of the scientific community is founded on shared values and norms. As Professor Karim has shown so eloquently, in a world awash with the politics of lies and disinformation, it is more important than ever that institutions of science to speak up for discourse that is rooted in evidence and truth. The Royal Society cannot dodge its duty by pretending that all political questions lie outside its purview.
For many of us, this episode has been a sad turn for an organisation that has built an international reputation as a bastion of science over the past 350 years. How might the Royal Society find a way to recover?
The beginnings of an answer can be found in one of Prof Karim’s slides:
So far, in its efforts to address the Musk issue the Royal Society has stumbled over each of these five steps. Yes, it has issued a statement; and yes, it has allocated a tranche of public money to attract international scholars, including those fleeing persecution in the USA. But overall, it has grievously misjudged the moment and the scale of the threats to science and scientific freedom from a US administration in which one of its own Fellows has played a leading role.
The Royal Society needs to pick itself up, acknowledge the injury, and take specific measures to repair its standing.
First, it needs to demonstrate that it can deal effectively with the conundrum created by Mr Musk’s behaviour. The outcome of the correspondence on this issue between Musk and the incoming President, Sir Paul Nurse, should be made public – even if it has come to nothing. The Royal Society cannot continue to hide behind appeals to confidentiality when its code of conduct has been breached so openly and flagrantly. It has to be better at communicating with the community it claims to represent.
Second, the Royal Society must ensure it is not caught out again by one of its Fellows pivoting from science to more questionable activities, political or otherwise. It now has to update its code of conduct to deal with cases where Fellows engage in behaviours that are divorced from evidence and truth-telling, while still allowing for political pluralism and robust, good-faith debate.
Finally, it should deliver on its promise of action and outline as soon as possible it plans to advocate for science amid the rising tide of misinformation. In this endeavour it might usefully ally with the social science expertise to be found at the British Academy.
A scientific community that has been greatly unsettled by the Royal Society’s fumbling of recent events will surely be encouraged by news that it is striving to learn the lessons. And so might Professors Sella and Karim.
