The Muskrat … and other Rodents

The Royal Society elected Elon Musk into a Fellowship in 2018. Musk was honoured for his work in technology and engineering, particularly in the fields of space exploration and sustainable energy,

This has become a controversial election. Musk’s reputation in scientific circles has crashed. On 25 November 2024, Prof Dorothy Bishop resigned her Fellowship with the blog posting here. Her argument is that Elon Musk had breached the Royal Society Code of Conduct, of which the most relevant sections are here.

2.6. Fellows and Foreign Members shall carry out their scientific research with regard to the Society’s statement on research integrity and to the highest standards. 

2.10. Fellows and Foreign Members shall treat all individuals in the scientific enterprise collegially and with courtesy, including supervisors, colleagues, other Society Fellows and Foreign Members, Society staff, students and other early‐career colleagues, technical and clerical staff, and interested members of the public. 

2.11. Fellows and Foreign Members shall not engage in any form of discrimination, harassment, or bullying.

Subsequently, Prof Andrew Millar resigned his Fellowship here on 13 February, stating “I hope the Royal Society reforms its processes fundamentally, so that it is fit for more of the challenges to science.”  There is also a letter by Prof Stephen Curry open for signatures from any member of the scientific community until March 3rd here. It deplores the continued silence and inaction of the Royal Society on the matter of Musk.

The contrary viewpoint has been articulated by Fiona Fox in an article for Research Professional News. For balance, Prof Dorothy Bishop has also provided a list of reasons not to expel Musk here.

It seems clear by his public attacks on Anthony Fauci that Elon Musk has breached the Code of Conduct. The problem is that other Fellows of the Royal Society seem also to have broken the Code of Conduct and experienced no repercussions. To be clear, the 21 Group would like to see Codes of Conduct implemented consistently and uniformly.

This is a problem not just for the Royal Society, but also the British Academy, the Academy of Medical Sciences and other learned bodies who have similar Codes of Conduct. Let’s give some examples.

AlJazeera provided compelling evidence that Prof Andy Orchard FBA of Oxford University is “a serial sexual predator“. It included testimony from Prof Catherine Karkov (Leeds University) and Prof Ananya Kabir (King’s College, London) about Orchard’s drunken and sexualised behaviour at the University of Cambridge when they were young. (Predictably, no action was taken by Cambridge). While at the University of Toronto, Andy Orchard targeted his students for affairs.  Prof Alex Gillespie, then a young academic, but now president and vice principal of Toronto University described how he corned her. “Then it got sexualized, he said: ‘I’m going to fire one last shot of testosterone across your bow’ It felt like a threat”. Nonetheless, in 2015 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. In 2019, he was even invited to deliver the British Academy’s Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture.

The archaeologist Prof Corinne Hofman FBA was found guilty of “a decades-long culture of fear in which Hofman and Hoogland [her partner] exhibited transgressive behaviour, violated scientific integrity, abused their power and possibly committed criminal offences.” The reports in the Dutch press make horrifying reading — not just because of the abusive treatment of students and postdocs over many years, but also because of violations of academic & scientific integrity and even criminal activity.  A total of nineteen people, including postdocs and PhD students who worked with Hofman in the period 1990-2023, complained about her abuse. The full report is available at Leiden University’s website. Leiden has begun proceedings to dismiss Prof Hofman.  She was a Fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. They suspended her with this statement. In response, Hofman resigned. However, Hofman was also elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 2016. So far the British Academy has remained silent about this matter.

The cancer scientist Prof Nazneen Rahman F MedSci resigned from her position as head of Genetics and Epidemiology at the Institute of Cancer Research in October 2018. This followed the upholding by an independent investigation of complaints of systematic bullying spanning 15 years from 44 of her current and former staff and students, as reported in The Guardian here. The complainants claimed the ICR had failed to take any action for years despite “multitudes of oral and written complaints” against Rahman at the institute. Rahman was elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2010. They have not seen fit to revisit this honour since the decades of horrific bullying were substantiated.

The Nobel laureate James Watson FRS is famous for the unravelling of the structure of DNA (for which he shared the Nobel Prize with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins). He has a long history of sexist, racist public comments. The Double Helix is a repulsive book, dismantling and ridiculing the achievements of the then deceased Rosalind Franklin. Latterly, he has become infamous for his often stated view that black people are intellectually inferior to white people, for example in the film American Masters: Decoding Watson. The remarks prompted the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, where Watson was a director from 1968 to 1994, to sever its ties. The lab removed Watson’s honorary titles, saying his views are “reprehensible, unsupported by science, and in no way represent the views of the lab“. He remains an FRS.

The Royal Society, the British Academy and the Academy of Medical Sciences all need to get up off their knees and live up to what they claim are their principles.

This is about more rodents than the Muskrat.