    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book II)]
    [September 30, 1993]
    [Pages 1636-1637]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks on Presenting the National Medals of Science and Technology
    September 30, 1993

        Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. When we schedule these
    wonderful things on the South Lawn, we normally do it because it's so
    warm at this time of year. I would give another medal to someone right
    now who could raise the temperature just 6 degrees. [Laughter]
        Mr. Vice President, Secretary Aspin, Secretary Brown, Under
    Secretary Kunin, Dr. Gibbons, Under Secretary of Commerce for Technology
    Mary Good, and Acting Director of the National Science Foundation Dr.
    Fred Bernthal, the Director-designate of the Science Foundation Dr. Neal
    Lane, distinguished medal recipients and members of the National Medal
    of Technology Nominating Evaluation Committee, members of the
    President's Committee on National Medal of Science, and the 1993
    Presidential Faculty Fellows, the 30 outstanding young scientists and
    engineers who are joining us here for this ceremony, and I congratulate
    all of you--where are you? They're in the back over there--and to the
    Foundation for the National Medals of

    [[Page 1637]]

    Science and Technology and other guests, although I hope I've named
    everyone by now. It's a great privilege for us to have you here today. I
    haven't been exposed to this much knowledge of science and technology
    since I named Al Gore to be my running mate last year. [Laughter]
        I'm glad to salute all of you who are winners, whose discoveries
    advance our standard of living and the quality of our lives, our health,
    our understanding of the world and our own place in it.
        I know that the achievements we honor today will improve our ability
    to communicate with one another, to increase the productivity of our
    people, and to secure our place in the global economy and hopefully to
    help to preserve in common our planet.
        It's especially important to me that we find ways to preserve what
    is important to us and to succeed in this global economy, because I know
    we cannot win the fight that we are in by continuing to do what we have
    done, which is to have our working people work harder and harder for
    less and less.
        Yesterday we celebrated two achievements of science and technology,
    and a great gamble besides, by announcing, as some of you noticed, an
    unprecedented joint research venture with the Big Three automakers, our
    national defense labs, and our other Federal scientific research
    facilities to try to triple the fuel efficiency of cars by the end of
    the decade. And then we announced that we were removing export controls
    on 70 percent of America's computers, both regular computers and
    supercomputers, in ways that we believe will add billions of dollars,
    indeed, tens of billions of dollars to our exports.
        Today, we honor people who are the dreamers, the pioneers, the risk
    takers, who remind us that the things we celebrated yesterday were once
    just a gleam in the mind's eye of a brilliant scientist or an engineer.
    You, too, will have that pleasure some day. But today we honor people
    who are the new scouts in our timeless urge for adventure.
        Forty years ago, J. Robert Oppenheimer said in a lecture, ``Both the
    man of science and the man of art live always at the edge of mystery,
    surrounded by it. Both, as the measure of their creation, have always
    had to do with the harmonization of what is new with what is familiar,
    with the balance between novelty and synthesis, with the struggle to
    make partial order in total chaos.'' That sounds like my job. [Laughter]
    ``This cannot be an easy life,'' he said. Well, it may not be an easy
    life, but clearly it is a life worth living, and today, a life worth
    honoring.
        I thank all of you so much for helping this country and this
    administration move toward the 21st century.
        Daniel Boorstin wrote in his book, ``The Discoverers'', ``All the
    world is still an America. The most promising words ever written on the
    map of human knowledge are terra incognita, unknown territory.'' Your
    discoveries of unknown territory are for the rest of us most promising,
    and your country salutes you for them.
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 3:05 p.m. on the South Lawn at the White
    House.