Professor Stephen Curry is leading a brazen campaign challenging Elon Musk’s position as a Fellow of the Royal Society. His open letter, which has garnered over 3,000 signatures, expresses dismay at the society’s “continued silence and apparent inaction” regarding Musk’s Fellowship, detailing alleged violations of the society’s Code of Conduct due to Musk’s public statements and political activities.
Musk was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2018 in recognition of his revolutionary technological achievements in space travel and electric vehicles. In its 364-year history, only two Fellows have been expelled — one in 1709 for failing to pay dues and another in 1775 for fraud. Expelling someone based on political views would not only be unprecedented but would arguably inflict far greater damage to the Royal Society’s reputation and standing than anything Musk has said or done.
The irony is unmistakable: Curry is not a Fellow of the Royal Society but an Emeritus Professor at Imperial College with a documented history of advocating greater ideological compliance within scientific institutions. He served as Imperial’s first Assistant Provost for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion and was a key author of the UKRI-commissioned ‘Harnessing the Metric Tide‘ report, which has played a significant role in shifting research assessment metrics away from scientific excellence and towards social justice considerations. This report criticised the concept of excellence itself as “ill-defined” and together with the original ‘Metric Tide‘ report, it recommended “the adoption of indicators that support equality and diversity as a counterweight” to what it viewed as problematic aspects of research excellence assessment. It also endorsed critiques claiming that “the biases inherent in the concept of excellence” sustain so-called “epistemic injustice”.
As Toby Young has noted, given Musk’s undeniable contributions to science and technology, expelling him would be akin to the Lilliputians attempting to bind Gulliver — a futile effort to diminish a giant.
Curry argues that Musk has violated the Royal Society’s Code of Conduct, citing his promotion of conspiracy theories, accusations against public figures such as Anthony Fauci and his inflammatory social media posts. He contends that these actions are incompatible with a code which require Fellows to have “due regard for the statement of values developed from time to time by Society”.
However, the phrase “due regard” merely requires consideration, not a prescribed outcome. More importantly, as Anna Krylov eloquently argued in her 2021 article, ‘The Peril of Politicising Science‘, scientific contributions should be evaluated on intellectual merit, not personal traits or political views:
Merton’s norms of science prescribe a clear separation between science and morality. Particularly relevant is Merton’s principle of universality, which states that claims to truth are evaluated in terms of universal or impersonal criteria, and not on the basis of race, class, gender, religion or nationality. Simply put, we should evaluate, reward and acknowledge scientific contributions strictly on the basis of their intellectual merit and not on the basis of personal traits of the scientists or a current political agenda.
Krylov reminds us of the historical dangers of moralising science:
Giordano Bruno was cancelled (burned at the stake in 1600) because his cosmological views were considered to be a threat to the dominant ideology. … Marie Curie was ostracised for immoral behaviour — an affair with a married man (Langevin) following the tragic death of her husband Pierre Curie. The Chair of the Nobel Prize committee, Svante Arrhenius, wrote to her advising that she not attend the official ceremony for her Nobel Prize in Chemistry in view of her questionable moral standing. Curie replied that she would be present at the ceremony, because “the prize has been given to her for her discovery of polonium and radium” and that “there is no relation between her scientific work and the facts of her private life”.
Efforts to impose political litmus tests on scientific recognition echo darker moments in history when ideological conformity was demanded — from Lysenko’s Soviet biology to various forms of religious and political censorship throughout the ages.
Curry further claims that Musk’s alignment with a Trump administration — one that has sought to reduce research funding and promote ideological restrictions — warrants his expulsion. He contends that Musk’s silence on these policies signals complicity and that the Royal Society must take a stand to uphold its values:
What message does it send about the Society’s commitment to upholding its code, its values and its declarations about the importance of diversity and inclusion? What message of support does it send to our friends and colleagues in the USA, especially women, people from ethnic minorities and disabled and LGBT researchers who are most exposed to the Trump-led offensive that has recruited Elon Musk FRS as its most enthusiastic general? I urge you, for the sake of decency and to offer hope in what are very troubling times, to demonstrate that the Royal Society has the courage to stand up for the scientific community and for the values that it claims to believe in.
This argument perfectly exemplifies the contemporary effort to subordinate scientific achievement to ideological conformity. As seen in universities across the Western world, such campaigns do not strengthen scientific institutions, they undermine them, corroding both their fundamental purpose and public trust.
Curry’s open letter is a textbook example of the politicisation of science. The Royal Society stands at a pivotal crossroads. By resisting this pressure and reaffirming its commitment to scientific excellence over ideological conformity, it has the opportunity to set a powerful precedent for scientific institutions worldwide.
Abhishek Saha is a Professor of Mathematics at Queen Mary University of London. He is a founder Member of the London Universities’ Council for Academic Freedom. This article was first published at Heterodox STEM.
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2004 and 2014 US led coups. The Maiden massacre by Ukes and the CIA. 15000 Russians slaughtered in Donbas post Maiden. Bio labs, money laundering. NATO, EU takeover of a former Russian state oblast which was never a country. And yet Russia is the bad actor. The US empire as evinced by Rona, fake science and endless wars is the locus of evil.
You sound a bit like a Marxist Revolutionary.
74 down ticks even with the last sentence being true
The quantity of down tickers only means that a group of people don’t like Ferd’s conclusions, not that they are wrong.
Assuming the US and it’s allies, which includes the UK, are the only bad actors in the world is naive. What can be done in the name of national security is just about anything. These clandestine agencies operate above any laws or morality.
https://off-guardian.org/2023/11/04/the-great-reset-part-2-a-camp-with-no-outside/
The second part of Simon Elmer’s look at their Great Reset and this looks at Digital Identity and the horrors this entails.
“At present, the UK Government is promoting Digital Identity in terms of ease of access, greater convenience and increased safety. So, under the Online Safety Act 2023, Digital Identity will be a requirement of access to the internet, not in order to censor what we can see, read and write but to protect children from pornography and grooming gangs.
Under the Elections Act 2022, it will be a requirement of voting, not in order to further discourage public participation in the electoral process but to stop illegal voting. It will be a requirement of receiving Universal Credit or, in the future, Universal Basic Income, not in order to force the immiserated and unemployed into obligatory retraining and work but to stop fraudulent benefit claims. It will be a requirement of gaining access to public transport, medical care, education and employment, not in order to control us whenever the World Health Organization declares a new pandemic but to protect the population from future health crises. It will be a requirement of travel and movement between nation states and within the UK, not in order to enforce the restrictions on our freedoms imposed by Agenda 2030 but to stop illegal immigration into the UK and save the planet from ‘global boiling’. It will be a requirement of opening a bank account, not to force us into opening a Digital Pound account but to stop financial crime.”
This is actually a first rate article and more like the Simon Elmer I have learnt to appreciate.
Toby, you’ve really got to keep Noah away from Ukraine issues.
DS credibility is at stake.
It’s like being back in London Calling, but with only James’s rantings presented.
Has it really taken you nearly 2 years to make that comment?
It wasn’t worth the wait.
Noah is making a rod for his own back here, because he hasn’t examined Katchanovski’s claims objectively (by having translations of videos, etc. done, as I have). Here’s a brief excerpt from an article I’ve been working on, which shows Katchanovski’s contempt for the facts. However, we know there was one gunman in the Hotel Ukraine on the February 20th 2014, he was seen shooting probably towards government units on rooftops towards the presidential buildings to the north west. It’s almost like Noah is being a cipher for Katchanovski by saying the idea of anyone with a gun in the Hotel Ukraine is a “conspiracy theory”.
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[His] next supposed witness is in the clip beginning at 2m49s. Katchanovski’s caption reads as follows:
To be clear, the Hotel Ukraine was never controlled by the Maidan protesters, as far as I have been able to establish from contemporaneous accounts and videos. It was used as a hotel, occupied by foreign journalists (BBC, RT, etc.) and others during this time. First aid was given to protesters in the lobby on February 20th, but Katchanovski has never established anything more. However, what Katchanovski fails to mention about this witness is that he states that he saw three individuals in uniform run into the hotel on February 17–18th and then down the stairs with cases resembling weapons cases. This is from a show broadcast by the popular Ukrainian channel TSN which, from what I can tell, presents the mainstream view that it was only government forces who were sniping protesters, and it’s clear from the video that these “snipers” were police or other government officers.
It is probably a waste of time dissecting those events yet again.
Ukraine is doomed and it is only a matter of time before the West formally casts them adrift.
America is already building a blame narrative that absolves Biden from any culpability and fingers Zelensky, Zelensky is already blaming his generals for the failures and Aristovich is positioning himself to replace Zelensky.
I think a stock of popcorn is in order.