The scroll of Esther, set in Persia 2,400 years ago, reaches its climax with a heart-wrenching dilemma facing the Jewish queen: the prospect of a genocidal plan she is being asked to confront, and a court whose laws assign capital punishment if she does so. The essence of Esther’s dilemma is captured in a powerful verse: “If you remain silent, deliverance will come in other ways. For it may be that your ascent to privilege was meant for this moment.” (Esther 4:14).

כִּי אִם הַחֲרֵשׁ תַּחֲרִישִׁי בָּעֵת הַזֹּאת רֶוַח וְהַצָּלָה יַעֲמוֹד לַיְּהוּדִים מִמָּקוֹם אַחֵר וְאַתְּ וּבֵית אָבִיךְ תֹּאבֵדוּ וּמִי יוֹדֵעַ אִם לְעֵת כָּזֹאת הִגַּעַתְּ לַמַּלְכוּת.

This timeless question, pondered by a queen 2,400 years ago, is also the question that shaped the life of Andrei Sakharov. What is the true meaning of our privileges – our status, our position, our discoveries, our reputations, our tenure, the special access they afford us? Are these merely the benefits of the job, the natural consequence of talent, hard work and success? Or do they carry with them an obligation – to stand for the rights of another human being, of a colleague or a student who suddenly finds themselves in the “loneliest place in the world?” And if so, are we willing to risk what we have in order to support that noble endeavor?

This moment, my colleagues, is not that rare or special. The opportunity is available for each one of us to make a difference, save a career or even a life. My name is Yoel Fink. Receiving the 2026 Sakharov Award is the honor of my lifetime. I am deeply humbled by this recognition – and equally puzzled by my own worthiness.

II. From top scientist to top dissident

Sakharov stood at the apex of scientific prestige in the USSR. He helped build the Soviet thermonuclear program believing that mutual deterrence is a necessary condition for peace; he made seminal contributions as a theoretical physicist including to the theory of the tokamak with his advisor Tamm. A Hero of the Soviet Union – he had a lot to lose; he certainly could have remained silent. Sakharov chose to harness his status, privilege and his unique access in defense of freedom of expression, the rights of individuals whom fate had placed in danger and importantly to courageously speak truth to power in the Soviet Union. He did risk it all.

I grew up in Jerusalem in the 1970s. At that time the struggle of Soviet Jews, refuseniks like Ida Nudel, Natan Sharansky, Boris Begun, and many others were the focus of national awareness and pain. These were individuals who faced enormous personal risks simply for demanding the right to leave, the right to speak, and the right to live freely. It was during that time, still in elementary school, that I first heard of Andrei Sakharov, whose courage in defending peace, freedom, and human rights made him one of the great moral figures of the twentieth century.

It was a mere few years after the 1968 “Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom,” was published arguing that there could be no scientific advancement without freedom of thought. Overnight, as Nathan Sharansky put it: “Sakharov was transformed from the Soviet Union’s top scientist to its top dissident.” Sakharov was a towering scientist – a four-time recipient of the Order of Lenin, a Hero of Socialist Labor. Yet when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975 he was not allowed to leave the Soviet Union to receive it. Think about that: one of the most decorated scientists in his country was not permitted to travel to his own award ceremony. Such were the times.

III. Righteous Among Nations – a call for universal advocacy

The young Sakharov was occasionally mistaken for being Jewish by virtue of his name or appearance – he experienced antisemitism firsthand. It is likely that these early life experiences help shape his belief. For those of us growing up in Israel, his courage had historical significance. We celebrated those rare individuals who, though not Jewish themselves, chose to risk their lives in defense of Jews and other persecuted people – we called them the “righteous among the nations.”

But Sakharov’s advocacy extended beyond. He spoke courageously not only for Soviet Jews but also for dissidents and oppressed peoples across the Soviet Union – including the Crimean Tartars, whose plight he famously raised in his 1975 Nobel lecture. I assumed that the great catastrophes of the past are over and with them the opportunities to take a stand on the right side of history. Sakharov taught us otherwise – that once we fail to protect human rights, science, progress, and peace will ultimately fail.

IV. The materials of freedom

Young Sakharov was exposed to physics at an early age; he was home schooled, his father taught physics. His childhood apartment was lined with books. He experienced the poverty that followed the revolution and the great purges under Stalin. Sakharov began his illustrious career in physics as a materials scientist inspecting armor piercing shell casings during WWII.

My upbringing in comparison was sheltered. In high school I studied theology, served in the Golani infantry brigade, and travelled for a couple of years. My first encounter with physics was at the Technion. For graduate school I came to MIT, where I had the extraordinary privilege of working under John Joannopoulos and Ned Thomas. At MIT I encountered something remarkable – an intellectual culture where ideas moved freely across disciplines, an institution where at the time, none of the doors were locked both figuratively and literally; this was in great contrast to anything that I encountered before. In Israel any institution of significance is surrounded by a security fence and here I could not find even one.

That freedom emboldened me as a second-year graduate student to ask a simple optics question in a room that had in attendance Herman Haus, Erich Ippen and John Joannopolous, luminaries in the physics of light – only an open and free environment would allow what I believed was a silly question to be asked. It was John Joannopoulos who answered; under the mentorship of JJ, as we fondly called him, I was then able to help find the non-trivial answer to this question. The particular photonic band diagram that we discovered launched my career and eventually led to a precise optical scalpel used in hundreds of thousands of minimally invasive surgeries. None of this would have happened if not for the amazing mentorship of a great physicist at MIT who pretty much taught me much of what I know. John Joannopolos passed away after battling lung cancer last summer; it is in his memory that I dedicate this award.

V. Is dignity a preserved quantity?

There is no question that the scientific enterprise as we have known it is facing significant headwinds in this country – it is not apparent to me how much of this is an “American problem” or whether this is a sign of things to come. The measure of a theory is in its ability to predict the outcome of an experiment; the future is an experiment on the grandest scale and yet we are at loss to predict it.

In the absence of all-encompassing theories we have the next best thing: leading indicators – those early signs like the dark clouds on the horizon that foretell a coming storm. In 1821 Heinrich Heine famously wrote: “that was only a prelude, where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people as well.” With Heine’s 200-year-old warning in mind, I would distill my message today: “where the dignity of scientists is destroyed, science itself may soon follow” – in other words, ignoring the torching of a colleague’s reputation carries immeasurable consequences to the human spirit and to truth itself.

This simple insight is quite ancient. Challenged to summarize the entire Torah while the listener stood on one foot – the sage Hillel responded by pointing out an underlying symmetry: “don’t inflict on others what you wouldn’t want for yourself.” The constant of motion associated with this symmetry is human dignity. The safekeeping and defense of human dignity is at the heart of our matter and in order to forecast or take action to prevent the evils ahead we need to measure one simple thing: human dignity, is it indeed preserved? This observation scales to all levels of our existence, the institutional scale notwithstanding.

VI. Amtrak vs. NASCAR

How do violations of human dignity come about? Haven’t we as a civilized society, created a system of rules, codes, and institutions that are designed specifically to shield us? Weren’t our institutions of higher learning and research designed to do just that? The outcomes speak for themselves: neither the codified books of laws, nor our esteemed institutions, nor even tenure stand in the way when the forces of politics, expediency, institutional self-preservation, power, misinformed public, or plain old hatred of foreigners, intellect, or antisemitism bear down on us.

Most disappointingly is that our own academic institutions are unable or unfit to rise to the occasion. They lack the fundamental ability to process risk inherent to groundbreaking discoveries and love the prestige of an upside, while rendered incapable of handling failures which are central to any risky enterprise such as science. Are we in universities a form of AMTRAK, the train company concerned with on time arrivals? Or are we NASCAR where cutting-edge racing inevitably involves flipping a car? These are very different models as far as risk goes. For us, the race drivers of research, it may be a question of life and death. With failures on the institutional level and its managerial class abound, what should we as individuals do about it?

VII. The loneliest place in the world

Mehmet, a former postdoc in the early days of my career, was the first to demonstrate a fiber that contained a conductor, an insulator and a semiconductor. A patriot of his homeland, I have never met a more devoted, more devout, or more hard-working scientist since. Mehmet and his wife Esra, who was getting her PhD in economics at Harvard, would be working in the lab well past midnight in a beautiful and pure pursuit of scientific discovery. Mehmet was passionate about science and led a simple life not driven by material concerns. He returned to Bilkent University to found and lead the national nanotechnology center UNAM while Esra taught economics.

None of this really mattered when the purges at universities unfolded after the failed coup attempt – Mehmet among many others was fired. A 700-page report detailing his offenses was generated in record time; “gold was missing from the fab” I was told by the president of the university himself. I was unsuccessful in countering this politically motivated termination, engaging among others a senior science advisor to president Ardgowan. All to no avail – my warnings that persecuting scientists is reminiscent of dark regimes and dark times fell on deaf ears.

Charlie Lieber, a respected scientist and a serving department head of Chemistry, was interrogated and arrested on Harvard’s campus in the early part of 2020, accused among other things of wire fraud and tax evasion. His institution – Harvard University – collaborated with the FBI, arranging an on-campus interrogation while not conditioning it on legal representation; Harvard prides itself on its school of law yet neglected to offer this basic right to its own faculty.

Lieber’s reputation and dignity were effectively destroyed well before any trial took place. Painfully, his plight was met with a deafening silence not only by his complicit university but sadly by his own colleagues – the 2,400 members of the faculty of arts and science. This set the stage for a playbook that soon was to be used elsewhere. The DoJ and the FBI concluded that their approach for persecuting scientists at research universities was working; aggressive, innovative prosecutorial strategies would soon be tested on campuses around the country including at MIT.

VIII. We are all Gang Chen

Armed with a basic knowledge of history and the leading indicators mentioned above, I was deeply alarmed and took the time to read and study any and all material released on Lieber’s case. In an MIT wide faculty meeting on February 5th 2020, I questioned our silence and warned that we may be next.

On Thursday January 14, 2021, the “China Initiative” hit home for us at MIT. Agents raided Professor Chen’s home in Cambridge in an early dawn raid; his wife Tracy was ordered out of bed by agents while they looked on – she refused. We learned that evening that Professor Chen had allegedly defrauded the government of $19 million and was guilty of wire fraud. MIT’s president expressed pain, but we the faculty decided to go further.

The very next day at 4:00 PM, a group of about 20 MIT faculty gathered on Zoom. The title of the presentation was “have you no decency sir?”, the famous quote from attorney Joe Welch that effectively ended the McCarthy hearings in 1954. We ended the meeting by reading the poem “First they came for the Communists – And I did not speak out” by Martin Neimoller. It didn’t take long for us to realize that the government’s criminal complaint had serious factual errors – including listing Prof. Gang Chen as a recipient of a whopping $29 million from the Chinese government, which we all knew went to MIT.

Why would the government choose to mislead if they had a truthful case? We realized that if a person like Gang could be criminally targeted for routine scientific activities, then none of us are safe. The rally cry “We Are All Gang Chen” underscored that it wasn’t his dignity and reputation alone that was maligned – it was ours.

The DoJ and FBI were bringing the heavy machinery of the federal justice system, such as “wire fraud” statutes developed for organized crime, into the halls of science. In doing so they were damaging the very same American innovation they sought to protect. Fear kills creativity and collaboration. A reputation built over a lifetime is gone in an instant. The concept of a “golden hour” applies to situations where the reputation of a colleague is assaulted by powerful forces. After the arrest of Professor Gang Chen, our community mobilized quickly, and today, Professor Gang Chen is a free man.

IX. Answering Sakharov’s call

The stories of these individuals are intended to illustrate the impact of inaction but also to capture the opportunity in taking a stand. The US today is a world away from the USSR of Sakharov’s times, however certain similarities in the persecution of scientists, in the suppression of free speech and in the violations of human rights remain. These were the very causes that Andrei Sakharov fought for.

The appeal to consider our privilege not as a source of benefit but as a deep personal obligation in defense of human rights captures the arc of Sakharov’s life. For it may be that our ascent to privilege was meant for this moment. The call for action couldn’t be more clearly articulated in Sakharov’s words: “In struggling to protect human rights we must, I am convinced, first and foremost act as protectors of the innocent victims.”

Thank you.

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