Science is the environment of different traditions unequally distributed throughout the world. Historically its development is deeply rooted in social and cultural process and often imbued with aspects of power, authority or control. Totalitarian dictatorships gave us variety of examples in the past but not even in democracies such examples were unknown. The reflection on how science was transformed through the mediation of unequal power relations is given in this commentary as a prerequisite for rethinking the strategies to help bridging existing gaps.