Nullius in verba.
This Latin call to never take anyone’s word blindly has been the motto of the Royal Society since it was founded in London in 1660. The motto of the oldest continuously operating scientific society is clearly no accident.
It reflects the unshakeable belief of its founding members, whose goal was to investigate natural phenomena, in experimental proof. Nothing was accepted as true unless members could demonstrate their claims experimentally, with a live demonstration before the assembled body.
And what members! From Newton and Boyle in its early years to Faraday, Kelvin and Darwin in the 19th century, and Einstein, Turing and Hawking in the 20th, the roster is remarkable. It includes around 10,000 members, British and non-British alike, since nationality was never a criterion for entry: admission has always rested on scientific merit alone.
Prompted by the recent induction into the Royal Society of Aris Rozakis, a distinguished professor at the California Institute of Technology, we looked into the society’s Greek members. We found there were only seven.
The first person recorded as “Greek” in the Society’s archives is Emmanouil Timonis (1665-1718), a native of Chios who served as physician and dragoman to the Sultan in Constantinople. He was elected in 1703 for his work in epidemiology, and is credited with introducing the idea of vaccination to Britain. Eighty five years later, in 1788, Evgenios Voulgaris (1717-1806), teacher of the Greek nation, was elected for his work in natural philosophy and mathematics.
More than two centuries passed before another Greek crossed the Royal Society’s threshold. In 2003, molecular and developmental biologist Fotis Kafatos (1940-2017) was elected, followed in 2018 by fellow developmental biologist and neuroscientist Vassilis Pachnis, a principal researcher at the Francis Crick Institute in London.
They were followed in 2019 by Paraskevas Sfikas, a professor in the Physics Department at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, for his work in particle physics conducted at CERN, and in 2024 by Giorgos Malliaras of the University of Cambridge for his work in bioelectronics, materials science and engineering.
The few, not just good but truly excellent Greek scientists who joined the Royal Society in the 21st century carried out their pioneering research abroad.
Could they have achieved as much had they stayed in Greece? I’m afraid the answer is no, which reflects our long standing failure to value the contribution basic research makes to the country’s prosperity. A shift in how we view this issue is now overdue.
