Do we like Michio Kaku?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A long anti-nuclear and science-education record, no harmful words found, marked down for amplifying a story other scientists doubt.
Kaku was born in San Jose in 1947 to a family that was poor but kept taking him to university libraries and let him run experiments at home. In high school he built an atom smasher in the garage from scrap metal and miles of wire. Nuclear physicist Edward Teller noticed it, and that helped land him a scholarship to Harvard, where he graduated top of his physics class in 1968.
He did a PhD at Berkeley, became a professor at City College of New York, and turned into the bloke who explains the universe on telly and radio. But he's been an activist for a long time too. In the 1980s he helped circulate a scientists' pledge against Star Wars research and took it to the UN. In 1997 he joined protests against NASA flying plutonium on the Cassini probe.
On the harm test, we found nothing nasty. No attacks on LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or anyone else turned up in what we read, and he's backed more diversity in science fields. To be fair, we also found nothing from him on trans issues one way or the other, so that's a gap rather than a tick.
The recent bit is the asterisk. In April 2026 he told Fox News Digital that if ten scientists with sensitive research access die or vanish, it's cause for national concern. He also said the pattern was unheard of. Newsweek reports he stressed that conclusions should rest on evidence, not speculation, and authorities say no link between the cases has been established. Where you land depends on whether you read it as a sensible call to check, or as feeding a theory the evidence doesn't support.
Our searches found no court rulings or allegations against him, which is a clean sheet. The good stuff is the long haul: decades of making physics accessible, plus peace and anti-nuclear campaigning. So, would we support him? Yes, with an eyebrow raised at the missing-scientists comments.