Professor Andrzej Orłowski, a long-time employee of National Marine Fisheries Research Institute, passed away on October 27, 2020. He was an outstanding scientist in the field of hydroacoustics. Inventor of the method of use of multiple echo measurements to assess the type of the seabed. To this day, this method is called the Orłowski Method. Professor Orłowski was a member of the Physics Section of the SCOR, the NMFRI Scientific Council, the Polish Acoustical Society, ICES Fishery Acoustic Science and Technology Group, ICES Fish Technology and Fish Behavior Working Group, ICES SG Acoustic Seabed Classification and ICES SG Fish Avoidance of Research Vessels.

The author recalls the profiles of some selected Polish scientists and their achievements in context of the current situation of Polish science.

Wacław Tadeusz Szybalski (1921–2020) was born in the city of Lwów. Gradueted from School of Chemistry of Technical University of Lwów (Politechnika Lwowska). In 1945 he obtained diploma of chemical engineering from Silesian University of Technology in Gliwice and PhD in 1949 from Gdańsk University of Technology. He left Poland in 1949, first for Denmark and later USA. From 1951–1955 Wacław Szybalski joined the famous Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY, as a Staff Member. From 1960 to 2003 he has position of Professor of Oncology at the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. Prof. Wacław Szybalski published over 260 scientific papers, covering many areas of biology, including bacterial genetics, mechanisms of drug resistance and radiosensitization, mutagenesis, multi-drug therapy, molecular biology of bacteriophages, particularly phage lambda, genetic engineering, gene therapy, synthetic biology and DNA biochemistry/sequencing. Prof. Wacław Szybalski retired in 2003, and held the rank of Emeritus Professor of Oncology and of Genetics since then. During all years in USA Wacław Szybalski relations with Poland, especially Gdańsk remained very strong. He was a Mentor of several Polish postdocs. Prof. Wacław Szybalski received many science awards over the years, was a Foreign Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Polish Academy of Art and Sciences. In 2011, he received the highest honor awarded in Poland, becoming a Knight of the Order of Polonia Restituta, First Class, presented by President of Poland Bronisław Komorowski. He has also received five honorary doctorates from leading universities in Poland.

Józefa Joteyko was the outstanding scientist in the end of the 19th and in the beginning of the 20th century. Together with Maria Skłodowska-Curie she was the most famous woman and scientist of Polish origin in Europe. She was given the right to present her lectures in the Collége de France and she was, after Adam Mickiewicz, the second Polish lecturer at this great academy. She had committed her life to scientific disciplines which included child neurology, neurophysiology, psychology and pedagogy. She had managed to develop each of them evenly with the same progress and in relation to children. Such approach was aimed at understanding the child and gathering the knowledge about its character and predisposition. These was also meant to help in determining what kind of educational and professional way the child should take. The present-day psychological and pedagogic clinics are the practical fulfilment of Józefa Joteyko’s idea and we cannot imagine the contemporary education without the support of such institutions.

Lifetime biographical and publication histories of 2,326 full professors were examined. A combination of administrative, biographical, and bibliometric data was used. Retrospectively constructed productivity, promotion age and speed classes were examined. About 50% of current top productive professors have been top productive throughout their academic careers, over 30–40 years. Topto- bottom and bottom-to-top transitions in productivity classes over academic careers are very rare. We used prestige-normalized productivity in which more weight is given to articles in high-impact than in low-impact journals, recognizing the highly stratified nature of academic science. The combination of biographical and demographic data with raw Scopus publication data from the past 50 years (N = 935,167 articles) made it possible to assign all full professors retrospectively to different productivity, promotion age, and promotion speed classes. In logistic regression models, there were two powerful predictors of belonging to the Top productivity class for full professors: being highly productive as associate professor and as assistant professor (increasing the odds by 180% and 360%). Neither gender nor age (biological or academic) emerged as statistically significant. Our findings have important implications for hiring policies as scientists stay in Polish academia usually for several decades.