    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1998, Book I)]
    [February 13, 1998]
    [Pages 221-225]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in
    Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
    February 13, 1998

        Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, to all the young people
    in the audience, I thank you all for that warm welcome. Thank you, Dr.
    Dresselhaus, for making me feel so
    welcome; Dr. M.R.C. Greenwood, Dr. Jane
    Lubchenco, and over 5,000 members of the
    AAAS. I'd like to recognize the presence here of Congressman Chaka
    Fattah of Philadelphia, my friend and
    Congressman from Philadelphia--thank you for being here; General Barry
    McCaffrey, the head of the Office of
    National Drug Control Policy; Dr. Neal Lane,
    the Director of the National Science Foundation; Dr. Harold
    Varmus, the Director of the National
    Institutes of Health.
        There are very many other people in this audience, and I hesitate to
    mention any of them for fear of omitting some who have helped this
    administration in some way or another to advance the cause of science
    and technology. But I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge, because
    of their unique support for us in the last 5 years, Dr. David
    Hamburg and Dr. John Holdren. Thank you especially for what you have done for us and
    for our country.
        I want to thank Jack Gibbons for that
    wonderful introduction. You know, just as there are laws of science,
    there are laws of politics. That introduction reflects Clinton's fourth
    law of politics: Whenever possible, be introduced by someone you have
    appointed to high office. [Laughter]
        I had to--you may find this hard to believe, but I actually had to
    fight the highest people in my family, both my family and my larger
    family, to get to give this speech. The First Lady wanted to give this speech. [Laughter] She said,
    ``Look, it was my idea to create this research fund for the 21st century
    and have this idea that we should celebrate the new millennium by
    imagining the future and preserving our past treasures, like the Star-
    Spangled Banner and the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution
    and the Bill of Rights.''
        And the Vice President, he really
    wanted to give this speech. [Laughter] This is all he ever thinks about,
    you know. [Laughter] This is a guy who goes absolutely rhapsodic when
    contemplating the Spallation Neutron Source. [Laughter] We had this huge
    fight, but I won it fair and square. I pulled rank. [Laughter]
        You should know, on a more serious note, that the Vice
    President did have one honor that I am not
    given by the Constitution. Today he got to swear in a world-renowned
    public health leader and a great doctor, Dr. David Satcher, as America's new Surgeon General.
        Before I get into my remarks, I'd like to make another couple of
    announcements about important changes in our science and technology
    team. First of all, with great regret, I have accepted the resignation
    of Dr. Jack Gibbons as my science adviser.
    His ability to build bipartisan coalitions on contentious issues from
    nuclear testing to cloning to climate change has strengthened our Nation
    immeasurably. And I thank him for those contributions, as well as for
    his work in our initiative on race. I know this afternoon he will chair
    a panel discussion

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    on the ways we can diversify the science and technology community. I
    hope you will join me in expressing our appreciation to Jack
    Gibbons for his service to the United
    States. [Applause]
        To replace him and ensure that our work goes forward without a
    hitch, I intend to nominate a fellow of the AAAS, the Director of the
    National Science Foundation, Dr. Neal Lane, to
    be the new Presidential science adviser. Neal, please stand up.
    [Applause] Neal has placed the National Science Foundation at the center
    of our science and technology policy in many ways. And to maintain that
    momentum I intend to nominate as his replacement Dr. Rita
    Colwell, the first life scientist chosen to
    head this organization. Rita, stand up. [Applause]
        I also want to salute your board of directors, which yesterday
    approved a resolution urging the Senate to provide its advice and
    consent as soon as possible for the ratification of the Comprehensive
    Test Ban Treaty. Thank you very, very much for that.
        Today, at the edge of a new century, the dawn of a new millennium,
    at a sunlit moment of prosperity for our people, we see before us an era
    of unparalleled possibilities. Our restless quest for knowledge, which
    has been one of America's defining traits since we got started right
    here in Philadelphia, will quicken. And more than ever before, the
    strength of our economy, the health of our environment, the length and
    quality of our lives--in short, the success of our continuing pursuit of
    happiness--will be driven by the pursuit of knowledge.
        We must seize this moment to strengthen our Nation for the new
    century by expanding our commitment to discovery, increasing our support
    for science, pressing our progress in the war against cancer and other
    diseases, protecting our children from public health dangers--most
    especially from the deadly addiction of tobacco.
        We've come a long way in the last half of the 20th century. Fifty
    years ago, when President Truman addressed your 100th anniversary
    meeting, Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley had just created the first
    transistor; Mauchly and Eckert had recently powered up the seminal ENIAC
    computer right here in Philadelphia; Pauling and Franklin were
    developing techniques that would help to unravel the mystery of our DNA.
        Things are moving much more quickly now. Today, the store of human
    knowledge doubles every 5 years. Soon, every child will be able to
    stretch a hand across a computer keyboard and reach every book ever
    written, every painting ever painted, every symphony ever composed.
    We'll be able to carry all the phone calls on Mother's Day on a single
    strand of fiber the width of human hair.
        Now, where will we be 50 years from now? By the year 2048, when a
    future President of the United States addresses your bicentennial
    meeting, fusion and solar power may yield abundant energy. In any case,
    I am absolutely convinced that by then we will have discovered how to
    grow the economy by restoring, not depleting, our planet. By then,
    telephones may translate foreign languages in real time. We may well
    have a permanent space station on the surface of Mars.
        And some of the greatest victories in the next 50 years doubtless
    will be in the ancient battle against human disease--its prevention, its
    detection, its treatment, and its cure. Sophisticated new AIDS therapies
    already have given HIV-positive men and women a new lease on life. And
    if this progress continues, I believe we'll have an effective vaccine
    within a decade.
        New treatments are slowing the development of Alzheimer's and
    lifting people up from the dark depths of depression. Researchers have
    begun to regenerate nerve cells, raising the prospect that victims of
    spinal cord injuries will be able to rise up and walk again. Within a
    few years, the human genome project will have traced the very blueprint
    of human life.
        And I think it is important to remember, as Americans tend to focus
    on the health miracles that can come from scientific progress, that
    advances in health research and prevention and treatment depend upon the
    entire scientific enterprise, including engineering efforts. For
    example, the MRI, a diagnostic tool that has benefited many of us in
    this audience today, originally came from research in nuclear physics.
    Space research today has vast implications for human health, which is
    one of the reasons I am so excited about Senator John Glenn going back into space.
        If we act now, we can catalyze the process of discovery and create
    even more dramatic progress. I have submitted the first balanced budget
    in 30 years. It is the result of 5 years of efforts based on a
    governmental philosophy that says we have to have fiscal discipline and
    greater investment in our people and our future

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    by a Government that is both smaller and more progressive.
        We, I believe, have now established beyond doubt that we can have a
    smaller Government, larger investment, and a stronger Nation. We have
    worked hard to increase investments in education, to open the doors of
    college to all and, increasingly, to increase the quality of education
    at the elementary and secondary levels.
        I take it that hardly anyone in this room would disagree with the
    proposition that we have the finest system of higher education in the
    world. It is America's great blessing. And my passion for the last 5
    years, with more Pell grant scholarships and hundreds of thousands of
    work-study positions, and education IRA's, and cheaper student loans
    that are easier to repay, and a $1,500 tax credit for the first 2 years
    of college, and tax credits for the junior and senior year and graduate
    school, my passion has been to be able to say with a straight face to
    every American family, if your child works hard, money will not keep
    your child out of a first-class college education.
        Now we must prove that we can have the best elementary and secondary
    education in the world. And we're working on a lot of fronts: more
    technology, better teacher training, smaller class sizes, more
    classrooms, higher standards, and greater accountability. But one of the
    most promising approaches that we have embraced, that is also a part of
    our balanced budget, is the one first brought to me by the Congressman
    from Philadelphia who is here with us today, Chaka Fattah.
        Under our approach, which is part of this balanced budget, we want
    to have colleges go in and start working with children as early as the
    seventh grade, to be able to say to them and their parents, if you will
    stay in school, if you will learn, if you will perform, if you will be
    held accountable, we can tell you in the seventh grade how much college
    aid you can get when you get out. You can know right now you can go to
    college. You can know how much you can get. And we`re going to help you
    for 6 years to make sure you are ready to succeed in the 21st century.
    And we thank you, Congressman, for your
    leadership.
        But there is probably no better example of this new approach, this
    so-called third way, than the proposal we have in the balanced budget
    for a 21st century research fund, part of our gift to America in the
    millennium, providing for the first time a strong, stable, multiyear
    source of funding for research that will enable you to engage in long-
    term planning as never before.
        This commitment represents the largest funding increase in history
    for the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of
    Health. It will provide substantial budget increases for basic and
    applied research at NASA, the Department of Energy, and the Department
    of Agriculture. It will spur technological innovations that will help us
    to combat global climate change, a growing threat that the journal
    Science warned us about more than 30 years ago now.
        Perhaps most important to American citizens in the moment, the 21st
    century research fund will give us the means to win the war on cancer.
    For the first time, cancer death rates have begun to fall. The 21st
    century research fund will build on this progress, with new classes of
    smart drugs that target specific molecules found in cancer cells. It
    will help those of you in this field to discover within a decade every
    single gene and protein that contributes to the conversion of a normal
    cell to a cancer cell. It will create new opportunities for prevention,
    new technologies for earlier and more accurate diagnosis.
        Today, we can cure 80 percent of the patients with certain kinds of
    cancer; let us work to ensure that within the next generation we will
    cure 80 percent of the patients with all forms of cancer. Thank you, Dr.
    Varmus, for your work in this regard. We
    appreciate it.
        But let me say this. As I was reminded today when we swore in Dr.
    David Satcher, the public health responsibility must be more broadly
    shared among our people. It cannot be the sole province of medical
    researchers and medical doctors. The rest of us have a job to do, too,
    on our own lives, the lives of our friends and neighbors and, most
    importantly, the lives of our children.
        We can take one major leap forward right away. We have an historic
    opportunity to curtail the deadly epidemic of teen smoking. More than
    three decades ago, responsible peer review journals, including Science,
    presented our society with a stark conclusion: Smoking causes cancer. We
    now know it is also linked in a deadly chain with emphysema, heart
    disease, and stroke. For years, our efforts to reduce smoking have been
    outmatched by billion-dollar industry ad campaigns targeted at our
    children. Now we have

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    the opportunity to save millions of those children from a life of
    addiction and a premature and very preventable death.
        I have asked the Congress to enact comprehensive legislation to
    raise the price of cigarettes by up to $1.50 a pack over the next 10
    years, to give the FDA full authority to regulate tobacco products, to
    change forever the way tobacco companies do business, to further public
    health research, and to protect tobacco farmers and their communities in
    the transition which will come.
        Now, just today, the Treasury Department will release an analysis of
    the probable effects of this comprehensive approach. The analysis
    projects that the price increase and other measures we have proposed
    will cut teen smoking by almost half over the next 5 years.
        Now, let me tell you what that means in real people. In Washington,
    in a different way, we sometimes maybe do what you do; we get into
    talking statistics and numbers and things that don't often grab people.
    Let me tell you what that means. That means if we act this year--instead
    of having a year-long political debate and doing nothing--if we act this
    year, by the year 2003 we can stop almost 3 million young people from
    smoking and save almost 1 million lives as a result. We ought to save
    those lives, and you should demand that we save those lives.
        On Wednesday Senator Kent Conrad from North
    Dakota introduced a strong bill in Congress that meets all the
    objectives I just mentioned. I look forward to working with him and with
    other Members to enact comprehensive and bipartisan legislation. But I
    ask for your support, as well. The scientific community can speak with a
    very loud voice. Speak loudly for our children. Tell people you're going
    to do all this research. Tell people we're going to do unbelievable
    things. Tell people there will be miracles they can't imagine in the
    21st century. But tell people, in the 21st century, parents will still
    have to take responsibility for their children, and people will still
    have to take responsibility for doing sensible things if we want a
    healthy, strong America. Help us lead the way in this fight.
        Let me say on one other point, the extraordinary promise of science
    and technology carries with it, as all of you know, extraordinary
    responsibilities for those who seek to advance the promise. It is
    incumbent upon both scientists and public servants to ensure that
    science serves humanity always and never the other way around.
        Last month, like most Americans, I learned the troubling news that a
    member of the scientific community claims to be
    laying plans to clone a human being. Now, human cloning raises deep
    ethical concerns. There is virtually unanimous consensus in the
    scientific and medical community that attempting to use known cloning
    techniques to actually create a human being is untested, unsafe, and
    morally unacceptable.
        Two days ago the Senate voted to take the time necessary to
    carefully craft a bill that will ban the cloning of human beings while
    preserving our ability to use cloning technology for morally acceptable
    and medically important purposes. Already, you have given us the
    scientific foundation for this debate. I thank you for that, and I urge
    you to continue to play an important role as the Senate, and then the
    House, considers this very significant issue in the coming year.
        You know, in spite of the pitfalls and the perils, our Nation has
    always believed that what you do in the end would always transform our
    world for the better. Benjamin Franklin, the father of our scientific
    revolution, once wrote, and I quote: ``The progress of human knowledge
    will be rapid and discoveries made of which we at present have no
    conception. I begin to be almost sorry I was born so soon since I cannot
    have the happiness of knowing what will be known in years hence.''
        I have been so struck by the contrast between Ben Franklin's vision
    and the depiction of the future now we see in so many books and on
    television and in these ``Road Warrior'' movies and other things that
    are made. The world is so often portrayed in the future as a terribly
    frightening, primitive, brutal place, a world where science has run amok
    or where the community and government have withered away, where people
    have to wear a gas mask to walk around and the entire Earth has been
    completely devastated by craven greed; where life is once again, as
    Thomas Hobbes once said it was in the state of nature, ``nasty, brutish,
    and short.''
        I don't think you believe that's what it's going to be like. And I
    think it's important that we all accept the responsibility to imagine
    and invent a very different kind of future, and then to tell our fellow
    Americans that that is the

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    future we are working toward. We need never run away from the dangers of
    our work run amok. We need never run away from our innate fear of the
    abuse of power, whether political or scientific. Indeed, the whole
    genius of our creation here in Philadelphia was the understanding that
    human nature is a mix of elements and all of them must be restrained.
    But we must never for a moment be afraid of the future. Instead, we must
    envision the future we intend to create.
        Your bicentennial meeting can convene in a world where climatic
    disruption has been halted, where wars on cancer and AIDS have long
    since been won, where humanity is safe from the destructive force of
    chemical and biological weapons wielded by rogue states or
    conscienceless terrorists and drug runners, where the noble career of
    science is pursued and then advanced by children of every race and
    background, and where the benefits of science are broadly shared in
    countries both rich and poor. That is what I pray it will be like, 50
    years from now, when my successor stands here before your successors and
    assesses how well we did with our time.
        Let me say, I believe in what you do. And I believe in the people
    who do it. Most important, I believe in the promise of America, in the
    idea that we must always marry our newest advances and knowledge with
    our oldest values, and that when we do that, it's worked out pretty
    well. That is what we owe our children. That is what we must bring to
    the new century.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 1:45 p.m. at the Philadelphia Marriott
    Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Mildred S. Dresselhaus, president,
    M.R.C. Greenwood, president-elect, and Jane Lubchenco, chair, board of
    directors, American Association for the Advancement of Science; David
    Hamburg and John Holdren, members, President's Committee of Advisors on
    Science and Technology; and human cloning advocate Richard Seed.