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What happens when a university burns in war? Science is difficult to rebuild

When Karazin University in Kharkiv fell silent in the spring of 2022, what was lost was not a database. It was a living epistemic community—something more intangible that takes centuries to build.

There is a question that the history and philosophy of science has not adequately confronted, “what precisely is lost when war destroys the conditions under which science is practised?” We have extensive literature on how science is made, on the social organisation of laboratories, the role of tacit knowledge, the formation of scientific communities, and the slow accumulation of what Michael Polanyi called the republic of science. We have rather less to say, as a discipline, about how science is unmade. The arc of conflict from Kharkiv to Sana’a to Aleppo makes that omission no longer defensible.

In Kharkiv, missile strikes have left Karazin University’s physics faculty, a department in the tradition of Nobel laureate Lev Landau, without a single intact building; in Sana’a, Yemen’s disease surveillance system has collapsed so completely that the country now has only a handful of working PCR machines. What gets reported is the strike count and the case count, never the disappearance of the research culture itself, and that gap in perception is the real casualty.

The default answer that war destroys infrastructure, displaces personnel, and interrupts research programmes is essentially true but not sufficient. It treats scientific knowledge as a stock of information that can, in principle, be warehoused, evacuated, and reinstalled elsewhere when conditions permit. This is a category error of some consequence. Scientific knowledge is not simply a collection of propositions. It is, as historians of science have argued at length since the 1970s, a form of practice: Embodied, distributed across communities, dependent on instruments and institutions, and reproduced through apprenticeship structures that take generations to establish.

When Karazin University in Kharkiv fell silent in the spring of 2022, its physicists fleeing westward, its laboratories abandoned, what was lost was not a database. It was a living epistemic community— something more intangible that takes centuries to build.

The particular culture of inquiry, the seminars and mentoring relationships and institutional memory that accumulate only across time and cannot be reconstructed by funding and ferocious exhortation alone. The distinction matters enormously for how we think about recovery, and for how we assign moral weight to the destruction of scientific institutions in wartime.

The historical record bears this out with unwelcome consistency. Nalanda’s destruction in 1193 offers an earlier instance of the same pattern: A monastic university that had drawn scholars from across Asia for seven centuries, its library said to have burned for months, was not simply a casualty of conquest but the termination of a transmission network whose like would not be reconstituted.

The Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258 is the archetype, not merely for its violence but for its specificity. The House of Wisdom represented a particular configuration of translation practices, patronage networks, and accumulated commentary traditions that had taken centuries to assemble. Its destruction did not simply interrupt Islamic science; it eliminated the institutional conditions under which that particular form of science had been possible. Whether the legend of the Tigris running black with ink is literally true is less important than what it encodes. The intuition, evidently deep in historical memory, that the destruction of written knowledge is a civilisational wound of a different order from other forms of physical destruction.

The Library of Alexandria functions similarly in Western historiography, whatever the actual circumstances of its end. These are not merely stories about books being burned. They are stories about the collapse of the conditions of possibility for inquiry.

The twentieth century gave us a more analytically tractable version of the same phenomenon. The Nazi persecution and expulsion of Jewish scientists produced what historians of science have called one of the most........

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