Science & Tech Quote by John Charles Polanyi

Polanyi’s line is a quiet flex: science isn’t just a method, it’s a network with clout. The key word is “influence,” a term that admits what polite scientific culture often denies - that credibility travels like currency. Academies of Science aren’t merely clubs for publishing papers; they are prestige machines with access to governments, funding bodies, and the global press. Polanyi is pointing to a modern shift: the same institutional authority once used to define “legitimate” knowledge can be turned outward as moral leverage.

The intent is partly corrective. For decades, the myth of scientific neutrality let institutions dodge political responsibility, even as scientists were drafted into national projects, weapons research, and ideological battles. Polanyi suggests a different posture: organized science as a counterweight to state power, able to rally internationally when rights are violated. That “around the world” isn’t decorative; it signals the advantage academies hold over individual dissidents. A lone researcher can be jailed or silenced. A transnational academy can embarrass regimes, amplify cases, and create costs through visibility and reputational pressure.

Subtext: human rights become a domain where facts and values collide. Academies can speak in the language of evidence - documenting abuses, defending persecuted scholars, supporting open inquiry - while still making an explicitly ethical claim. Polanyi, writing in the long shadow of 20th-century authoritarianism and Cold War science politics, is arguing for institutional conscience: if science benefits from being global, it also has global obligations.