Research report: The prince and the scientists

Why do some scientific institutions produce exceptional science while others, with comparable resources and equally talented researchers, remain merely good? In a commentary published in EMBO Reports, he argues that the answer lies not in budgets or buildings but in leadership, and that scientific leadership is a distinct skill that institutions systematically neglect when selecting, training and evaluating the people who run them.

Laudet’s starting point is a habit he has developed over years of serving on evaluation panels. After the formal presentations by leadership teams, with their strategies, priorities and long-term visions, he seeks out an informal conversation with administrative staff, technicians or students over coffee in a hallway. Those unscripted exchanges, he writes, often reveal what formal assessments cannot: whether people trust their leaders, take pride in their institution, collaborate naturally and feel part of a scientific community rather than merely an organization. They do not necessarily contradict what leaders say, but they tell another part of the story, one that is harder to measure yet essential to understanding why some institutions thrive.

The core of his argument is that a scientific institution is fundamentally unlike a business, an army or a government. Those organizations pursue identifiable objectives, whether winning a battle, turning a profit or implementing a political agenda. A scientific institution, by contrast, aims to generate something that does not yet exist. A true discovery is, by definition, unpredictable. Laudet invokes Albert Einstein’s quip that if we knew what we were doing, it would not be called research. This difference, he contends, changes the nature of leadership itself. Researchers are recruited precisely because they think for themselves and challenge accepted ideas, so an institution cannot demand that they be fiercely original in their science yet docile within its hierarchy.

Formal authority, in his view, is a remarkably poor instrument for producing science. A general commands and a chief executive imposes decisions, but a leader can instruct researchers to attend a meeting, follow a procedure or respect a budget without being able to instruct them to have an original idea. Scientific leadership therefore depends on example, persuasion and the ability to articulate a vision that scientists eventually make their own. The role of a scientific leader is not to tell researchers what to think or investigate, but to create an environment in which they can do so themselves. Laudet illustrates the danger of ignoring this with an early-career memory: a new secretary general hired from the private sector applied corporate methods to his institute, optimizing procedures and streamlining decisions. It was, he writes, a total disaster, because the organization was brilliantly managed while its core purpose, generating knowledge, was missed. Uncertainty, intellectual freedom, diversity of approaches and risk-taking, he argues, are not flaws to be eliminated but part of the process by which discovery occurs.

To frame his case, Laudet turns deliberately to Niccolò Machiavelli, whose Prince sought to master fortune and preserve power. The scientific leader faces almost the opposite challenge: how to use power to foster the independence and creativity on which science depends. Yet, he observes, scientific leaders still too often adopt the codes of the Prince, with hierarchy, displays of authority and the enduring temptation of the great-man model of leadership, a conception he traces to the long tradition of associating leadership with charisma and command. Such displays may reinforce authority, he writes, but they contribute remarkably little to science.

Against that model, Laudet proposes what he calls epistemic legitimacy. The head of a scientific institution need not be its best or most productive researcher, and cannot guide the scientific choices of dozens or hundreds of teams. Nevertheless, he argues, a great scientific leader must be an excellent scientist, because scientific legitimacy, unlike political authority, cannot be inherited or conferred by office. It must be earned through the practice of science. Researchers do not expect their leaders to dictate experiments, but they do expect them to understand what science actually means: the failed experiments, rejected papers and years of work leading nowhere, alongside the thrill of discovery. This shared experience, recognized by a community, forms the basis of epistemic legitimacy. He is careful to add that it is necessary but not sufficient, since the history of universities is full of exceptional scientists who became mediocre presidents. Scientific excellence provides legitimacy; it does not magically provide leadership. There are also critical moments, such as deciding whether to keep supporting a laboratory that publishes little but is extraordinarily creative, or whether to recruit an unknown young scientist over a safer candidate, when genuine scientific judgment cannot be reduced to performance indicators or dashboards.

The commentary’s central metaphor is ecological. Recruiting the best researchers, he argues, is not enough to build the best institution, just as a coral reef is remarkable not for assembling the best species but for its extraordinarily rich network of interactions. He recalls a lesson from Jamshed R. Tata, the British molecular biologist who spent six months in his laboratory when Laudet was a young group leader, and who told him that a team of ten Zidanes could not work: a team needs only two or three goal scorers, and more diversity, otherwise it will have no structure and no soul. Excellence, in this view, is not about assembling as many stars as possible but about diversity, complementarity and the interactions between members.

The ecological analogy extends further. Scientific institutions have their own keystone species, the ecologist’s term for organisms whose disappearance destabilizes an entire system. In a laboratory, these may not be the most famous researchers but a brilliant engineer keeping an indispensable platform running, or an administrator who always finds a solution when everyone else is stuck, people whose importance often bears little relation to their position on the organizational chart. Leaders, meanwhile, can act as ecosystem engineers, reshaping the scientific habitat through decisions about recruitment, resources, infrastructure and even physical space. Creating a department, opening a new research area or constructing a building alters which people and disciplines come into contact, and such decisions require judgment about when an institution should expand and when it should resist growing simply because resources are available. Laudet also stresses margins: evolutionary novelty often emerges at the periphery, where small, partially isolated populations escape homogenizing forces, and scientific institutions similarly need unproductive margins of time, funding and intellectual space to explore unlikely ideas, since that is often where novel ideas emerge. Leadership effects, he adds, propagate through an institution much like energy through a food web, with poor leadership at the top gradually contaminating every level, while excellent local leadership can preserve creativity even when the wider institution struggles.

If the institution is an ecosystem, Laudet argues, trust is its invisible infrastructure, appearing on no organizational chart and listed in no budget. He regards trust not merely as a quality of human relationships but as a major determinant of scientific performance, because it accelerates the circulation of ideas, facilitates collaborations and allows a doctoral student to knock on a team leader’s door with a risky idea, or researchers to share preliminary results and admit failed experiments. When trust disappears, researchers become cautious, information circulates less freely and procedures multiply. Bureaucracy, he suggests, develops like a scar, replacing administrative control for relationships that previously functioned on trust, in a self-reinforcing spiral. Trust cannot be decreed: no president can announce that the community will trust its leadership from Monday. It is built slowly through hundreds of small decisions, kept promises, explained decisions, acknowledged mistakes, and it is profoundly asymmetric, taking years to build and weeks to destroy. Echoing Machiavelli’s conclusion that it is safer for a prince to be feared than loved, Laudet argues that fear may secure obedience but is disastrous for producing science, since a weakened leader who compensates with rules and displays of power only accelerates the erosion. Authority may secure compliance, he writes, but trust is what makes a scientific community possible.

The commentary closes with a call to take scientific leadership far more seriously as a subject for reflection, teaching and research. Laudet notes a strange asymmetry: early-career researchers are scrutinized relentlessly, their projects evaluated and papers counted, while institutional leaders are often treated with remarkable leniency, particularly by governing boards composed of senior leaders who understand one’s peers all too easily and excuse them. Yet the asymmetry of consequences runs the other way, because a young scientist can learn from a bad decision while a poor leader can damage an entire institution for years. He rejects further metrics or bureaucratic evaluation, noting that leadership is not easily captured by a dashboard and that some effects become visible only years later, but insists that difficulty of measurement is no excuse for absence of judgment. Leadership, he argues, can be learned, discussed and improved, and future leaders should be mentored before appointment. His final criterion is the most demanding: where Machiavelli’s Prince sought to preserve power, a great scientific leader should aspire to build an institution whose excellence no longer depends on their presence. Having directed the Institute of Functional Genomics at the ENS de Lyon for eight years, he recalls being delighted that nobody ever called him for advice after he left, proof, he suggests, that the ultimate achievement of scientific leadership is to leave behind a community that remains ambitious, creative and capable of renewing itself after its leader is gone.

Subject of Research: The nature of scientific leadership and how institutions can be led to foster discovery

Article Title: The prince and the scientists

Article References: Laudet, V. (2026). The prince and the scientists. EMBO Reports. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44319-026-00964-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s44319-026-00964-5

Keywords: scientific leadership, research institutions, epistemic legitimacy, trust, ecosystem metaphor, Machiavelli, EMBO Reports, Vincent Laudet, science management, institutional culture, creativity, evaluation