Science Must Not Be Tainted By International Politics

Science unifies humanity. By constraining who can participate we demean science, and hurt society.

This week, I penned a piece for the Canadian national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, in response to the decision to exclude Russian scientists from working on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The decision is the wrong one, for a host of reasons that I describe in the piece.

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Science is, by its very nature, a deeply social endeavour. In the modern world, where the issues scientists are addressing have become both more complex and more weighty, the need to tap the intellectual resources of all of humankind has never been more important. But that has also opened science up to the growing threat of politicization, and the pressures that come with it.

The looming removal of Russian scientists from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)’s pioneering experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at the end of November, in response to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, puts into stark relief the challenge that global geopolitics, and political ideology more generally, pose to the scientific enterprise….

To read the rest.. go to https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-science-must-not-be-tainted-by-international-politics/