Bishop did not wish to be associated with ‘someone who appears to be modelling himself on a Bond villain’
In a notorious interview in the Sunday Times in 2007, the Nobel Prize-winning geneticist James Watson said, among other things, that aborting babies with gay genes was ‘common sense’ and that ‘all our social policies are based on the fact that their [blacks] intelligence is the same as ours [whites] – whereas all the testing says not really’. He also defended the explanation offered by Larry Summers of why there are fewer female professors in Stem subjects than male – there are more men at the right-hand tail of the IQ distribution curve. It caused such a furore that Watson was forced to cancel a forthcoming book tour, Nature ran an editorial saying his remarks were ‘beyond the pale’ and the trustees of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory suspended him from administrative duties, forcing him to retire shortly afterwards. Yet at no point did anyone suggest he should be expelled from the Royal Society.
Contrast Watson’s treatment with that of Elon Musk. In August, 74 fellows wrote to the institution asking whether the owner of X was a ‘fit and proper person’ to be a member of the society – a distinction he’s enjoyed since being elected in 2018 – for his technological achievements in space travel and electric cars. The president consulted m’learned friends and was told that Musk wasn’t in breach of the society’s code of conduct – an important consideration, since if he’s excluded because of his political views he might be able to sue for discrimination under the Equality Act. When this advice was communicated to the fellowship, there was a good deal of grumbling, intensified when Donald Trump won the US presidential election and announced he would appoint Musk as co-director of the Department of Government Efficiency.
The discontent came to a head last week when Dorothy Bishop, an Oxford professor and one of the signatories of the original letter, wrote a blog post announcing her resignation from the society. After cataloguing Musk’s sins – ‘promoting vaccine hesitation’, ‘downplaying the climate emergency’ and ‘spreading deep fakes and misinformation’ – she said she could no longer comply with the code of conduct, which required her to ‘treat all individuals in the scientific enterprise collegially and with courtesy’, and that she did not wish to be associated with ‘someone who appears to be modelling himself on a Bond villain’.
Bishop’s resignation has prompted the president to look again at whether Musk can be got rid of. But in the society’s 364-year history, only two fellows have been expelled, one in 1709 for not paying his dues, and one in 1775 for embezzlement. If Musk was kicked out for his controversial views, why not Watson, who is still alive? Indeed, if failing to treat fellow members ‘collegially and with courtesy’ is a breach of the rules, shouldn’t the other 73 signatories of the letter be given their marching orders? In 2020, Francis Collins, a fellow of the society and then head of the National Institutes of Health, called for a swift ‘takedown’ of the Great Barrington Declaration. The three original signatories included Sunetra Gupta, the recipient of the Royal Society’s Rosalind Franklin Award. Not exactly collegial behaviour. Wouldn’t he have to go, too?
In her article, Bishop repeatedly accuses Musk of undermining the society’s mission to promote good science. But if challenging the consensus in a particular field is behaviour unbecoming of a member of the Royal Society, wouldn’t that apply to Sir Isaac Newton, the society’s president from 1703 to 1727?
Like many self-appointed gatekeepers, Bishop seems to think that anyone with unorthodox views that put them at odds with liberal policy-makers has no place in the scientific ‘community’. In fact, one of the reasons public trust in science is declining is because people rightly suspect that any research that challenges metropolitan groupthink in certain key areas (climate change, sex and gender, Covid) is being suppressed. To restore that trust, scientific institutions such as the Royal Society need to step away from politics, not do the bidding of left-wing Torquemadas.
There’s one more argument why Musk should not be kicked out. When he was elected, Musk had more conventional political views for a member of the elite. Until 2022, he was a registered Democrat. If he’s punished for holding less fashionable opinions, that sends a message to other members of the society: go against the grain and you will be excommunicated. That would be a bad look for a society that supposedly champions intellectual independence and free speech.
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