The Centre specializes in historical investigation of scientific development understood in terms of intellectual and social history as an entirety of empirical, theoretical and practical knowledge leading to new findings produced by specific communities of researchers. The time and thematic span in which research is pursued in the Centre is quite wide: from the cosmology of the Middle Ages, through analysis of the intellectual potential of the Early Modern ‘res publica litteraria’, to the 20th century communication in science and relation of science and politics. A long-term priority represents tracking the scientific development and transformation of the Czech scientific community in the multicultural and multinational interwar Czechoslovakia and during the totalitarian regimes, both the Nazi (1939–1945) and the communist (1948–1989) ones. The scientific disciplines whose history is treated are especially astronomy, nuclear physics, genetics and biochemistry, some chemical disciplines, and selected humanities, especially historiography. One of the Centre’s recent key projects is “Czech Scholars in Exile, 1948–1989”; it explores the phenomenon of scientific exile investigating as target group scientific workers of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences who escaped from the country during the communist oppression in the years 1952–1989. The Centre issues irregularly its own Czech, German and English publications in the series Práce z dějin vědy – Studies in the History of Sciences and Humanities, as well as individual works, monographs, proceedings and editions.