Why Elon Musk shouldn’t be kicked out of the Royal Society

Bishop did not wish to be associated with ‘someone who appears to be modelling himself on a Bond villain’

In a notorious interview in the Sunday Times in 2007, the Nobel Prize-winning geneticist James Watson said, among other things, that aborting babies with gay genes was ‘common sense’ and that ‘all our social policies are based on the fact that their [blacks] intelligence is the same as ours [whites] – whereas all the testing says not really’. He also defended the explanation offered by Larry Summers of why there are fewer female professors in Stem subjects than male – there are more men at the right-hand tail of the IQ distribution curve. It caused such a furore that Watson was forced to cancel a forthcoming book tour, Nature ran an editorial saying his remarks were ‘beyond the pale’ and the trustees of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory suspended him from administrative duties, forcing him to retire shortly afterwards. Yet at no point did anyone suggest he should be expelled from the Royal Society.

Contrast Watson’s treatment with that of Elon Musk. In August, 74 fellows wrote to the institution asking whether the owner of X was a ‘fit and proper person’ to be a member of the society – a distinction he’s enjoyed since being elected in 2018 – for his technological achievements in space travel and electric cars. The president consulted m’learned friends and was told that Musk wasn’t in breach of the society’s code of conduct – an important consideration, since if he’s excluded because of his political views he might be able to sue for discrimination under the Equality Act. When this advice was communicated to the fellowship, there was a good deal of grumbling, intensified when Donald Trump won the US presidential election and announced he would appoint Musk as co-director of the Department of Government Efficiency.