23.09.2025
A lecture in honour of Prof Anne Husebekk
Tromsø, Norway.
19 Sept 2025
Sir Peter Gluckman
President, International Science Council,
Director: Koi Tū Centre for Informed Futures, Auckland, New Zealand
I am honoured to be invited to speak on behalf of the international science community to honour Anne for her many important contributions to science nationally, in the Arctic and internationally. In particular, I want to respect her very important contributions as Vice-President of the International Science Council and as chair of its Committee for Freedom and Responsibility in Science (CFRS). The title I have chosen for this talk is intended to honour her contributions and commitment by reflecting on the real challenges now facing science in an increasingly troubled world. We must work hard to protect science’s core principles and potential contributions in this context.
The International Science Council is the world’s primary federation of scientific bodies. The Council’s members are over 270 member organisations comprising a mix of national academies and funders, including the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, international scientific bodies including the University of the Arctic and many other global and regional scientific bodies. In various forms it is well over 100 years old, but the Council as we now know it was formed and named in 2018 by the merger of ICSU and ISSC, bringing the natural and social sciences under the same umbrella.
The Council’s core mission is to be the global voice for science and its primary goals are both outward looking to how science is used and inward looking at issues within the science system itself. Some of the most immediate foci are: to address the internal and external challenges to trust in science; to promote freedom, responsibility and inclusivity in science; to assist in international science agenda-setting and promote international science collaboration; to be the bridge between the active scientific community and the multilateral system – we work closely with the UN and its agencies; to promote evidence-based policy making; and to provide a route for track 2 science diplomacy.
The Council has headquarters in Paris with regional presence in Latin America, Africa, Asia-Pacific and soon the Middle East, and there is a liaison office in New York to link with the UN system. It is a complex organisation including 14 affiliated international science bodies, several in partnership between the ISC and UN agencies. These include the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, the World Climate Research Programme, the Global Ocean Observatory System and the International Network for Governmental Science Advice. We partner with UNESCO on the executive committee of the International Decade of Sciences for Sustainable Development and with World Meteorological Organization on the executive committee of the International Polar Year, the latter of key interest to this audience and to Anne.
The CFRS, which Anne chaired, was formed many decades ago and is charged with protecting scientific freedoms and working on the responsibilities of science and scientists, especially in the ethical conduct and reporting of their work. It works closely with UNESCO and organisations such as Scholars at Risk. It has the difficult challenge of addressing issues that can be very sensitive, but the ISC is strictly non-political, truly global and crosses the geostrategic divides. I am proud to say that the New Zealand government has for many years provided additional contributions to the ISC to support the secretariat to the committee.
Philosophers have long agonised over how to define science. The Popperian definition has been long discarded as inadequate. UNESCO and ISC have both tried to address the issue of definition and like many philosophers of science they have come to recognise that it is best defined by its principles which I have very roughly paraphrased and abbreviated here:
Science is an organized system of knowledge – one based on observation and experimentation. Explanations can only be based only on causal reality, logic, and past observations. Explanations based on subjective and non-empirical considerations such as belief are excluded. Claims without the capacity for quality assessment by expert peers should not be considered part of science. Publication allows for replication and further investigation as well as ensuring that science can be a global public good. The processes of science are defined, not methodologically, but by iterative review and progressive modification of knowledge as new observations are made and incorporated.
Such a principles-based description encompasses the physical, natural, data, health, engineering, and social sciences and indeed some of the humanities. There are other relevant points.
Science is a universal knowledge system. The idea that modern science is solely a western science is a poor conception of how modern science evolved and is, in reality, a political and perhaps understandable statement reflecting how science was a tool of colonialism. Indeed, modern science may be the closest we have to a universal language, and this gives it extraordinary importance.
But science is not the only knowledge system that people use – religion, professional knowledge, local and indigenous knowledge are important examples of other knowledge systems. The latter includes components that reflect deep observations and informal experiments on the observable world. The relationship of such knowledge to modern science is a sensitive and complex matter which has occupied a lot of my time coming from a country with a large and rich indigenous knowledge base. While it is wrong to attempt to conflate knowledge systems, science must acknowledge that it operates alongside these.
But now we have an additional and worrisome confusion: in a world of growing populism and a changed and expansive information environment, people are now creating their own bases of reality with the mantra “they can do their own research and reach their own definition of truth.”
It is also important to distinguish between the institution of science as a knowledge system, scientific institutions for funding and producing science including universities which vary by context and culture, and the activities of individual scientists. In the remarks that follow I am focused on the institution of science as a knowledge system that provides the most reliable way of interpreting the observable world.
Science faces troubling times for a mix of internal and especially external issues and yet science is needed more than ever to address multiple challenges form the local to global.
There are issues within the culture of science that need to be addressed. This include dealing with scientific fraud, looking at the incentive systems that encourage a focus on publications at all costs – areas Anne has been most active in considering. Technologies are also changing what science can be done, how it is done, and how it is reported. Clearly artificial intelligence will fundamentally change the shape of science but there are risks as well as rewards in what will result.
One the positive side however, the institution of science is changing, with the centre of gravity of research shifting southwards and eastwards and growing diversity of actors by gender, geography and ethnicity – which is needed, welcome, and overdue.
Another big change has been the regrowing recognition that the siloed nature of much science must be addressed. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) serve as an example: despite an enormous willingness of science to claim that its work is key to progress on these, multiple analyses show that progress is poor at best, and that the organisation of public science is not well constructed to ensure the production of actionable knowledge. It requires natural and social sciences working together. It is obvious that technologies do not exist in isolation from the human factors that determine how they are used.
Many of the issues encompassed in the SDGs require transdisciplinary approaches bringing natural and social sciences together and with community, business and policy stakeholders. As Prof Matthias Kaiser, my close colleague from Bergen, and I pointed out in a recent report for the ISC[1], this requires new modalities for funding, evaluating and undertaking science, yet the institutions of science, especially the universities and funding bodies, have been resistant to change.
Covid-19 highlighted some limitations in how science is communicated and in the context that we are discussing, we may need to give much more thought to the discipline of science communication.
So now let me turn to some of the external factors affecting science. My comments will focus, not surprisingly given the populist turn, on the attitude to the place of science in the western democratic world.
The social contract between science and society is increasingly threatened at the very time when science is needed more than ever. What we are observing is a dangerous rebalancing of the relationship between science and society being defined by political movements. While the focus of many in the science community has been on recent disruptive events, the issues confronting science have been emerging over many years.
The shift to a multipolar world has been unsettling. The sociological changes and the dominant economic model of the past few decades have not met the needs of many citizens. While the overall average statistics might show progress, it is what happens to individuals that matters. As a result, we have seen greater societal polarisation, loss of social stability, and exacerbated economic inequities in western societies.
Many of the challenges we now face are linked to past scientific developments. We live with extraordinary change brought about by the science-based technologies now emerging at an extraordinary pace, creating mismatches between the technology itself and societies’ capacity to adapt thus creating power shifts. Climate change is ultimately the result of 19th century technology creating an economy based on fossil fuels. We see more conflict powered by science-based technologies – war has always been a competition of technologies. But now with drones and AI, the role of science is sadly even more obvious. We have seen massive demographic changes brought about by better public health and medical science but it in turn is driving expectations governments cannot meet. We face massive sociological change brought about by developments ranging from reproductive technologies to communication technologies, and we see social changes brought about by a changed information environment.
The impact of this changed information environment cannot be underestimated. Yes, people have more information, but much is unfiltered in its reliability, and it has given rise to the false impression that experts are no longer needed. While disinformation is not a new phenomenon, the internet fuels conspiracy and alternate facts. Our cognitive biases can be reinforced and opinions manipulated; the platforms, social media and gamers are sophisticated users of cognitive psychology in manipulating our attention. Social media has changed the nature of human-to-human interactions and indeed the way conversation occurs. It has changed the nature of societal discourse, it is angrier, less nuanced and of a form that most societies did not tolerate even a few decades ago.
And a new set of actors has emerged empowered by the pace of technological change and the shift of much research-based innovation from the public to private sector; we have non-State actors with global reach and influence equivalent or greater than that of many nation states. The pace of change and the power of these actors has outstripped the regulatory capacity of domestic mechanisms and that has further disrupted societal, diplomatic and economic norms.
While the response to Covid-19 was a massive success for biomedical science with the rapid development of vaccines, it was the not the ‘sputnik moment for science’. Indeed, science as an institution has become a target. For those who were already primed, the pandemic reinforced their attitudes to science. Claims by politicians they were ‘just following the science’ when often they were progressing other agendas did not help. And there was too often a failure by both the political and scientific leadership to acknowledge uncertainty. There were dogmatic, paternalistic and in some cases manifestly self-interested statements by public scientists. Trust in political elites was already compromised, and science was seen as part of that elite set of institutions. Conspiracy theories were fuelled. The interaction of geopolitics and science was clearly in play in debates over the origin of Covid-19 that continue. The science of immunisation became confused with politics of mandates, public health and individual freedoms. The lasting consequences have been persistent economic challenges, a rise in disinformation and conspiracy theories, greater societal anger, increased nationalism and a turn away from globalisation, and reduced trust in multilateral institutions such as the WHO.
When people are feeling anxious, scared or angry they seek strong leadership and this fuels the autocratic turn in many countries. In turn this can be manipulated by populist leaders. Overall, these shifts have accelerated the decline in trust of elites – and science is essentially an elite process.
The institutions that produce science have been attacked, albeit that other factors have been involved: there may be a valid debate about the roles of public universities beyond knowledge production. But academic freedom is key to the role of a university in a democratic society.
Populism’s attitude to science has several dimensions. First, science can be seen as part of the alleged decision making of the so-called deep state and that delegitimises it. Second, science seems to usurp epistemic legitimacy which, in the view of populists, lies not in evidence but in the people’s views. Beyond populism we also have the challenge of confronting interests, motivated reasoning and cognitive biases. We have seen over the years how partisans across the political spectrum have cherry picked the science, whether it is over genetic technologies or climate change. Of course, the science can be accepted and the use of the technology still rejected on valid societal and democratic grounds. Science must not be naïve and ignore those threats believing that we will return to some imagined sense of stability, for it has evolved considerably over the last hundred years.
Let me conclude by focusing closer to home on issues close to Anne’s heart.
The issues of the Arctic require natural and social sciences and local communities, governments and diplomats to work closely together. In an age of geostrategic tension and conflict on one hand, and global warming and its impact on peoples of the Arctic on the other, its biota and biodiversity, transdisciplinary science and international cooperation in science are more important than ever. The question is, could science diplomacy achieve in the North what it did in the South some 70 years ago with the signing of the Antarctic Treaty?
Norway has a deep association with the Antarctic. Norway along with New Zealand is one of eight countries with a sovereign interest in the subantarctic region, that is the area between latitude 50 and 60 and outside the polar region. Bouvet Island is Norway’s sovereign territory. In December this year the ISC will start discussions with the relevant ISC bodies to promote a collaboration on issues in the Southern Ocean between these eight countries. Such islands are critical monitoring sites for climate change and biodiversity loss. It could be an important piece of track 2 science diplomacy. I hope Norway will actively engage.
Anne’s enthusiasm and commitment to polar science, even though it is well outside her original biomedical discipline, her leadership in Norwegian academia, and her many broader contributions to the interface between science and society are to be applauded. It has been a privilege to work with her over the last few years and I can only give her the best wishes from the ISC secretariat and Board as she faces her own challenges. Thank you for the opportunity to honour her by speaking in celebration of her contributions to academic, national and global science.
[1] Kaiser, M. & Gluckman, P. (2023). Looking at the future of transdisciplinary research: Discussion paper. International Science Council. https://council.science/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/2023-04-26Futureoftransdisciplinaryresearch.pdf
