The Committee of Concerned Scientists (CCS) is an independent international organization devoted to the protection and advancement of

human rights Human rights are universally recognized Morality, moral principles or Social norm, norms that establish standards of human behavior and are often protected by both Municipal law, national and international laws. These rights are considered ...

and scientific freedom of

scientist A scientist is a person who Scientific method, researches to advance knowledge in an Branches of science, area of the natural sciences. In classical antiquity, there was no real ancient analog of a modern scientist. Instead, philosophers engag ...

physician A physician, medical practitioner (British English), medical doctor, or simply doctor is a health professional who practices medicine, which is concerned with promoting, maintaining or restoring health through the Medical education, study, Med ...

engineer Engineers, as practitioners of engineering, are professionals who Invention, invent, design, build, maintain and test machines, complex systems, structures, gadgets and materials. They aim to fulfill functional objectives and requirements while ...

s, and

scholar A scholar is a person who is a researcher or has expertise in an academic discipline. A scholar can also be an academic, who works as a professor, teacher, or researcher at a university. An academic usually holds an advanced degree or a termina ...

History

The Committee was formed in 1972 in Washington and New York as an ad hoc group of scientists and scholars concerned about violations of academic freedom and the persecution of scientists around the world. (Sometimes, the creation of the Committee is dated to 1973.) Most of the activities of the Committee in the 1970s and 1980s were aimed to help

refusenik Refusenik (, ; alternatively spelled refusnik) was an unofficial term for individuals—typically, but not exclusively, Soviet Jews—who were denied permission to emigrate, primarily to Israel, by the authorities of the Soviet Union and oth ...

s and

dissident A dissident is a person who actively challenges an established political or religious system, doctrine, belief, policy, or institution. In a religious context, the word has been used since the 18th century, and in the political sense since the 2 ...

scholars in the

Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

and

Soviet bloc The Eastern Bloc, also known as the Communist Bloc (Combloc), the Socialist Bloc, the Workers Bloc, and the Soviet Bloc, was an unofficial coalition of communist states of Central and Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America that were a ...

countries. The Committee lobbied both the Soviet and Western governments on behalf of these oppressed scholars, provided moral and financial support to them, and organized conferences and meetings of refuseniks, including in the Soviet Union itself. Sometimes, the Committee of Concerned Scientists is credited with having coined the actual term "

". The Committee played an active role in helping such Soviet dissidents as

Andrei Sakharov Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov (; 21 May 192114 December 1989) was a Soviet Physics, physicist and a List of Nobel Peace Prize laureates, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, which he was awarded in 1975 for emphasizing human rights around the world. Alt ...

Natan Sharansky Natan Sharansky (; born 20 January 1948) is an Israeli politician, human rights activist, and author. He served as Chairman of the Executive for the Jewish Agency for Israel, Jewish Agency from June 2009 to August 2018, and currently serves as ...

, Yuri Orlov, Benjamin Levich, and others. Subsequently, CCS expanded its activities to pursue human rights and academic freedom issues in other countries. For example, CCS lobbied both the Chinese and the U.S. governments on behalf of the Chinese astrophysicist Fang Lizhi, who supported dissident students during the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. After his immigration to the U.S., Fang Lizhi served on the CCS himself. In 2001, the CCS lobbied the Russian government and the Russian President

Vladimir Putin Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin (born 7 October 1952) is a Russian politician and former intelligence officer who has served as President of Russia since 2012, having previously served from 2000 to 2008. Putin also served as Prime Minister of Ru ...

in support of the Russian scientist Igor Sutyagin, who was accused by the FSB (the successor agency to the

KGB The Committee for State Security (, ), abbreviated as KGB (, ; ) was the main security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 to 1991. It was the direct successor of preceding Soviet secret police agencies including the Cheka, Joint State Polit ...

) of treason and espionage. In 2016, CCS made an appeal to then-Chilean President

Michelle Bachelet Verónica Michelle Bachelet Jeria (; born 29 September 1951) is a Chilean politician who served as President of Chile from 2006 to 2010 and again from 2014 to 2018, becoming the first woman to hold the presidency. She was re-elected in December ...

to reopen the case of Boris Weisfeiler, a mathematician who disappeared in Chile in 1985. In 2019, CCS made the case to Donald Trump, then U.S. president, to end a described campaign to intimidate U.S. scientists of Chinese ethnicity.

Activities

The Committee issues an annual report about cases of abuse of academic freedom and human rights of scientists and scholars around the world.

Members

Prominent scientists who served on the CCS include a substantial number of

Nobel Prize The Nobel Prizes ( ; ; ) are awards administered by the Nobel Foundation and granted in accordance with the principle of "for the greatest benefit to humankind". The prizes were first awarded in 1901, marking the fifth anniversary of Alfred N ...

winners, such as Paul Flory, Gerhard Herzberg,

David Baltimore David Baltimore (born March 7, 1938) is an American biologist, university administrator, and 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine. He is a professor of biology at the California Institute of Tech ...

Owen Chamberlain Owen Chamberlain (July 10, 1920 – February 28, 2006) was an American physicist who shared with Emilio Segrè the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the antiproton, a sub atomic particle, sub-atomic antiparticle. Biography Born i ...

, Jerome Karle, Walter Kohn, John Charles Polanyi, Charles Hard Townes,

Steven Weinberg Steven Weinberg (; May 3, 1933 – July 23, 2021) was an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in physics for his contributions with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow to the unification of the weak force and electromagnetic inter ...

Rosalyn Sussman Yalow Rosalyn Sussman Yalow (July 19, 1921 – May 30, 2011) was an American medical physicist, and a co-winner of the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (together with Roger Guillemin and Andrew Schally) for development of the radioimmunoass ...

, and others. Mathematical physicist

Joel Lebowitz Joel Louis Lebowitz (born May 10, 1930) is a mathematical physicist known for his contributions to statistical physics, statistical mechanics, and many other fields of mathematics and physics. He is a founding editor of the Journal of Statis ...

has been the long-term co-chair of the CCS, alongside the other three current co-chairs: physicist Eugene Chudnovsky, psychiatrist Walter Reich, and chemist Alexander Greer. Sophie Cook, a retired government lawyer and mediator, served as executive director from 2008 to 2015. Her successor was Carol Susan Valoris, who was employed as executive director from 2015 to 2023. The current executive director is Alexandra Bender.

References

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External links

The Committee of Concerned Scientists website
Columbia University Libraries, Archival Collections. Human rights organizations based in the United States Scientific organizations based in the United States

History

Activities

Members

See also

References

External links