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The University and College Union (UK), representing more than 120,000 college-level educators, voted May 30 to pass a controversial resolution calling for a boycott of Israeli academics and universities.
The Economist, June 14, 2007 (1)
Martin Rees, the President of the Royal Society re-affirmed the commitment of the Royal Society, the UK national academy of science, to a statement in opposition to academic boycotts. "Moratoria on scientific exchanges based on nationality, race, sex, language, religion, opinion and similar factors thwart [our] goals."
E. B. Davies, FRS, July 4 2007 (2)
The other humane studies I apply myself to are natural philosophy, the mechanics and husbandry, according to the principles of our new philosophical college ...an Invisible College
Robert Boyle, FRS, letter, 1646 (3)
Dr. South [Canon of Christchurch] made a long oration of satirical invectives against Cromwell, fanaticks and the new philosophy.... They can admire nothing except fleas, flies and themselves.
John Wallis, FRS, to Robert Boyle, FRS, Oxford, 1669 (4)
BOYCOTT US
This summer, laptops on benches and beaches were awash in protests against an academic boycott of Israel launched by a union of British educators. The boycott resolution, passed by the University and College Union [UCU] of Britain, calls for union members to cut their contacts with Israeli academics and universities, and to stop EU funding of Israeli scientific research. The motion would also require UCU members not to submit articles to Israeli journals (5)
. The UCU action was taken in response to an appeal by a Palestinian union of academics which urged their colleagues in the UK "to comprehensively and consistently boycott all Israeli academic and cultural institutions and to refrain from participation in any form of academic and cultural cooperation, collaboration or joint projects with Israeli institutions..." as protest against "military occupation and colonization (6)
."
The boycott motion was passed at the inaugural meeting of a new union formed by a merger of the Association of University Teachers (AUT) with the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE). Although the group now represents 100,000 members, only 257 members took part in the ballot, with 158 in favor and 99 against. The resolution is up for approval by the entire UCU membership over the next few months (6
, 7)
.
I’d argue that the resolution sets a terrible precedent because discourse without borders makes science happen. This year the FASEB Journal has received submissions, reviews, comments, and letters from Egypt, Lebanon, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates as well as from Israel and the UK. This must continue. As experimental scientists we are not only citizens of one or another country, members of one or another sect, but we are also members of what Robert Boyle called the "invisible college" of natural philosophy. (3)
. The Royal Society, the original invisible college, has rightly opposed any such boycott because it would "deny our colleagues their rights to freedom of opinion and expression; interfere with their ability to exercise their bona fide academic freedoms; inhibit the free circulation of scientists and scientific ideas; and impose unjust punishment (8)
."
Other colleges, visible and invisible, have also protested the boycott. In the UK, the resolution was denounced by the Academy of Medical Sciences and from Universities UK, a group representing vice-chancellors of 20 research universities. In New York, the Wiesel Foundation chimed in with a strong statement in support of academic freedom signed by 51 Nobel laureates including Mikhail Gorbachev, the Dalai Lama, and former South African president F. W. de Klerk (9)
. The American Physiological Society voted to reaffirm their opposition to "all discrimination on the basis of such factors as ethnic origin, religion, citizenship, language, political stance, gender, sex or age (10)
." Under an ad hoc banner, more than 10,000 scholars, including 32 Nobel Laureates and 53 University and Foundation Presidents expressed outrage at the UCU declaring "We Will Regard Ourselves as Israeli Academics and Decline to Participate in any Activity from which Israeli Academics are Excluded (11)
." Full page ads in the New York Times signed by scores of university presidents, featured a similar challenge by Lee Bollinger of Columbia: "Boycott us, then, for we gladly stand together with our many colleagues... against such intellectually shoddy and politically biased attempts to hijack the central mission of higher education (12)
."
Writing as an editor, I’d stand with Lee Bollinger: "Boycott us, then, if you boycott any journal of science, in any corner of the world."
BOYCOTT, SCHMOYCOTT
Unfortunately, the UCU-proposed boycott carries with it more than a hint of age-old bigotry, since no similar boycotts have been advocated against states other than Israel, states that—in the words of the Palestinian appeal to which the UCU responded—could be accused of "military occupation and colonization (6)
." Are there no British troops in Basra?
Political scientist Geoffrey Alderman of Buckingham University has analyzed why Israel has been singled out for boycott by the new British union (7)
. Alderman reminds non-Brits that "a very substantial number of members of the UCU are not and never have been academics." Rather, NATFHE functioned as an old-fashioned trade union of educational employees, sharing a traditional Marxist antipathy to Jewish nationalism and mandarin scholarship. "Add to this a goodly measure of anti-colonialism, and a stubborn determination to view Israel merely as a colonial outpost of Anglo-America, and you have a fertile ground in which the boycotters were able to plant their seeds (7)
."
ACADEMIC FREEDOM AND "EXPERIMENTALL LEARNING"
A professional historian of science might remind his colleagues in the UCU that the seeds of modern academic freedom were sown in the same soil as that of Marxist theory. The Prussian constitution of 1850, which was a direct consequence of the European revolutions of 1848, established Freiheit der Wissenschaft (freedom of science) as a university standard. It became the third academic freedom, so to speak, alongside the older principles of Lehrfreiheit und Lernfreiheit (freedom of teaching and learning). And as German Wissenschaft grew to be the envy of the world in the course of the 19th century, its tradition of Freiheit protected dispute and dissent in every grove of academe. Herman von Helmholtz quarreled with Edward Hering over human perception; Paul Ehrlich and Robert Koch disagreed with each other (and with Julius Cohnheim) on immunity; while Marx’s pal Friedrich Engels, Rudolph Virchow, and Ernst Haeckel held very different views of natural selection. There was academic Freiheit aplenty for Darwinist and Lamarckian, nobleman and communist, Jew and Gentile. Alas, less than a century later, it all ended with national socialism ...and then there was Israel.
That same historian might adduce a lesson for the British educators closer to home. The Royal Society of London was founded in an age of sectarian violence, political chaos, and brutal regicide: there was that small matter of King Charles’s decapitation. There was also enough "military occupation and colonization" in the British Isles to last for three centuries. There was also that small matter of Cromwell sacking Ireland. But, thanks to the efforts of men from each side of the 17th century civil wars, "a Colledge for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning (16)
" finally emerged. John Wallis left a first-person account of how the invisible college became the Royal Society:
About the year 1645, while I lived in London (at a time when, by our civil wars, academical studies were much interrupted in both our Universities)...I had the opportunity of being acquainted with divers worthy persons, inquisitive of natural philosophy, and other parts of human learning; and particularly of what hath been called the New Philosophy or Experimental Philosophy. We did by agreements, divers of us, meet weekly in London ...About the year 1648–49, some of our company being removed to Oxford (first Dr Wilkins, then I, and soon after Dr Goddard) our company divided...
The London group continued to meet at Gresham College until the year 1658 when they had to disband in fear of their lives as soldiers took over their meeting rooms and London underwent a period of terror. In February 1660 Monk’s army entered London and restored order. King Charles returned to London at the end of May 1660 and the meetings at Gresham College resumed (17)
.
Following the restoration of Charles II, the first meeting of the Royal Society was held at Gresham College on November 28, 1660. Christopher Wren, Gresham Professor of Astronomy, delivered a lecture on the pendulum to an apostolic audience of 12. These included six Roundheads (Parliamentarians) four Cavaliers (Royalists) and two with their positions on regicide undefined (16)
. Would that Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds could assemble such a college in post-civil war Iraq!
LORDS OF THE FLIES
The new philosophers chased from Oxford by the Restoration were mainly of roundhead allegiance. Royalist clerics like Robert South of Christchurch were concerned that science had entered Oxford behind Cromwell’s parliamentary armies. Not entirely wrong, since members of Boyle’s invisible college included the first-secretary-to-be of the Royal Society, John Wilkins, Cromwell’s brother-in-law; Jonathan Goddard, who was a physician to Cromwell’s armies in Ireland and Scotland; William Petty, who was the surveyor for these armies; and John Wallis, (see above) who was the cryptographer for Parliament (18)
.
But the invisible college had room for cavalier as well as roundhead, scientist as well as amateur. The first president of the Royal Society was Viscount William Brouncker, a Royalist physician and mathematician who went on to formulate the generalized, continued fraction of 
nth. Brouncker’s father had bought himself into the Irish peerage and, according to diarist Samuel Pepys (another FRS), "gave 1200 pounds to be made an Irish lord, and swore the same day that he had not 12 pence left to pay for his dinner (19)
." In 1662, Charles II appointed William Brouncker as Keeper of the Great Seal. Brouncker proceeded not only to keep the Seal but also to bestow it on the Colledge for Experimentall Learning—and the Royal Society was born.
Another peer, the Honorable Robert Boyle, was rightly called "the Father of chemistry and the Son of the earl of Cork" and gave the new science its bona fides by virtue of his rank. Boyle is remembered by every high school student, if not by every pulmonary physiologist, as the contributor of V (for volume) to the law of perfect gases (PV=nRT). But perhaps Boyle’s major achievement was to distinguish the facts of chemistry from the opinions of alchemy. It was Boyle who finally dispensed with the old notions of "elemental" earth, air, fire, and water, announcing in The Sceptical Chymist the new Restoration definition of an element:
Certain primitive and simple, or perfectly unmingled bodies; which, not being made of any other bodies, or of one another, are the ingredients of which all [other] bodies are immediately compounded, and into which they are ultimately resolved (20)
Robert Hooke, the butt of Robert South’s taunt that the Royals cared for nothing but "fleas, flies and themselves" did not come from noble stock. Indeed, he may have been the first professional scientist of the modern era, starting his career as Boyle’s lab assistant. Eventually he was employed by the Royal Society as its "Curator of Experiments," i.e., he arranged bench-top demonstrations at its meetings. Hooke not only made microscopy practical but in his atlas of magnificent engravings Micrographia (1663) first suggested that living matter, as in cork or sponge, was composed of smaller subunits that resembled the cells of monks:
I could exceedingly plainly perceive it to be all perforated and porous, much like a Honey-comb, but that the pores of it were not regular.... these pores, or cells were indeed the first microscopical pores I ever saw, and perhaps, that were ever seen. (21)
His most famous image was that of the flea, which he described as "adorn’d with a curiously polish’d suite of sable Armour, neatly jointed (22)
." Hooke, as mere commoner, became a prime target for such enemies of the new science as the Canon of Christchurch and the Bishop of Ely, who could not risk offending the likes of Viscount Brouncker or Boyle. Hooke and his insects also became the stuff of popular satire. Thomas Shadwell, probably the least gifted poet laureate of England, described Hooke in pejoratives that sound familiar to those who pursue basic science:
A sot that has spent two thousand pounds in microscopes to find out the nature of eels in vinegar, mites in a cheese, and the blue of plums which he has subtly found out to be living creatures... One who has broken his brains about the nature of maggots, who has studied these twenty years to find out the several sorts of spiders, and never cares for understanding mankind (23)
SCIENCE WITHOUT BORDERS
History suggests that it would have been better for the British to have spent a few more pounds on microscopes and studies on the "nature of maggots." For when the great bubonic plague struck London in the summer of 1665, it claimed seventy thousand victims, of a population of almost half a million. Since the bubonic plague is caused by transmission of Yersinia pestis from infected rats to human by those "neatly jointed" fleas, perhaps more attention should have been paid to those creatures in "sable Armour" than to vestry robes or Restoration comedies.
Under Charles II, Cavaliers and Roundheads joined in common cause to fight the Dutch for dominion of the sea, and—one may add—to pluck New York from the Dutch (1664). But national disputes did not halt the discourse of science. Ironically, when news of the microbial world reached the Royal Society, it was from the land of Britain’s bitterest adversary and from a man who could neither write nor read English. Despite national rivalries between their two countries, despite wars of "military occupation and colonization" over four continents, England’s Royal Society received and published a crucial communication from Holland’s Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a lens-grinder and tradesman of Delft (24)
. In April 9, 1676, in order to discover "the cause of the hotness or power whereby pepper affects the tongue," Leeuwenhoek had ground pepper seeds into water. Three weeks later, he discovered an incredible number of very little "animalcules:" it was the first sighting of the microbial world. A friendly Dutch physician translated his observations and communicated them to the Royal Society. After several tries, Robert Hooke, as Curator of Experiments, confirmed Leeuwenhoek’s observations, the Transactions of the Royal Society recorded the event, and in time the low-born lens-grinder from Holland was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1680. International discourse and the world of experiment had won out over the trivial divisions of class, credentials, or country.
The editors of this journal welcome contributions from all the colleges, visible and invisible, around the globe. We remain open to science without borders.
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FOOTNOTES
The opinions expressed in editorials, essays, letters to the editor, and other articles comprising the Up Front section are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of FASEB or its constituent societies. The FASEB Journal welcomes all points of view and many voices. We look forward to hearing these in the form of op-ed pieces and/or letters from its readers addressed to journals{at}faseb.org.
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