The Royal Society is dead

A few months ago, Dorothy Bishop resigned her fellowship in the Royal Society in protest at Elon Musk’s continuing fellowship. This was a highly principled stand.

Eight weeks ago, Steven Curry wrote an open letter to the President of the Royal Society asking him to explain how Musk’s activities and pronouncements can be considered compatible with the Society’s code of conduct. That letter has been co-signed by 3494 other UK academics, but has not to my knowledge received even the courtesy of a reply.

A few days later, a second fellow, Andrew Millar, also resigned his Fellowship.

Around the same time, I also sent my own letter to the Royal Society, which has also no recieved a reply.

A month ago, the Society met to discuss “the principles around public pronouncements and behaviour of fellows”, but the only outcome was an anaemic statement that didn’t even mention Musk. As a result, Kit Yates, associate editor at the Royal Society’s journal Open Science, resigned his post.

Fiona Fox, a fellow of the Royal Society and chief executive of the Science Media Centre was quoted as worrying that “ejecting Musk from the Royal Society would be seen as a political move.” This strikes me as incredibly naive. At a time when the USA is gleefully destroying its own scientific infrastructure, with Musk at the head of the charge, doing nothing is a political move.

It simply isn’t possible for a society to both “recognise, promote and support excellence in science and to encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity” (as its mission statement claims) and enjoy the patronage of someone who is doing the exact opposite.

And that was going to be the final line of this post, until a few days ago, when I saw this: Royal Society decides not to take disciplinary action against Elon Musk. The Guardian quotes a cowardly letter from society president Sir Adrian Smith:

The view of council is that making judgments on the acceptability of the views and actions of fellows, particularly those that might be regarded as political, could do more harm than good to the society and the cause of science in general.

This is, of course, complete nonsense. The point is not, and has never been, that Musk is unpleasant or personally disliked. As the careful letters of Bishop, Curry and others have all pointed out, Musk is flagrantly and unambiguously in contravention of the society’s own Code of Conduct.

And it seems quite clear that “do more harm than good to the society” means that the society is scared of not getting any of that delicious Musk money.

So the Society has made its choice. It prefers the fellowship of Musk — who in the last few months has possibly done more to impede the progress of science worldwide that literally any other person in history — over that of actual scientists.

Unsurprisingly, I will not submit any of my papers to Royal Society journals, as I have done in the past, and I urge others to take the same step. Similarly I will no longer be providing peer reviews for Royal Society journals, and I urge every other scientist also to withhold voluntary professional labour. And I will no longer contribute to their conferences, and urge others to join me in this.

I want to be clear: this is not a protest or a boycott. I’m under no illusion that withdrawing my very minor contributions will make the slightest bit of difference to Society policy when the resignation of actual fellows hasn’t affected anything. It’s simply that I’ve given up on the society — I’m not throwing good effort after bad. The Royal Society of 2025 is simply not an organization that I want to have anything to do with in any capacity.

In short, the Royal Society is dead. Three hundred and sixty-five years of history, and it’s ended it as a beard for a fascist. What an utterly utterly shameful end for a once-great society.

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doi:10.59350/ndeyh-vq64

Source: https://svpow.com/2025/04/04/the-royal-society-is-dead/