It has been awarded to many eminent scientists throughout history, including Isaac Newton (1672),[2] Benjamin Franklin (1756), Charles Babbage (1816),[2] Michael Faraday (1824),[2] Charles Darwin (1839),[2] Ernest Rutherford (1903),[3] Srinivasa Ramanujan (1918),[4] Jagadish Chandra Bose (1920),[5] Albert Einstein (1921),[6] Paul Dirac (1930), Winston Churchill (1941), Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1944),[7] Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (1945),[8] Dorothy Hodgkin (1947),[9] Alan Turing (1951),[10] Lise Meitner (1955),[11] Satyendra Nath Bose (1958),[12] and Francis Crick (1959).

[13][14] More recently, fellowship has been awarded to Stephen Hawking (1974), David Attenborough (1983), Tim Hunt (1991), Elizabeth Blackburn (1992), Raghunath Mashelkar (1998), Tim Berners-Lee (2001), Venki Ramakrishnan (2003), Atta-ur-Rahman (2006),[15] Andre Geim (2007),[16] Bai Chunli (2014), James Dyson (2015), Ajay Kumar Sood (2015), Subhash Khot (2017), Elon Musk (2018),[17] Elaine Fuchs (2019) and around 8,000 others in total,[2] including over 280 Nobel Laureates since 1900.

[18] Fellowship of the Royal Society has been described by The Guardian as "the equivalent of a lifetime achievement Oscar"[19] with several institutions celebrating their announcement each year.

[20][21][22][23][24][25][26] Up to 60 new Fellows (FRS), honorary (HonFRS) and foreign members (ForMemRS) are elected annually in late April or early May, from a pool of around 700 proposed candidates each year.

Honorary Fellows include the World Health Organization's Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (2022), Bill Bryson (2013), Melvyn Bragg (2010), Robin Saxby (2015), David Sainsbury, Baron Sainsbury of Turville (2008), Onora O'Neill (2007), John Maddox (2000),[32] Patrick Moore (2001) and Lisa Jardine (2015).

Nominations for Fellowship are peer reviewed by Sectional Committees, each with at least 12 members and a Chair (all of whom are Fellows of the Royal Society).

Each Sectional Committee covers different specialist areas including: New Fellows are admitted to the Society at a formal admissions day ceremony held annually in July,[48] when they sign the Charter Book and the Obligation which reads: "We who have hereunto subscribed, do hereby promise, that we will endeavour to promote the good of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, and to pursue the ends for which the same was founded; that we will carry out, as far as we are able, those actions requested of us in the name of the Council; and that we will observe the Statutes and Standing Orders of the said Society.

Provided that, whensoever any of us shall signify to the President under our hands, that we desire to withdraw from the Society, we shall be free from this Obligation for the future".