The  Nature editorial Power of the Pen – 24 March 2016 (click for the pdf)

Scientists must unite to stop Turkey from removing the right to freedom of expression.

When he labelled outspoken academics as terrorists, Turkey’s increasingly authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was probably not thinking of Voltaire’s eighteenth-century philosophical maxim: “To hold a pen is to be at war”.

Erdoğan sent shivers down the spines of those who care about human rights by declaring on 14 March that those who support terrorists are as guilty as those “who pull the trigger”, and …

We have already shared The International Human Rights Network of Academies and Scholarly Societies (IHRNASS)  statement on freedom of speech in Turkey. (please click)

On January 21, 2016 ICSU (International Council of Scientific Unions)  shared their letter to President Tayyip Erdoğan regarding freedom of speech in Turkey. (please click)

On February 1, 2016 ALLEA (All European Academies) shared their support regarding freedom of speech issues in Turkey. (please click)

The Science Academy welcomed world-renowned astrophysicist Prof. Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, in the first ever of its recently launched Annual Lectures. At the conference held on 4 February 2016 at Boğaziçi University, Dame Jocelyn gave a lecture on pulsars, which she discovered in 1967, in the context of relativity and gravity.

Please click to watch the video: