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The intensive contacts between academic and industrial chemistry, which grew in germany after the mid-19th century, remained unique to that country for quite a long time. As a number of contributors to this volume suggest (petri on italy; macleod and travis on britain; kragh, lundgren and myllyntaus on scandinavia), the ties between academia and the corporate world were considerably less strong in many other european nations right up to world war i. At the start of the century the situation in the netherlands was hardly different: university research and industrial production were quite unrelated activities and a ph.d. In chemistry generally did not pave the way to employment in a private company. In 1908, industry employed less than 10 per cent of university graduates.1 so while dutch science was going through its “second golden age” and van’t hoff had ushered academic chemistry into prosperity too, the chemical industry virtually sat by and watched from a distance.keywordsroyal academyapply scientific researchscience professordutch scienceacademic chemistthese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Editor—Rather than arguing that nakedness is bad like Abbasi,1 in our article on the democratisation of science we urge transparency advocates to be specific about the body parts that should be displayed publicly.2 As scientific advisory councils find themselves at the intersections of science and society, they necessarily transgress the boundaries of science. This makes them vulnerable to the politicisation of their work. Sound scientific advice is urgently needed in a time where our societies are overwhelmed with new technologies. Therefore, we think that science advisory boards do well in taking utmost care in shaping their relations with policy actors and the citizenry. The experience of the Health Council of the Netherlands in dealing with scientific elements (colliding knowledge claims, etc), can be inspiring to develop methods and procedures to allow societal elements into the advisory process.3 Transparency about one's arguments, allowing your readership to join you in (or dissent from) a line of reasoning, is one of these fragile new procedures that enables the council to be both scientific and useful to policy and public debate. Scientific journals should publish dissenting voices, as this is important for the advancement of science (although journals also have their backstage processes, as McCabe says in her rapid response4). Science advisory boards, however, are to advise government on the state of the art. Debates in the committee further that goal, as this is useful in mobilising the expertise of committee members. Confidentiality of the committee process is essential for the production of such debates (public scrutiny during the process might deter openness among experts). Whereas it goes without saying that lasting dissent is not to be concealed, it seems unwise to bring temporary dissent into the open, as this would be easily taken up to politicise the advice and thus render it ineffective.

Experts, decision-makers and stakeholders dealing with risk must deal with challenges associated with uncertainty. These challenges associated with uncertainty are both complex and significant. In this paper, it is proposed to de-define uncertainty as a reference to situations in which people experience, or construct doubt, on something that matters in view of decision-making and acting, which is made possible, because (scientific) knowledge is perceived or portrayed as limited. The second part of the paper is about dealing with uncertainty. The scholarly focus so far has been on methodology to accommodate uncertainty. Another way is to empirically research logics, manners and strategies actually adopted in dealing with uncertainty. Various uncertainty logics and manners in use are distilled from reviewing quite different contributions, which have, more or less explicitly, addressed the question of how uncertainty is dealt with in various practices.

What do scientific advisory boards such as the Health Council of the Netherlands get their authority from? How does the Council ensure that its advice is incorporated into policy and into the practices at which the advice is directed? A frequently heard answer to this question is: by describing 'the state of knowledge' as optimally as possible. However, case studies on advisory work by the Health Council have shown that this explanation is too simplistic. It is more likely that the explanation lies in the use of 'co-ordination tools' - such as problem definition, the committee process and a specific use of language - that enable the Council to both separate and bridge science and policy. The authority of the Council is based on the hybrid nature of its work.