Science Quote by Joseph Rotblat

Rotblat’s line lands like a quiet rebuke delivered in a lab coat: not to politicians, not to generals, but to “my fellow scientists,” the people most likely to treat their work as neutral and their hands as clean. The verb “appeal” matters. He’s not issuing an order, because science doesn’t run on command-and-control; it runs on norms, prestige, and peer conscience. So he aims for the only enforcement mechanism that reliably reaches across borders and institutions: professional identity.

The subtext is an argument against the comforting fiction of the detached researcher. “Remember their responsibility to humanity” implies that the responsibility has been actively forgotten, or strategically bracketed off in the name of curiosity, career, or national security. Rotblat is calling out a moral outsourcing: the idea that ethical consequences belong downstream, handled by “society” or “leaders,” while scientists simply provide tools.

Context gives the sentence its bite. Rotblat worked on the Manhattan Project and left when it became clear Nazi Germany wasn’t building the bomb; he then spent decades warning about nuclear escalation, helping launch the Pugwash Conferences and winning the Nobel Peace Prize. So this isn’t abstract ethics. It’s a witness statement from someone who saw how quickly intellectual brilliance can become industrialized apocalypse.

The phrase “humanity” is deliberately expansive, resisting the tribal pull of nation, bloc, or employer. It frames scientific work as a global public trust: the higher the power of the knowledge, the less plausible the claim that its makers are mere bystanders.