Science and policy advice have become an additional activity for socially engaged and committed researchers. Knowledge should be shared and used to the benefit of society. However, it is not just ministers, members of parliament and governmental offices who pose political questions hopefully to be able to make knowledge guided decisions but also sometimes to advance their own career. Researchers can handle these challenges by focusing their efforts on politicians whom they recognize as honest and authentic. For the researcher most political issues arise at the lab. Deans, Head of Departments and other university administrators are now typically in charge of too many employees to understand what is happening and thus cannot exercise knowledge-based academic leadership as required to inspire the individual employee and create a vibrant research environment. Instead, the approach is to set up rules on how to resolve all kind of envisioned problems with no detailed understanding on why a problem may have arisen. This is very disruptive to the well-functioning and dynamic research units and serves to reduce the engagement of university researchers in the public political debate. Most are fed up by the internal politics and do not have the energy to engage in external debates that for many reasons may also be difficult to handle. Everyone seems to agree that we should move towards a biobased society. Researchers are trying to provide solutions e.g. by harnessing solar energy in artificially built solar cells or by designing biological systems to replace production systems based on petrochemicals. The debate rapidly becomes polarized: are we producing food for a rising global population or bioethanol? Politicians render it less favorable to install solar cells to compensate for the loss of income from the energy tax on petrochemical fuels due to reduced consumption. It will be discussed how researchers may need to change their research focus to be able to guide politicians to make decisions favoring the shift towards a biobased society.