[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 13]
[Senate]
[Pages 17826-17830]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                 ANNIVERSARY OF THE DITCHLEY FOUNDATION

 Mr. LUGAR. Mr. President, I am pleased to have the opportunity 
to pay tribute to the work of the Ditchley Foundation on the occasion 
of the 50th anniversary of its founding.
  Since the foundation's inception in 1958, several of my colleagues, 
on both sides of the aisle and in both Chambers of the Congress, have 
taken part in the conferences held at Ditchley Park. This beautiful 
18th century country

[[Page 17827]]

house a few miles outside of Oxford, England, was used as a weekend 
retreat by Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Averill Harriman, then 
U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain, during the frequent bombings of 
London during World War II. Today, Ditchley Park is home to around a 
dozen conferences each year on topics of relevance to transatlantic 
relations and international policy concerns in general. This series 
includes a keynote annual address given by a distinguished lecturer 
every summer.
  This year's lecture gathering was especially noteworthy during this 
anniversary year. Individuals from a number of fields and countries 
attended, including our former colleague in the House of 
Representatives, now president emeritus of New York University, Dr. 
John Brademas. Dr. Brademas is himself a trustee of the Ditchley 
Foundation and was for several years chairman of the American Ditchley 
Foundation.
  The current chairman is Rita E. Hauser, president of the Hauser 
Foundation and a former member of the President's Foreign Intelligence 
Advisory Board. Further, the executive director of American Ditchley is 
John J. O'Conner, vice chancellor and secretary of the State University 
of New York.
  At the annual lecture on July 11, 2008, chairman of the Ditchley 
Foundation and former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom John Major 
made the following introductory remarks, which I would like to share 
with my colleagues. I ask to have the remarks printed in the Record.
  The material follows.

       ``Ditchley is one of the hidden gems of the Transatlantic 
     relationship.
       It doesn't feature in Presidential speeches or Prime 
     Ministerial briefing. Mercifully, it is not a plaything of 
     the media: but its role as a clearing house for ideas; a 
     forum for debate and discussion; and a magnet for policy-
     makers gives it a unique status. It is the intellectual 
     expression of `soft power' and a tribute to the pre-eminence 
     of reason and rational debate.
       Of course--you all know that: it is why you are here. All 
     of you know Ditchley, are committed to Ditchley, care about 
     its future and have contributed generously to ensure it. For 
     that--I thank you most warmly; it is a delight to see you all 
     here this evening. My only regret is that many others--who 
     also care for Ditchley and have been enormously generous to 
     it--could not be here to join us. In their absence, I thank 
     them, too, for all their support.
       On Ditchley's 50th Anniversary, I think it worthwhile to 
     look at its role.
       My father was half-American. Brought up in the United 
     States he drilled into me as a boy the importance of the 
     Transatlantic relationship. His affection for it was 
     emotional--but the economic, political and military case is 
     even stronger. And yet we cannot take this for granted; it is 
     not necessarily a fixed star in the firmament. Geography hugs 
     Britain to her neighbors in Europe, and so does trade.
       Trade and real politik turn American eyes to the East: 
     there is no room for complacency. The most successful 
     alliance in history is not immutable. It needs cherishing to 
     keep it in good order.
       Ditchley plays a role in this. And why is that? It is, of 
     course, because thoughtful minds--lifting debate from the 
     ephemeral to the eternal--see the importance (and the self-
     interest if you like) of nurturing Transatlantic ties.
       But there is a further reason why Ditchley plays a role--a 
     more prosaic reason. It is because one man saw the importance 
     of the subject and had the vision to establish Ditchley in 
     order to do something about it. That man was David Wills. 
     Today, we remember and honour his vision, his commitment and 
     his generosity. He saw the need--forgive the unintended pun--
     and he willed the means. David Wills is the Father of 
     Ditchley and the effect of his invisible hand is evident in 
     the continuing and instinctive relationship of trust that we 
     take for granted across the Atlantic.
       He chose wisely, too, in entrusting his legacy to Lady 
     Wills and Catherine Wills. No one could have cared for 
     Ditchley more, and their generosity has always been 
     outstanding. I don't simply mean generosity in material 
     terms--though certainly that, for the Wills family were by 
     far the largest contributors to our recent fundraising 
     campaign--but also their personal commitment in time and 
     involvement. They are the living embodiment of Ditchley. I 
     believe they can be satisfied that their actions have helped 
     bind the ties that keep us safe and prosperous.

  Following Sir John's remarks, the annual lecture was delivered by an 
eminent British scholar and scientist, Professor Martin Rees, a member 
of the House of Lords. President of the Royal Society, Lord Rees of 
Ludlow is also Master of Trinity College, Cambridge University, and 
Astronomer Royal. The address by Lord Rees, in full, was as follows:

       Last year, Brent Scowcroft stood at this podium as Ditchley 
     Lecturer. It's daunting to follow him. I'll take as my text 
     his concluding words:
       ``If we behave wisely, prudently and in close strategic 
     cooperation with each other, the 21st century could be the 
     best yet in the rather dismal history of mankind.''
       This is the 50th anniversary of the Ditchley Foundation, 
     and I've been asked to offer a scientist's perspective on the 
     next fifty years. As an astronomer, I often get mistakenly 
     described as an astrologer--but I cast no horoscopes and have 
     no crystal ball. My message will be that the Promethean power 
     of science offers greater opportunities than ever before--for 
     the developing and the developed world. We can indeed be 
     optimistic: we can surely expect huge economic and social 
     advances, especially in Asia. But there will be new 
     challenges and vulnerabilities to contend with.


                           THE LAST 50 YEARS

       Fifty years ago no-one here could confidently have 
     predicted the geopolitical landscape of today. And scientific 
     forecasting is just as hazardous. Three of today's most 
     remarkable technologies had their gestation in the 1950s. But 
     nobody could then have guessed how pervasively they would 
     shape our lives today.
       It was in 1958 that Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments and 
     Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductors built the first 
     integrated circuit--the precursor of today's ubiquitous 
     silicon chips, each containing literally billions of 
     microscopic circuit elements. This was perhaps the most 
     transformative single invention of the past century.
       A second technology with huge potential began in Cambridge 
     in the 1950s, when Watson and Crick discovered the bedrock 
     mechanism of heredity--the famous double helix. This 
     discovery launched the science of molecular biology, opening 
     exciting prospects in genomics and synthetic biology.
       And it's just over 50 years since the launch of Sputnik. 
     This event started the `space race', and led President 
     Kennedy to inaugurate the programme to land men on the Moon. 
     Kennedy's prime motive was of course superpower rivalry--
     cynics could deride it as a stunt. But it was an 
     extraordinary technical triumph--especially as NASA's total 
     computing power was far less than in a single mobile phone 
     today. And it had an inspirational aspect too: it offered a 
     new perspective on our planet. Distant images of Earth--its 
     delicate biosphere of clouds, land and oceans contrasting 
     with the sterile moonscape where the astronauts left their 
     footprints--have, ever since the 1960s, been iconic for 
     environmentalists.
       Most of us here are old enough to recall the Apollo 
     programme. But it's nearly 40 years since Neil Armstrong's 
     `first small step'. To young people today, however, this is 
     ancient history: they know that the Americans went to the 
     Moon, just as they know the Egyptians built pyramids, but the 
     motives for these two enterprises may seem equally baffling.
       There was no real follow-on after Apollo: there is no 
     practical or scientific motive adequate to justify the huge 
     expense of NASA-style manned spaceflight, and it has lost its 
     glamour. But unmanned space technology has flourished, giving 
     us GPS, global communications, environmental monitoring and 
     other everyday benefits, as well as an immense scientific 
     yield. But of course there is a dark side. Its initial 
     motivation was to provide missiles to carry nuclear weapons. 
     And those weapons were themselves the outcome of a huge 
     enterprise, the Manhattan project, that was even more intense 
     and focused than the Apollo programme.
       Soon after World War II, some physicists who had been 
     involved in the Manhattan project founded a journal called 
     the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, aimed at promoting arms 
     control. The `logo' on the Bulletin's cover is a clock, the 
     closeness of whose hands to midnight indicates the Editorial 
     Board's judgement on how precarious the world situation is. 
     Every year or two, the minute hand is shifted, either 
     forwards or backwards.
       It was closest to midnight at the time of the Cuban Missile 
     Crisis. Robert MacNamara spoke frankly about that episode in 
     his confessional movie `Fog of War'. He said that ``We came 
     within a hairbreadth of nuclear war without realising it. 
     It's no credit to us that we escaped--Khrushchev and Kennedy 
     were lucky as well as wise''. Indeed on several occasions 
     during the Cold War the superpowers could have stumbled 
     towards armageddon.
       When the Cold War ended, the Bulletin's clock was put back 
     to 17 minutes to midnight. There is now far less risk of tens 
     of thousands of H-bombs devastating our civilisation. Indeed 
     one clear reason for sharing Brent Scowcroft's optimism is 
     that the greatest peril to confront the world from the 1950s 
     to the 1980s--massive nuclear annihilation--has diminished.

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       But the clock has been creeping forward again. There is 
     increasing concern about nuclear proliferation, and about 
     nuclear weapons being deployed in a localised conflict. And 
     Al Qaida-style terrorists might some day acquire a nuclear 
     weapon. If they did, they would willingly detonate it in a 
     city, killing tens of thousands along with themselves, and 
     millions would acclaim them as heroes.
       And the threat of a global nuclear catastrophe could be 
     merely in temporary abeyance. I'm diffident about even 
     mentioning such matters to an audience where there's so much 
     experience and expertise. But during this century, 
     geopolitical realignments could be as drastic as those during 
     the last century, and could lead to a nuclear standoff 
     between new superpowers that might be handled less well--or 
     less luckily--than the Cuba crisis was.
       The nuclear age inaugurated an era when humans could 
     threaten the entire Earth's future--what some have called the 
     `anthropocene' era. We'll never be completely rid of the 
     nuclear threat. But the 21st century confronts us with new 
     perils as grave as the bomb. They may not threaten a sudden 
     world-wide catastrophe--the doomsday clock is not such a good 
     metaphor--but they are, in aggregate, worrying and 
     challenging.
       I want briefly to address some of these themes, and then, 
     near the end of my lecture, to comment on the role of science 
     and scientists in the policy arena.


                           ENERGY AND CLIMATE

       High on the global agenda are energy supply and energy 
     security. These are crucial for economic and political 
     stability, and linked of course to the grave issue of long-
     term climate change.
       Human actions--mainly the burning of fossil fuels--have 
     already raised the carbon dioxide concentration higher than 
     it's ever been in the last half million years. Moreover, 
     according to `business as usual' scenarios, it will reach 
     twice the pre-industrial level by 2050, and three times that 
     level later in the century. This much is entirely 
     uncontroversial. Nor is there significant doubt that 
     CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and that the higher its 
     concentration rises, the greater the warming--and, more 
     important still, the greater the chance of triggering 
     something grave and irreversible: rising sea levels due to 
     the melting of Greenland's icecap; runaway greenhouse warming 
     due to release of methane in the tundra, and so forth.
       There is a substantial uncertainty in just how sensitive 
     the temperature is to the CO2 level. The climate 
     models can, however, assess the likelihood of a range of 
     temperature rises. It is the `high-end tail' of the 
     probability distribution that should worry us most--the small 
     probability of a really drastic climatic shift. Climate 
     scientists now aim to refine their calculations, and to 
     address questions like: Where will the flood risks be 
     concentrated? What parts of Africa will suffer severest 
     drought? Where will the worst hurricanes strike?
       The `headline figures' that the climate modellers quote--2, 
     3 or 5 degrees rise in the mean global temperature--might 
     seem too small to fuss about. But two comments should put 
     them into perspective.
       First, even in the depth of the last ice age the mean 
     temperature was lower by just 5 degrees. Second, the 
     prediction isn't a uniform warming: the land warms more than 
     the sea, and high latitudes more than low. Quoting a single 
     figure glosses over shifts in global weather patterns that 
     will be more drastic in some regions than in others, and 
     could involve relatively sudden `flips' rather than steady 
     changes.
       Nations can adapt to some of the adverse effects of 
     warming. But the most vulnerable people--in, for instance, 
     Africa or in Bangladesh--are the least able to adapt.
       The science of climate change is intricate. But it's a 
     doddle compared to the economics and politics. Global warming 
     poses a unique political challenge for two reasons. First, 
     the effect is non-localised: the CO2 emissions 
     from this country have no more effect here than they do in 
     Australia, and vice versa. That means that any credible 
     regime whereby the `polluter pays' has to be broadly 
     international.
       Second, there are long time-lags--it takes decades for the 
     oceans to adjust to a new equilibrium, and centuries for ice-
     sheets to melt completely. So the main downsides of global 
     warming lie a century or more in the future. Concepts of 
     intergenerational justice then come into play: How should we 
     rate the rights and interests of future generations compared 
     to our own? What discount rate should we apply?
       In his influential 2006 report for the UK government, 
     Nicholas Stern argued that equity to future generations 
     renders a `commercial' discount rate quite inappropriate. 
     Largely on that basis he argues that we should commit 
     substantial resources now, to pre-empt much greater costs in 
     future decades.
       There are of course precedents for long-term altruism. 
     Indeed, in discussing the safe disposal of nuclear waste, 
     experts talk with a straight face about what might happen 
     more than 10,000 years from now, thereby implicitly applying 
     a zero discount rate. To concern ourselves with such a remote 
     `post-human' era might seem bizarre. But all of us can surely 
     empathise at least a century ahead. Especially in Europe, 
     we're mindful of the heritage we owe to centuries past; 
     history will judge us harshly if we discount too heavily what 
     might happen when our grandchildren grow old.
       To ensure a better-than-evens chance of avoiding a 
     potentially dangerous `tipping point'; global CO2 
     emissions must, by 2050, be brought down to half the 1990 
     level. This is the target espoused by the G8. It corresponds 
     to two tons of CO2 per year from each person on 
     the planet. For comparison, the current European figure is 
     about 10, and the Chinese level is already 4. To achieve this 
     target without stifling economic growth--to turn around the 
     curve of CO2 emissions well before 2050--is a huge 
     challenge. The debates last week in Japan indicated the 
     problems--especially how to bring India and China into the 
     frame. The great emerging economies have not caused the 
     present problem, but if they develop in as carbon-intensive a 
     way as ours did, they could swamp and negate any measures 
     taken by the G8 alone.
       Realistically, however, there is no chance of reaching this 
     target, nor of achieving real energy security, without 
     drastically new technologies. Though I'm confident that these 
     will have emerged by the second half of the century, the 
     worry is that this may not be soon enough.
       Efforts to develop a whole raft of techniques for 
     economising on energy, storing it and generating it by 
     `clean' or low-carbon methods, deserve a priority and 
     commitment from governments akin to that accorded to the 
     Manhattan project or the Apollo moon landing. Current R and D 
     is far less than the scale and urgency demands. To speed 
     things up, we need a `shotgun approach'--trying all the 
     options. And we can afford it: the stakes are colossal. The 
     world spends around 7 trillion dollars per year on energy and 
     its infrastructure. The U.S. imports 500 billion dollars 
     worth of oil each year.
       I can't think of anything that could do more to attract the 
     brightest and best into science than a strongly proclaimed 
     commitment--led by the U.S. and Europe--to provide clean and 
     sustainable energy for the developing and the developed 
     world.
       Even optimists about prospects in solar energy, advanced 
     biofuels, fusion and other renewables have to acknowledge 
     that it will be at least 40 years before they can fully `take 
     over'. Coal, oil and gas seem set to dominate the world's 
     every-growing energy needs for at least that long. Last year 
     the Chinese built 100 coal-fired power stations. Coal 
     deposits representing a million years' accumulation of 
     primeval forest are now being burnt in a single year.
       Coal is the most `inefficient' fossil fuel in terms of 
     energy generated per unit of carbon released. Annual 
     CO2 emissions are rising year by year. Unless this 
     rising curve can be turned around sooner, the atmospheric 
     concentration will irrevocably reach a threatening level.
       So an immediate priority has to be a coordinated 
     international effort to develop carbon capture and storage--
     CCS. Carbon from power stations must be captured before it 
     escapes in the atmosphere; and then piped to some geological 
     formation where it can be stored without leaking out. It's 
     crucial to agree a timetable, and a coordinated plan for the 
     construction of CCS demonstration plants to explore all 
     variants of the technology. To jump-start such a programme 
     would need up to 10 billion dollars a year of public funding 
     worldwide (preferably as part of public-private 
     partnerships). But this is a small price to pay for bringing 
     forward, by five years or more, the time when CCS can be 
     widely adopted and the graph of CO2 emissions 
     turned around.
       What is the role of nuclear power in all this? The concerns 
     are well known--it is an issue where expert and lay opinions 
     are equally divided. I'm myself in favour of the UK and the 
     U.S. having at least a replacement generation of power 
     stations--and of R and D into new kinds of reactors. But the 
     non-proliferation regime is fragile, and before being relaxed 
     about a world-wide programme of nuclear power, one would 
     surely require the kind of fuel bank and leasing arrangement 
     that has been proposed by Mohamed el Baradei at the IAEA.


                    NATURAL RESOURCES AND POPULATION

       Energy security and climate change are the prime `threats 
     without enemies' that confront us. But there are others. High 
     among these is the threat to biological diversity caused by 
     rapid changes in land use and deforestation. There have been 
     5 great extinctions in the geological past; human actions are 
     causing a 6th. The extinction rate is 1000 times higher than 
     normal, and increasing. We are destroying the book of life 
     before we have read it.
       Biodiversity--manifested in forests, coral reefs, marine 
     blue waters and all Earth's other ecosystems--is often 
     proclaimed as a crucial component of human wellbeing and 
     economic growth. It manifestly is: we're clearly harmed if 
     fish stocks dwindle to extinction; there are plants whose 
     gene pool might be useful to us. And massive destruction of 
     the rain forests would accelerate global warming. But for 
     environmentalists these `instrumental'--and anthropocentric--
     arguments aren't the only compelling ones.

[[Page 17829]]

     For them, preserving the richness of our biosphere has value 
     in its own right, over and above what it means to us humans.
       Population growth, of course, aggravates all pressures on 
     energy and environment. Fifty years ago the world population 
     was below 3 billion. It has more than doubled since then, to 
     6.6 billion. The percentage growth-rate has slowed, but the 
     global figure is projected to reach 8 or even 9 billion by 
     2050. The excess will almost all be in the developing world.
       There is, incidentally, a global trend from rural towards 
     urban living. More than half the world's population is now 
     urban--and megacities are growing explosively.
       There is an extensive literature on the `carrying capacity' 
     of our planet--on how many people it can sustain without 
     irreversible degradation. The answer of course depends on 
     lifestyle. The world could not sustain its present population 
     if everyone lived like present-day Americans or Europeans. On 
     the other hand, the pressures would plainly be eased if 
     people travelled little and interacted via super-internet and 
     virtual reality. And, incidentally, if they were all 
     vegetarians: it takes 13 pounds of corn to make one pound of 
     beef.
       If population growth continues even beyond 2050, one can't 
     be other than exceedingly gloomy about the prospects. 
     However, there could be a turnaround. There are now more than 
     60 countries in which fertility is below replacement level--
     it's far below in, for instance, Italy and Singapore. In Iran 
     the fertility rate has fallen from 6.5 in 1980 to 2.1 today. 
     We all know the social trends that lead to this demographic 
     transition--declining infant mortality, availability of 
     contraceptive advice, women's education, and so forth.
       If the transition quickly extended to all countries, then 
     the global population could start a gradual decline after 
     2050--a development that would surely be benign.
       There is, incidentally, one `wild card' in all these long-
     term forecasts. This is the possibility that the average 
     lifespan in advanced countries may be extended drastically by 
     some biomedical breakthrough.
       The prognosis is especially bleak in Africa, where there 
     could be a billion more people in 2050 than there are today. 
     It's worth quoting some numbers here. A hundred years ago, 
     the population of Ethiopia was 5 million. It is now 75 
     million (of whom 8 million need permanent food aid) and will 
     almost double by 2050. Quite apart from the problem of 
     providing services, there is consequent pressure on the water 
     resources of the Nile basin.
       Over 200 years ago, Thomas Malthus famously argued that 
     populations would rise until limited by food shortages. His 
     gloomy prognosis has been forestalled by advancing 
     technology, the green revolution and so forth, but he could 
     be tragically vindicated in Africa. Continuing population 
     growth makes it harder to break out of the poverty trap--
     Africa not only needs more food, but a million more teachers 
     annually, just to keep standards level. And just as today's 
     population couldn't be fed by yesterday's agriculture, a 
     second green revolution may be needed to feed tomorrow's 
     population.
       But the rich world has the resources, if the will is there, 
     to enhance the life-chances of the world's billion poorest 
     people--relieving the most extreme poverty, providing clean 
     water, primary education and other basics. This is a 
     precondition of achieving in Africa the demographic tradition 
     that has occurred elsewhere. The overseas aid from most 
     countries, including the U.S., is far below the UN's target 
     of 0.7 percent of GNP. It would surely be shameful, as well 
     as against even our narrow self-interests, if the Millennium 
     Goals set for 2015 were not met.
       (To inject a pessimistic note in parenthesis, the meagre 
     underfunding of overseas aid, even in a context where the 
     humanitarian imperative seems so clear, augurs badly for the 
     actual implementation of the measures needed to meet the 2050 
     carbon emission targets--generally quoted as around 1 percent 
     of GNP--where the payoff is less immediately apparent.)


                        some new vulnerabilities

       Infectious diseases are mainly associated with developing 
     countries--but in our interconnected world we are now all 
     more vulnerable. The spread of epidemics is aggravated by 
     rapid air travel, plus the huge concentrations in megacities 
     with fragile infrastructures.
       Whether or not a pandemic gets global grip may hinge on the 
     efficiency of worldwide monitoring--how quickly a Vietnamese 
     or Sudanese poultry farmer can diagnose or report any strange 
     sickness.
       In our everyday lives, we have a confused attitude to risk. 
     We fret about tiny risks: carcinogens in food, a one-in-a-
     million chance of being killed in train crashes, and so 
     forth. But we're in denial about others that should loom much 
     larger. If we apply to pandemics the same prudent analysis 
     that leads us to buy insurance--multiplying probability by 
     consequences--we'd surely conclude that measures to alleviate 
     this kind of extreme event need higher priority. A global 
     pandemic could kill tens of millions and cost many trillions 
     of dollars.
       This thought leads me to new vulnerabilities of a different 
     kind: vulnerabilities stemming from the misuse of powerful 
     technologies--either through error or by design. 
     Biotechnology, for instance, holds huge promise for health 
     care, for enhanced food production, even for energy. But 
     there is a downside.
       Here's a quote from the American National Academy of 
     Sciences: ``Just a few individuals with specialized skills . 
     . . could inexpensively and easily produce a panoply of 
     lethal biological weapons. . . . The deciphering of the human 
     genome sequence and the complete elucidation of numerous 
     pathogen genomes . . . allow science to be misused to create 
     new agents of mass destruction'.''
       Not even an organized network would be required: just a 
     fanatic, or a weirdo with the mindset of those who now design 
     computer viruses--the mindset of an arsonist. The techniques 
     and expertise for bio or cyber attacks will be accessible to 
     millions.
       We're kidding ourselves if we think that technical 
     expertise is always allied with balanced rationality: it can 
     be combined with fanaticism--not just the traditional 
     fundamentalism that we're so mindful of today, but new age 
     irrationalities. I'm thinking of cults such as the Raelians: 
     and of extreme eco-freaks, animal rights campaigners and the 
     like. The global village will have its village idiots.
       In a future era of vast individual empowerment, where even 
     one malign act would be too many, how can our open society be 
     safeguarded? Will there be pressures to constrain diversity 
     and individualism? Or to shift the balance between privacy 
     and intrusion? These are stark questions, but I think they 
     are deeply serious ones. (Though--to inject a slightly 
     frivolous comment--the careless abandon with which younger 
     people put their intimate details on Facebook, and the broad 
     acquiescence in ubiquitous CCTV, suggests that in our society 
     there will be surprisingly little resistance to loss of 
     privacy.)
       Developments in cyber, bio or nano-technology will open up 
     new risks of error or terror. Our global society is 
     precariously dependent on elaborate networks--electricity 
     grids, air traffic control, the internet, just-in-time 
     delivery and so forth--whose collapse could stress it to 
     breaking point. It's crucial to ensure maximal resilience of 
     all such systems.
       At the start of this lecture, I cited three technologies 
     that now pervade our lives in ways quite unenvisioned 50 
     years ago. Likewise, by extrapolating from the present, I 
     have surely missed the qualitatively greatest changes that 
     may occur in the next 50.
       The great science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clark opined 
     that any ultra-advanced technology was indistinguishable from 
     magic. Everyday consumer items like Sony game stations, sat-
     nav and Google would have seemed magic 50 years ago.
       In the coming decades, there could be qualitatively new 
     kinds of change. One thing that's been unaltered for 
     millennia is human nature and human character. But in this 
     century, novel mind-enhancing drugs, genetics, and `cyberg' 
     techniques may start to alter human beings themselves. That's 
     something qualitatively new in recorded history.
       And we should keep our minds open, or at least ajar, to 
     concepts on the fringe of science fiction--robots with many 
     human attributes, computers that make discoveries worthy of 
     Nobel prizes, bioengineered organisms, and so forth. Flaky 
     Californian futurologists aren't always wrong.
       Opinion polls in England show that people are generally 
     positive about science's role, but are concerned that it may 
     `run away' faster than we can properly cope with it. Some 
     commentators on biotech, robotics and nanotech worry that 
     when the genie is out of the bottle, the outcome may be 
     impossible to control. They urge caution in `pushing the 
     envelope' in some areas of science.
       The uses of academic research generally can't be foreseen: 
     Rutherford famously said, in the mid-thirties, that nuclear 
     energy was `moonshine'; the inventors of lasers didn't 
     foresee that an early application of their work would be to 
     eye surgery; the discoverer of x-rays was not searching for 
     ways to see through flesh. A major scientific discovery is 
     likely to have many applications--some benign, others less 
     so--none of which was foreseen by the original investigator.
       We can't reap the benefits of science without accepting 
     some risks--the best we can do is minimize them. Most 
     surgical procedures, even if now routine, were risky and 
     often fatal when they were being pioneered. In the early days 
     of steam, people died when poorly designed boilers exploded.
       But something has changed. Most of the `old' risks were 
     localized. If a boiler explodes, it's horrible but there's an 
     `upper bound' to just how horrible. In our ever more 
     interconnected world, there are new risks whose consequences 
     could be so widespread that even a tiny probability is 
     unacceptable.
       There will surely be a widening gulf between what science 
     enables us to do, and what applications it's prudent or 
     ethical actually to pursue--more doors that science could 
     open but which are best kept closed.
       There are already scientific procedures--human reproductive 
     cloning, synthetic biology and the rest--where regulation is 
     called for, on ethical as well as prudential grounds. And 
     there will be more. Regulations will need to be 
     international, and to contend with commercial pressures--and 
     they may

[[Page 17830]]

     prove as hard to enforce as the drug laws. If one country 
     alone imposed regulations, the most dynamic researchers and 
     enterprising companies would migrate to another that was more 
     permissive. This is happening already, in a small way, in 
     primate and stem cell research.


                 the international scientific community

       Some comments, now, on the role of the scientific 
     community. Science is the only truly global culture: protons, 
     proteins, and Pythagoras's theorem are the same from China to 
     Peru. Research is international, highly networked, and 
     collaborative. And most science-linked policy issues are 
     international, even global--that's certainly true of those 
     I've addressed in this lecture.
       This is primarily an Anglo-American gathering, so I hope 
     it's not out of place to emphasis that our two countries have 
     been the most successful in creating and sustaining world-
     class research universities. These institutions are magnets 
     for talent--both faculty and students--from all over the 
     world, and are in most cases embedded in a `cluster' of high-
     tech companies, to symbiotic benefit.
       By 2050, China and India should at least gain parity with 
     Europe and the US--they will surely become the `centre of 
     gravity' of the world's intellectual power. We will need to 
     aim high if we are to sustain our competitive advantage in 
     offering cutting-edge `value added'.
       It's a duty of scientific academies and similar bodies to 
     ensure that policy decisions are based on the best science, 
     even when that science is still uncertain and provisional; 
     this is the Royal Society's role in the UK and that of the 
     National Academy of Sciences in the US. The academies of the 
     G8 + 5 countries are playing an increasing role in 
     highlighting global issues. And one thinks of consortia like 
     the IPCC, and bodies like the WHO.
       In this country, an ongoing dialogue with parliamentarians 
     on embryos and stem cells has led to a generally-admired 
     legal framework. On the other hand, the GM crops debate went 
     wrong here because we came in too late, when opinion was 
     already polarized between eco-campaigners on the one side and 
     commercial interests on the other. I think we have recently 
     done better on nanotechnology, by raising the key issues 
     early. It's necessary to engage with the public `upstream' of 
     any legislation or commercial developments.
       We need to point out that the resources and expertise 
     devoted to applications of science are not deployed 
     optimally. Some subjects have had the `inside track' and 
     gained disproportionate resources; huge sums, for instance, 
     are still devoted to new weaponry. On the other hand, 
     environmental projects, renewable energy, and so forth, 
     deserve more effort. In medicine, the focus is 
     disproportionately on cancer and cardiovascular studies, the 
     ailments that loom largest in prosperous countries, rather 
     than on the infections endemic in the tropics.
       Policy decisions--whether about energy, GM technology, 
     mind-enhancing drugs or whatever--are never solely 
     `scientific': strategic, economic, social, and ethical 
     ramifications enter as well. And here scientists have no 
     special credentials. Choices on how science is applied 
     shouldn't be made just by scientists. That's why everyone 
     needs a `feel' for science and a realistic attitude to risk--
     otherwise public debate won't rise above the level of tabloid 
     slogans.
       Scientists nonetheless have a special responsibility. We 
     feel there is something lacking in parents who don't care 
     what happens to their children in adulthood, even though this 
     is largely beyond their control. Likewise, scientists 
     shouldn't be indifferent to the fruits of their ideas--their 
     intellectual creations. They should try to foster benign 
     spin-offs--and of course help to bring their work to market 
     when appropriate. But they should campaign to resist, so far 
     as they can, ethically dubious or threatening applications. 
     And they should be prepared to engage in public debate and 
     discussion.
       I mentioned earlier the atomic scientists in World War II. 
     Many of them--and I've been privileged to know some, such as 
     Hans Bethe and Joseph Rotblat--set a fine example. Fate had 
     assigned them a pivotal role in history. They returned with 
     relief to peacetime academic pursuits. But they didn't say 
     that they were `just scientists' and that the use made of 
     their work was up to politicians. They continued as engaged 
     citizens--promoting efforts to control the power they had 
     helped unleash. We now need such individuals--not just in 
     physics, but across the whole range of applicable science.


                          a cosmic perspective

       My special subject is astronomy--the study of our 
     environment in the widest conceivable sense. And I'd like to 
     end with a cosmic perspective.
       It is surely a cultural deprivation to be unaware of the 
     marvelous vision of nature offered by Darwinism and by modern 
     cosmology--the chain of emergent complexity leading from a 
     still-mysterious beginning to atoms, stars, planets, 
     biospheres and human brains able to ponder the wonder and the 
     mystery. And there's no reason to regard humans as the 
     culmination of this emergent process. Our Sun is less than 
     half way through its life. Any creatures witnessing the Sun's 
     demise, here on earth or far beyond, won't be human--they'll 
     be as different from us as we are from bacteria.
       But, even in this cosmic time-perspective--extending 
     billions of years into the future, as well as into the past--
     this century may be a defining moment. It's the first in our 
     planet's history where one species--ours--has Earth's future 
     in its hands.
       I recalled earlier the image of our Earth viewed from 
     space. Suppose some aliens had been watching our planet--a 
     `pale blue dot' in a vast cosmos, for its entire history, 
     what would they have seen?
       Over nearly all that immense time, 4.5 billion years, 
     Earth's appearance would have altered very gradually. The 
     continents drifted; the ice cover waxed and waned; successive 
     species emerged, evolved and became extinct.
       But in just a tiny sliver of the Earth's history--the last 
     one millionth part, a few thousand years--the patterns of 
     vegetation altered much faster than before. This signaled the 
     start of agriculture. The changes accelerated as human 
     populations rose.
       But then there were other changes, even more abrupt. Within 
     fifty years--little more than one hundredth of a millionth of 
     the Earth's age, the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere began 
     to rise anomalously fast. The planet became an intense 
     emitter of radio waves (the total output from all TV, 
     cellphone and radar transmissions).
       And something else unprecedented happened: small 
     projectiles lifted from the planet's surface and escaped the 
     biosphere completely. Some were propelled into orbits around 
     the Earth; some journeyed to the Moon and planets.
       If they understood astrophysics, the aliens could 
     confidently predict that the biosphere would face doom in a 
     few billion years when the Sun flares up and dies. But could 
     they have predicted this unprecedented spike less than half 
     way through the Earth's life--these human-induced alterations 
     occupying, overall, less than a millionth of the elapsed 
     lifetime and seemingly occurring with runaway speed?
       If they continued to keep watch, what might these 
     hypothetical aliens witness in the next hundred years? Will a 
     final spasm be followed by silence? Or will the planet itself 
     stabilize? And will some of the objects launched from the 
     Earth spawn new oases of life elsewhere?
       The answers will depend on us, collectively--on whether we 
     can, to quote Brent Scowcroft again, `behave wisely, 
     prudently.' ''

                          ____________________