We are living in a moment of urgency. Intolerance is growing, emotions are winning over reason, distrust is creeping into our most essential institutions. Obscurantism, which we thought was relegated to the past, is making a comeback. Sometimes insidiously. Sometimes brutally. Fueled by fear, misinformation, suspicion. Every time fear triumphs over dialogue, every time reason becomes silent, humanity takes a dangerous path.
Not taking action is no longer an option. Camus warned us: “To name things wrong is to add to the misfortune of the world.” Today, speaking badly about science, distorting it, exploiting it, coercing it, is not only betraying science: it is renouncing this humanist approach which consists of searching, doubting, understanding before judging. Because from now on, it is no longer an individual choice, but a collective duty: to resist obscurantism, violence, simplisms and affirm, through knowledge, what unites rather than what divides.
Allow me a detour to the nation that once proclaimed itself “the land of the free.” In the United States, a worrying paradox is taking hold: science is attacked when it disturbs, the arts threatened when they question, the press prosecuted when it investigates, justice weakened when it refuses to obey. Even the Kennedy Center, a symbol of free creation, was threatened by political control. In universities, funding requests are refused if certain words appear: diversity, vaccines, evidence-based science (Editor’s note: evidence-based science).
When a country begins to punish the thought that questions it, it deprives itself of what made it powerful: its ability to create, to imagine, to reinvent itself. And yet, America was built on free science! The year is 1945. The country is emerging from the war and understands one essential thing: scientific freedom can decide the destiny of a nation. Vannevar Bush presents to Franklin D. Roosevelt Science: The Endless Frontier. He asserts a revolutionary idea: the State must invest massively in fundamental research, but never control it! Finance without dictating. Support without intervening. Provide the means without imposing thought. This choice will transform America. Before 1945: 18 Nobel Prizes. After: more than 400! Silicon Valley is born, the biotechnology industry explodes. Free science becomes an engine of power, innovation and prosperity.
“Europe will always choose science”
Another report could have transformed our continent. In 2024, Mario Draghi proposes a similar vision for Europe: invest, give universities the means, recognize that science is a pillar of sovereignty, freedom and peace. But a year later, only 11% of its recommendations are implemented. The difference can be summed up in one word: boldness. The audacity to finance. The audacity to trust. The audacity to understand that supporting science is not about spending: it is about deciding who will write our future.
Today, Europe devotes barely 2% of its GDP to research, while the United States invests more than 3%. In Europe, Germany exceeds 3%, Sweden reaches 3.4%. France remains below 2.2%. If we want to remain free, innovative, sovereign, we must accept this choice: invest at the same level as those who are already shaping the future. As Ursula von der Leyen said: “Europe will always choose science. And Europe will always inspire scientists around the world to choose Europe.”
We still need to give ourselves the means to live up to this promise. The 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics, Philippe Aghion warns us: “The power of a nation now depends on its capacity to produce technological breakthroughs.” If Europe wants to remain free, it must invest in the future of its intelligence. The Renaissance must be a lesson for our times. Stefan Zweig reminds us what it was: not technical or artistic progress, but an inner revolution. Man discovers that he can think, create, explore for himself. Europe is no longer stuck in certainties; it becomes a space for dialogue, curiosity, daring. Magellan expands the world, Columbus shakes up the cards, Copernicus breaks the established order, Leonardo invents the impossible.
Europe shone when it dared to think differently. We must regain this audacity!
When science meets politics
The Covid-19 pandemic could have brought science and society closer together. It sometimes did, but it also created confusion. For what ? Because we were afraid to say, “We don’t know yet.” We have poorly explained that research is not science. She advances like a child learning to walk: she falls, hesitates, stumbles — but each fall prepares a safer step. Newton said: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” But sometimes science has been confused with politics. The role of explaining has been mixed with that of deciding. This confusion has transformed science into an instrument of power – and no free science should accept this.
We need to doubt to move forward. Descartes taught us: “Doubt is the beginning of wisdom.” To doubt is not to renounce the truth, it is to refuse the easy way, to accept nuance, to listen before concluding. Edgar Morin reminds us: knowledge progresses not by denying contradictions, but by integrating them. Let us not forget one essential thing: we did not evolve to understand, but to survive. Our minds prefer instinct to nuance, certainty to doubt. And yet, it is by learning to doubt that we have become human. Science advances by connecting what seemed opposites, transforming disagreement into understanding.
But then, how can we defend complexity in a world that wants answers before even asking the questions? By relearning to dialogue. Not to triumph, but to understand. Not to impose a truth, but to bring about a new one, which no one could have reached alone. The ancients understood this. Epicureans and Stoics met in the evening as one feeds a fire: log by log. Not to win, but to shine a better light together. Seneca wrote: “We will go up together, or we will not go up.”
The dialogue was not a fight. It was a joint climb. So let’s find this requirement. This word that listens before responding. This debate which connects instead of opposing. This thinking that accepts doubt as a promise – not a threat. Because thinking together already means transforming the future. Educating in science is essential today: it means educating in listening, in creativity, in tolerance. It is learning that disagreement can be fruitful, and that doubt is a promise of progress.
May Europe return to what it should be
Allow me to talk about what I experience every day at the Imagine Institute. We don’t just change treatments: we transform lives. We can do this because we are a University Hospital Institute (IHU) – a private interest foundation, supported by a pact of trust between public institutions – AP-HP, Inserm, Université Paris Cité – and all those who are committed to the common good: researchers, doctors, businesses, donors, citizens. This pact gives us what all science requires: the freedom to invent, the responsibility to act.
It is in this context that one of the pioneers of the institute, Professor Alain Fischer, cured children using gene therapy. This is how, by studying genetic Parkinson’s in children, Michela Deleidi is opening therapeutic avenues for adults suffering from Parkinson’s. This is what Europe does when it dares: it heals children… and heals society as a whole. No discipline, no institution, no single person will meet the challenges that lie ahead. It is all together – biologists and philosophers, artists, journalists, doctors, citizens, entrepreneurs, and political leaders – that we must invent the science of tomorrow.
Not a science that divides or constrains, but a science that connects, enlightens and emancipates. Stefan Zweig and Erasmus embodied this humanist tolerance: a lucid, reasoned tolerance, demanding in its quest for truth. But history also teaches us that tolerance alone is not enough. She becomes powerless when she gives up choosing, when she accepts that reason gives up in the face of violence. This is where the example of Robert Badinter enlightens us. He showed us what the greatness of a free spirit can be: transforming pain into justice, tolerance into action, lucidity into hope. Freedom is not an abstract principle: it is an exercised responsibility. Dante reminds us in the Divine Comedy: “It is not evil that condemns, but going through life without ever choosing — without the courage of justice, nor the risk of the truth.”
So, let Europe once again become what it should be: not a refuge, but an engine of freedom; not a follower, but a beacon of knowledge; not a legacy, but the living laboratory of the human future. If Europe wants to illuminate the future, it must decide today to be its architect. To choose science is to choose freedom over dependence, prosperity over decline, peace over powerlessness.
The future will not wait for us. It’s up to us to build it.
*Professor Bana Jabri, General Director of the Imagine Institute
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