Walter Rosenblith

I am not telling you anything when I tell you that I find it difficult to follow Professor Mohamed's moving account and Professor Kates's look to the future of universal rights and the role that the academy should and needs to play in that regard.

Maybe I should spare you altogether my remarks and let you address my two colleagues, but which professor has ever been able to do this?

(Laughter)

The National Academy of Sciences is a symbol of the international nature and character of science. One-fifth, at least, of its membership was born, as we call it today, “offshore.”

(Laughter)

The annual meeting has, in the past four years, started with a symposium of a day and a half on issues of nuclear war and arms control. So it was last Saturday and Sunday. The topic dealt with the issues of the day, with the problems and the hopes for potential

These issues, like those of human rights, are not issues in which deep cuts in nuclear weapons arrays. benefits of the moral behavior of scientists can be easily quantified in cost/benefit terms. They are more in what our forebears might have called the nature of a tithe, of an ethical imperative. We owe it to the people who live with these issues—and Professor Mohamed has demonstrated that most vividly—not to scatter our shots and to be as effective as we can be with respect to this epidemic, because it is an epidemic.

We should find ways, and that is probably the most difficult thing for a body such as the academy—and I speak not only to members, but also to our guests—to find ways to not be satisfied with high-sounding declarations.

I think what this committee has evolved over the last 10 years is a modus operandi, a way of involving itself in issues where the outcome is in some ways like those in research, uncertain, and yet the members of the committee and the thousand-odd (and some of them are very odd, like myself) correspondents contribute not as professionals but as semi-amateurs, semi-pros.

But they contribute because there is a kin of colleagueship that science uniquely brings about. Our colleague, Professor Mohamed, has drawn for us the horrible crimes of repression, of apartheid. In particular, I have been impressed with the fact that the overwhelming majority of the young has no access to the education that will allow them to become involved meaningfully in the life of the mind, of which science is a part.

He has brought us up short by asking us the uncomfortable question, What does scientific or academic freedom mean in a racist society? Or, for that matter, in societies in which minorities or even majorities, even South Africa, or in many countries, women, are being excluded in a most basic and radical way from the very institutions in which science lives and flourishes as one of the exquisite endeavors of humankind.

We do not need to remind ourselves, especially after what my colleague, Professor Kates, has said, of what people call the basic human needs. But if we as an academy look towards the role that science and technology is playing in changing the human environment, in changing the globe, in changing our society, can we omit the right to education both as a human need and as a human right?

Can we find, as the committee has over the past decade, a way of asserting our impact, whatever it be, in that area? I am not arguing, obviously, against what you said. Obviously, this is not the occasion to discuss the history and the alternate strategies and tactics that human rights advocates have developed in defense of those colleagues whose human rights have been violated.

And we must defend those colleagues. Who defends those who do not have the right to become colleagues? That seems to me a question that is perhaps pedagogical, others might say political, and yet I do think that severe repression (and we have heard it) is not just imprisonment, is not just torture, is not just internal exile, is not just disappearance, but is also the fact that you do not have the opportunity to learn.

I am a physicist and therefore not really qualified to speak about that, but to me, the human curiosity, if not satisfied, is a very basic neglected human need.

So, I think if you ask this question, you have to ask yourself, have we, as a scientific community, spent enough effort in understanding its importance? These are days in which we have been overjoyed that Professor Sakharov is back in Moscow. We should not forget that he wrote, in 1968, a book that is not read as much as it deserves to be. In Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom, he says: “Intellectual freedom is essential to human society, freedom to obtain and distribute information, freedom for openminded and unfearing debate, and freedom from pressure by officialdom and prejudices.”

There are some political overtones in that statement.

(Laughter)

But, basically, it addresses the issue. Only a short five years ago, Sakharov said something about the worldwide character of the scientific community assuming particular importance when dealing with problems of human rights. “By its international defense of persecuted scientists, of all people whose rights have been violated, the scientific community confirms its international mandate, which is so essential for successful scientific work and for service to society.”

Well, our scientific societies, be they national ones or be they international ones, come in contact with these issues all the time and especially at the present time the International Council of Scientific Unions is trying to come to some formulation that will take into account some of the things that Professor Mohamed has mentioned.

So, I am saying nothing new to you; I have a message that is much less polemical, perhaps, but I hope that it fits in with what my two colleagues have to say. Thank you.