On the occasion of receiving the highest distinction of the honorary professor from the Jagiellonian University at Kraków, the author looks back at his academic career and ponders how sociological wisdom has left an impact on his life. He singles out the sixteen principles and rules formulated by the eminent sociologists, both classical of the XIX century and modern of the XX century, which he believes have influenced his professional social roles of the researcher, writer and educator, as well as his private everyday life. The famous quotations drawn from the sociological literature (e.g. the Thomas theorem, C.W. Mills’ sociological imagination, C.H. Cooley’s looking-glass self, E. Goffman’s the theatre of everyday life, R. Merton’s metaphor of scholars as pigmies on the shoulders of giants etc.) are accompanied by extensive interpretations by the author, relating them to his personal life-experiences.

The uncertainty, threats and risks are unavoidable aspects of human existence. The response to them is trust, the expectation of beneficial, future actions of others (individuals, institutions, organizations). Risk and trust take unique forms during pandemic. Risk is global, universal, hard to assess and attached to common, everyday actions. Trust, the bridge over the abyss of uncertainty, is directed toward three addressees: the government, medicine (medical science, services and products), and the other members of society. For each category the expectations are different. These theoretical considerations are applied and illustrated by the brief history of the pandemic in Poland.

Trust and trustworthiness are crucial for science: equally for the scientific knowledge, scientific institutions and scientific community. For scientific knowledge the main criterion of trustworthiness is the search for truth, for scientific institutions it is the regime of autonomy, and for scientific community – respecting the ethos of science: norms of universalism, communalism, disinterestedness and organized scepticism (peer review and meritocracy). In the traditional academic science due to these criteria the level of deviance (fraud, plagiarism etc.) was very low. Alas in current post-academic science we witness numerous occurrence of fake knowledge, loss of autonomy of academic institutions and the neglect of the ethos of science among scholars. There are several processes responsible for this condition: fiscalisation, privatization, marketization, bureaucratization, and the pressure of non-academic, external forces and interests on scientific community. The regaining of autonomy and reactivation of academic culture (primarily the ethos of science), are the preconditions for overcoming the current crisis of trustworthiness in science.