The University of Copenhagen was more complicated and far more time-consuming to manage than the Chairman of the Board Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen had ever imagined. It is the arm wrestling with the politicians that has been the most demanding, he says in this retrospective.

Physicist Benny Lautrup has got Alzheimer’s. Slowly, stubbornly, the disease eats in to the acuity of mind that made him a professor. The poor boy from the working class Istedgade district in Copenhagen, who ended up as a recognised scientist, is used to standing up to adversity.

Ekatherina Zhukova came to Denmark as a PhD student from Belarus, where the professors still have a patent on all the right answers, and where nobody is rewarded for thinking independently.

As chairman of a government-appointed Danish Council on Climate Change, Peter Birch Sørensen refused, right from the beginning, to submit to the government's political logic. So he was dismissed, and now he is back on his professor seat at the Department of Economics. But he does not bear a grudge. In his experience, credible proposals from researchers always end up victorious.