The Importance of Scientific Societies

This essay was written for the International Regulatory Peptide Society at the request of its President, to mark the occasion of its 25th International Symposium to be held in Washington in June 2025. The IRPS is a small Society with a broad international membership, and a vibrant commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusiveness.

In 1938, the American sociologist RK Merton [1] drew attention to political attacks on scientific institutions. He went on to ask “How should scientists respond”. Four years later, with anti-intellectualism now spreading ‘like a contagion’, he gave his answer: he declared that: “An institution under attack must re-examine its foundations, restate its objectives, seek out its rationale.”  His response was to describe the ethos of Science, by which it may be said to deserve public support, respect and trust [2].

That ethos, as Merton expressed it, comprises four sets of “institutional imperatives”:

Universalism: scientific claims are assessed objectively; and should be consistent with available evidence and with previously confirmed knowledge.

Communism: The fruits of science are products of an extended co-operative effort over many decades, involving scientists of many nations. They constitute a common heritage of humanity.

Disinterestedness: The outcomes of scientific experiments are objective and reproducible: they are what they are, whatever the scientists involved or their funders might have hoped they would be.

Organized Skepticism: The scientist takes nothing in his field of expertise on faith, but questions everything, openly and stringently.

This does not mean that scientists are morally better than anyone else. The values of science, in the words of Jacob Bronowski [3], “derive neither from the virtues of its members, nor from the finger-wagging codes of conduct by which every profession reminds itself to be good. They have grown out of the practice of science, because they are the inescapable conditions for its practice… [science] must have the habit of truth, not as a dogma but as a process”.

Indeed, scientists, like other people, are fallible. A few cheat, more stretch the patience of critical observers by selective or misleading citation, by cherry-picking evidence, by exercising their “researcher degrees of freedom” to bias outcomes, by questionable use of statistics. But we generally recognise that such breaches are not acceptable and should be called out – we demand disclosure of interests, are outraged by fraud, and we expect data to be made openly available - and in these things we display our near universal acknowledgement of Merton’s norms.

But we are not taught these norms. We learn them from listening to colleagues who have earned our respect, and by listening to and participating in the critical discourse around scientific ideas. We learn from each other, and from each other we learn about the diverse threads of knowledge that build our common understanding, and about the importance of integrity, openness, and humility. These are the threads that bind us together in communities that support and strengthen us. And from each other we learn what is acceptable and what is not, and together, together, we make progress. And the crucibles in which our ideas are ventured, tested, and tempered are the scientific meetings of those communities.

Although the scientist is often portrayed as a cloistered recluse, collaboration, and co-operation are integral part of our professional life, and conferences are a source of shared joy and pride as well as tension, and a time for recognising our mutual debts.

Newton is often quoted as saying “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” In The Matter of Facts [4] we recalled that Merton [5] had shown how that quotation began as an aphorism of how a dwarf might see further by standing on the shoulders of a giant. He observed that some had asked how might a dwarf be raised there in the first place – and how others had noted that, in science, a giant is only a giant because of the dwarves that have amassed on its shoulders, and how yet others had raised the prospect of the dwarves crushing the giant back into the ground.

The ‘seminal’ paper, the “citation classic”, is a giant only because of the predecessors who laid the foundations of the idea it describes, and because of the successors who tested it, embellished it, corrected it, interpreted it and promoted it. To venerate the great men and women of science is somehow to miss the point. Science is built by communities, and the great men and women become seen as great only through being part of great communities [6].

In this time of trial, when science is again under attack, we must re-examine its foundations, and where necessary, rebuild its institutions. More than ever, we need our societies and the meetings that they organise. We need to celebrate and strengthen the ethos that unites us, and we need to re-form our fractured and injured communities.

Perhaps it is worth being clear about what a scientific society ought to be. In a system distorted by market and political logics, a society should work to empower and protect its community. To shelter them against demonstrable nonsenses which undermine their collective enterprise. This means promoting the value of science and its scientists beyond their publication or citation counts, or how much grant income they’ve accumulated, or how they’ve consulted with industry, policy, or the media. These are the goals of other actors – of research managers, of politicians, of businesses, and of those among us who vainly seek the rewards of such prestige and influence. These are not the goals of a society, though, at times, a society may recognise their importance as means to their end.

But what end? A society must recognise that knowledge is an end in itself, and not merely useful for making money, accumulating citations, or supporting the whims of politicians and business. And when the pursuit of these whims becomes destructive, then it is the duty of a society to resist them. An effective society nurtures its community. It works to foster the collegial and critical spirit that is necessary for producing scientific knowledge – a community that cares about one another and about the rigour and importance of their collective output.

Societies exist for their members. Merton’s norms are general and refer to the entire scientific enterprise, but each society must decide for itself what values it will uphold, what it will stand for, and what it will resist. And the obligation flows down to all the members of every society – to cherish our colleagues, to defend our shared values, to protect our common heritage. To speak out.

Gareth and Rhodri Leng, March 2025

1.     Merton, R. K. (1938). Science and the Social Order. Philosophy of Science, 5(3), 321–337. http://www.jstor.org/stable/184838. Robert King Merton, born in 1910 as Meyer Robert Schkolnick, was the son of a Jewish family who had emigrated from Tsarist Russia for the USA 6 years before. He spent most of his academic career as a professor of sociology at Columbia University. In 1990, Columbia established the Robert K. Merton Chair in Social Science in his honour.

2.     Merton RK (1942) ‘Science and Technology in a Democratic Order.’ Journal of Legal and Political Sociology 1: 115-126, and republished as ‘The Normative Structure of Science’ in Merton. RK (1973) The Sociology of Science. Theoretical and Empirical Investigations. It is available online at https://www.panarchy.org/merton/science.html

3.     Bronowski J (1956). Science and Human Values New York: Harper & Row. Jacob Bronowski was a polymath perhaps best known for his documentary television series “The Ascent of Man.” (BBC 1973; http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/549805/index.html). One scene was filmed at Auschwitz, where many members of his family had died. Bronowski walks into the pond where the ashes of his family had been thrown, and says:

“It is said that science will dehumanise people and turn them into numbers. That is false - tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality - this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.”

a.      His 1974 interview with Michael Parkinson recalls that scene https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFgnGUL78MU           

4.     Gareth Leng and Rhodri I. Leng (2024) The Matter of Facts MIT Press https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262043885/the-matter-of-facts/

5.     Robert K. Merton (1965) On the Shoulders of Giants. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.

6.     Leng RI, Leng G (2024) A career in numbers: A citation network analysis of the work of RP Millar and his contribution to GnRH research. J Neuroendocrinol. 36(10):e13430.