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The Royal Society celebrates its 350th birthday

In 1660, a dozen friends, among whom were Christopher Wren and Robert Boyle, met at Gresham College in London for a drink. As a result of that casual encounter, three years later, the informal group of colleagues would receive a royal charter giving them the title of the Royal Society of London charged with improving the knowledge of the natural sciences. Three hundred and fifty years later, the Royal Society maintains its academic and social prestige as well as a high degree of influence.

Xavier Pujol Gebellí | 12 July 2010

First, it was merely a group of friends interested in the “promotion and dissemination” of scientific knowledge, and shortly thereafter a Royal Society whose aim was also to extend “ideas and the scientific debate.” Today, three and a half centuries later, it is a highly prestigious institution, with many of its members involved in the so-called "corridors of power” and with a growing, if not decisive, degree of influence in matters of governmental policy where the scientific and ethical debate occupy a prominent place. Climate change, reproductive biology and genetically modified foods are just some of the cases in which the Royal Society of London must position itself.

The society has just celebrated its 350th birthday. As part of this celebration, it has held a series of debates, lectures, conferences, and interviews with the media. The “big week” of the dean of science academies across the world practically coincided with another of the major European meetings for the dissemination of science, the EuroScience Open Forum (ESOF), which took place in Turin, Italy, Europe’s version of the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the institution that publishes the journal Science.

Changing course

In general, the life of science academies has been a quiet one for most of the nearly one hundred countries with such institutions. Their principal activity, again, generally speaking, has been limited to working for the recognition of their elected members and the discussion of ideas in their areas of expertise. But their true influence, barring a few notable exceptions, has rarely transcended their own walls. At best, among a distinguished few one can note an air of elitism that occasionally acted as a selective pressure group, as the science editor Colin Macilwain describes in Nature.

In the case of the Royal Society, this calm was disturbed in the mid-1990s, when genetically modified foods and especially the mad cow crisis erupted onto the scene. It was then that the British Academy deemed it necessary to speak out, via the British Science William Waldegrave, on a number of scientific issues that greatly affected British society. An independent opinion was required to support the difficult decisions made by the government and at the same time counterbalance the pressure from industrial lobbies.

It was thus that the Royal Society assumed a role equal to that of its American counterpart, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), which was created by President Abraham Lincoln for the purpose of advising the U.S. government in matters of a scientific nature. The NAS, now the most important scientific academy in the world, produces each year about 200 reports for the government on the most varied set of issues with an impact on society.

Expansion

The Royal Society, now fully involved in British public life and with a newly appointed president, Paul Nurse, president of Rockefeller University in New York, scheduled to take office in late 2010, was the model for many countries that wanted to bring together their most brilliant scientific minds, even if that did occur almost a century after its birth.

The emergence of science academies took place in the mid-eighteenth century, but, unlike the unified British model, institutions that atomized the fields of knowledge were born. This was the case of Spain, for example, which favored the establishment of institutions that grouped together scientists from a given area of knowledge or even by geographic locations. The pattern was repeated in various European and Latin American countries and was on the rise well into the twentieth century, but this fragmented model gained little social influence. The few exceptions prove the rule. The aforementioned NAS, the French and the Russian academies earned a role that went beyond social prestige. In Spain, this role is occupied by the Royal Language Academy, whose social impact manages to go beyond the elitism that has characterized the majority of these institutions. And of course, the Royal Society, which in many respects continues to be a prominent social actor.

THE COUNTERPOINTThe social inefficiency that the majority of science academies have deliberately displayed has been partly compensated by the birth, in the mid-twentieth century, of scientific societies that have played a much more active role with regards to their specific discipline, their members and, increasingly, with respect to society.

Throughout the world, once again the United States sets the standard with the powerful AAAS leading a pack of a wide range of medical societies, which, with the support of the big drug companies, make their messages reach society.

In Spain, however, the academies, with the exception of the Royal Language Academy, continue to find themselves submerged in a very long period of ostracism that results in a very low level of social influence. This is corrected in part by medical societies and, in more recent times, scientific societies, clustered together a dozen years ago under the umbrella of the Confederation of Scientific Societies (COSCE). The COSCE, as recently stated in the journal Cell, has played a role close to that of the NAS, producing reports

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