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

human rights Human rights are moral principles or normsJames Nickel, with assistance from Thomas Pogge, M.B.E. Smith, and Leif Wenar, 13 December 2013, Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyHuman Rights Retrieved 14 August 2014 for certain standards of hu ...

and scientific freedom of

scientist A scientist is a person who conducts scientific research to advance knowledge in an area of the natural sciences. In classical antiquity, there was no real ancient analog of a modern scientist. Instead, philosophers engaged in the philosophica ...

physician A physician (American English), medical practitioner (Commonwealth English), medical doctor, or simply doctor, is a health professional who practices medicine, which is concerned with promoting, maintaining or restoring health through th ...

engineer Engineers, as practitioners of engineering, are professionals who invent, design, analyze, build and test machines, complex systems, structures, gadgets and materials to fulfill functional objectives and requirements while considering the l ...

s, and

scholar A scholar is a person who pursues academic and intellectual activities, particularly academics who apply their intellectualism into expertise in an area of study. A scholar can also be an academic, who works as a professor, teacher, or research ...

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 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 refuseniks 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 20th ...

scholars in the

Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...

and

Soviet bloc The Eastern Bloc, also known as the Communist Bloc and the Soviet Bloc, was the group of socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America under the influence of the Soviet Union that existed du ...

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 Concerned Scientists Committee is credited with having coined the actual term " refusenik". The Committee played an active role in helping such Soviet dissidents as

Andrei Sakharov Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov ( rus, Андрей Дмитриевич Сахаров, p=ɐnˈdrʲej ˈdmʲitrʲɪjevʲɪtɕ ˈsaxərəf; 21 May 192114 December 1989) was a Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident, nobel laureate and activist for nu ...

, Natan Sharansky, Yuri Orlov,

Benjamin Levich Veniamin Grigorievich (Benjamin) Levich (russian: Вениами́н Григо́рьевич Ле́вич; 30 March 1917 in Kharkiv, Ukraine – 19 January 1987 in Englewood, New Jersey, United States) was a Soviet dissident, internationally prom ...

, 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 holds the office of president of Russia. Putin has served continuously as president or prime minister since 1999: as prime m ...

in support of the Russian scientist Igor Sutyagin, who was accused by the FSB (the successor agency to the KGB) 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 United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2018 to 2022. She previously served as President of Chile from 2006 to 2010 and 2014 to 20 ...

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 ( ; sv, Nobelpriset ; no, Nobelprisen ) are five separate prizes that, according to Alfred Nobel's will of 1895, are awarded to "those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind." Alfre ...

winners, such as Paul Flory,

Gerhard Herzberg Gerhard Heinrich Friedrich Otto Julius Herzberg, (; December 25, 1904 – March 3, 1999) was a German- Canadian pioneering physicist and physical chemist, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1971, "for his contributions to the knowle ...

David Baltimore David Baltimore (born March 7, 1938) is an American biologist, university administrator, and 1975 Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine. He is President Emeritus and Distinguished 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 antiparticle. Biography Born in San Francisco, Cal ...

, 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, and others. Mathematical physicist Joel Lebowitz has been the long-term co-chair of the CCS. Sophie Cook, a retired government lawyer and mediator, has served as executive director from 2008 to 2015, dividing her time between New York City and Washington, D.C. Her successor and current executive director is Carol Susan Valoris.

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