[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 41 (Monday, October 18, 1999)]
[Pages 2015-2020]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at the Eighth Millennium Evening at the White House

October 12, 1999

[The First Lady began the program making brief remarks and introducing 
the evening's featured speakers: Dr. Vinton Cerf, senior

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vice president of Internet architecture and technology, MCI WorldCom, 
who discussed the evolution of Internet technology; and Dr. Eric Lander, 
director, Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research, who 
discussed advances in genetic research and biotechnology.]

    The President. We have had many wonderful nights here, but I don't 
think I've ever been more stimulated by two talks in my life. Thank you, 
Dr. Cerf. Thank you, Dr. Lander.
    I would like to also say a word of appreciation to Hillary. I think 
that as our time here draws toward its close, it's clear that she has 
been, I believe, the most active and innovative First Lady since Eleanor 
Roosevelt, for, perhaps these Millennium Evenings will last longer in 
the imagination of America than virtually anything any of us have done, 
and I thank her for that.
    Also, being term-limited does have its compensations. Normally, at 
this time of year, in this kind of year, I'd be doing something else 
tonight. [Laughter] Yesterday I called the Vice President to rub it in 
and describe what I would be doing tonight. [Laughter] And I was having 
a very good time turning the screw about how fascinating this was going 
to be. And finally, he said, ``That's okay, you need to be there more 
than I do.'' [Laughter] The jokes about my technological and scientific 
limitations are legion around the White House. [Laughter]
    So I have been thinking of all these questions--do I really want a 
mouse smart enough to go to Princeton? [Laughter] Won't it be sad to 
have an Internet connection with Mars if there are no Martians to write 
to or E-mail us? [Laughter] I am glad to know that the total connection 
of the Internet to the nervous system of human beings is a little ways 
out there in the future. I had been under the impression that that has 
already occurred among all children under 15 in America. [Laughter]
    This is an amazing set of topics. Let me say just one other thing. I 
really loved seeing--on a slightly sad note, I loved seeing that 
wonderful, famous picture of Wilt Chamberlain and Willie Shoemaker. Some 
of you may know the great Wilt Chamberlain passed away today, one of the 
greatest athletes of the 20th century. So I hope you will have him and 
his family and friends in your thoughts and prayers tonight.
    This is a fitting thing for us to do in the White House, because 
innovations in communication and technology are a very important part of 
the history of this old place. In 1858 the first transatlantic telegraph 
transmission was received here in a message that Queen Victoria sent to 
President Buchanan. Later, the first telephone in Washington, DC, was 
located in a room upstairs, and we now have a replica of that telephone 
in the same room upstairs. The first mobile phone call to the Moon was 
made here by President Nixon 30 years ago. Even these Millennium 
Evenings have made their own history. This is where we held the first-
ever cybercast at the White House.
    So I want to thank the speakers for building on all of this and 
telling us what we can look forward to in the future and for reminding 
us that as we unlock age-old mysteries and make what we can think more 
possible to do, there are ways to do it that bring us together as a 
society.
    So I would like to begin the questioning, if I might, with a 
question to Dr. Lander, because it bears on a great deal of the work 
we've done.
    You talked about how we were 99.9 percent the same, but how if you 
looked at how many permutations there were in the one-tenth of a percent 
left, we could still be very different. I think it's very interesting--
and I talk about this all the time--that as we're on the edge of this 
new millennium and we have these evenings and we imagine this future 
that you have sketched out to us, this is what we all like to think 
about, how exciting, how wonderful, how unbelievable it can be. The 
biggest threat to that future is how many of us on this globe are still 
in the grip of the most primitive of human limitations, the fear of the 
other, people who are different from us. And we see all over the world, 
from Bosnia and Kosovo to the Middle East, to Northern Ireland, to the 
tribal wars in Africa, how easily the focus on our differences--that 
one-tenth of one percent--as what matters can lead first to fear and 
then to hatred and then, ultimately, to dehumanizing people who are 
different.

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    And it's very interesting--as someone who grew up in the segregated 
South and lived with the whole terrible and, yet, beautiful struggle of 
the civil rights years, to think that there were in my hometown people 
who were dehumanizing other people because of the one-tenth of one 
percent difference between them is quite an awesome thing to 
contemplate.
    So I would like to ask you, if you could say in ways that would make 
sense to us, explain to us a little bit what is it that makes us the 
same and what is it that makes us different? And how could we 
communicate this scientific knowledge to people in a way that would 
diminish the force of racism and other bigotry in the world in which we 
live?

[Dr. Lander responded to the President's question, and Ellen Lovell, 
Director, White House Millennium Council, then led the question-and-
answer portion of the evening. One of the questions concerned the legal 
status of privacy rights.]

    The President. Let me just say this. We've been working on this, and 
it's very important to me because I'm a fanatic about this issue. I want 
unlimited scientific discovery, and I want unlimited applications. But I 
think we don't want people to lose their sense of self and the fragility 
of their personhood, here, in some sort of assault. So we've been 
working on this.
    What you said sounds great, but it's not as easy to do as it sounds. 
So I think it might be helpful, if I could just ask Secretary Shalala, 
who is in charge of one piece of this, which is our efforts to protect 
the privacy of medical records, just to talk a little bit in practical 
terms about what we're doing to respond to this young man's question.
    Donna, would you--there's a mike.

[Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna E. Shalala noted the 
relative lack of Federal protection of an individual's health 
information, citing that video rental records are more secure. She also 
said a person's State of residence can make a difference.]

    The President. But let's deal with two hard questions here, real 
quick--I think this is important. Question number one, pretty soon if 
the genome project is brought to fruition, according to what Dr. Varmus 
told me, when I spent a day out there, it will become normal in some 
point in the not-too-distant future for young mothers to go home with 
their babies from the hospital with a map of their genetic future. You 
may not want to know about Alzheimer's, but you could know about things 
that even if you can't cure you could delay, defer, or minimize. So you 
get that.
    Now, the mother and the father are employed by someone, and they 
provide family health insurance. Since private insurance is based on a 
reasonable approximation of risk--I don't agree with the way we finance 
health care in this country; you all know that, but that's a fight I 
didn't win here in the last 7 years--if it's based on an assessment of 
risk, what should the insurance company have a right to know? And if the 
insurance company doesn't have a right to know, haven't you undermined 
the whole basis of privately funded insurance based on risk--question 
one. Question two for you.
    Dr. Cerf. We don't get to answer that one?
    The President. Yes, I want you to answer that, but I want you guys 
to talk. Question two, this is the problem we face in a much more grave 
sense in dealing with the prospect of cyberterrorism or something. It's 
one thing for us to write laws that protect privacy of records. But you 
just got through--in answering Omar's question, you were talking about 
how, well, but all these kids are always figuring out--well, among the 
things they're figuring out is how to break into various systems all the 
time. So even if we had perfect laws, how are we going to protect 
privacy when we're dealing with all of these creative geniuses out there 
working through the net? Respond to those two questions.

[Dr. Lander answered that insurance companies' right to know depended on 
whether insurance was about matching rates to risks or about sharing 
risks not chosen. The question-and-answer portion of the evening 
continued and included a question from the Internet by Danella Bryce in 
Sydney, Australia, about technology's effect on alleviation of growing 
numbers of the disadvantaged in world population.]

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    The President. Can I give--you said that we got 6 billion people 
last night. Half of them live on $2 a day; 1.3 billion live on $1 a day 
or less. Those are the numbers behind what Ms. Bryce is asking.

[The discussion continued.]

    The President. If I might just interject, I don't know the answer to 
this, but I've spent a lot of time thinking about it. This woman, Ms. 
Bryce, she works, and she's talked about she works in sustainable 
development. A big problem in poor countries, they totally destroy the 
environment to try to develop, and then they don't have anything upon 
which to develop. The biggest problem in our hemisphere is Haiti. If you 
fly over the island of Hispaniola, you know when you're going from the 
Dominican Republic to Haiti because in all the years when it was 
governed by dictatorships they just tore down all the trees and--if any 
of you know anything about it, know this.
    The real question is, we used to have certain assumptions about 
development in a poor country; that if you wanted ever to build a middle 
class life for a substantial number of the people, yet have X amount of 
electric generating capacity, and you had to have Y number of roads, and 
you had to have Z number of manufacturing companies, no matter what they 
did to greenhouse gases, and that eventually you get around to building 
schools and universal education--and then 30 or 40 years later you start 
letting the girls go to school with the boys and there is this sort of 
thing that would happen.
    I do believe that the question, the real question is if you're 
running a country like this, should you put this sort of infrastructure 
development first? That is assuming you've got a base level of 
electricity necessary to run a system. Should you do this first because 
this gives you the possibility to skip a whole generation of development 
that would otherwise take 30 years in the economy and in education? And 
I think the answer to that, at least, is, maybe--at least, is, maybe. 
That I think is really the question that this woman is asking.

[The discussion continued.]

    The President. If I could just give you one example, because I think 
this may have also relevance for remote, physically remote areas in 
America, Appalachia, the Native American reservations, things of this 
kind.
    We were talking before we came in here tonight--I was out in 
northern California the weekend before last. And I was talking with a 
lot of people who work for eBay, and they were telling me that there are 
now, in addition to the employees of eBay, over 20,000 people who make a 
living on eBay, buying and selling and trading, and that a fair number 
of these people were actually people who once were on welfare, who moved 
from welfare to work. That is, from--and presumably a lot of them work--
didn't have a lot of formal education. They had made this jump, and a 
market had been created for them, where they lived, that otherwise would 
be alien to their own experience. They wouldn't have been able to go 
down to the bank and get a loan and on and on and on.
    Now, last year we made--and this year we will make, through our aid 
programs in foreign countries--over 2 million microenterprise loans to 
poor people, to help them start their businesses in Africa and Latin 
America and Asia. If you could somehow marry the microenterprise concept 
to setting the infrastructure of the Internet out there, I do think it's 
quite possible that you could skip a generation in economic development 
in a way that would reinforce rather than undermine the environment.

[The question-and-answer portion of the evening continued.]

    The President. Did you say you expected the penetration of the 
Internet to equal that of the telephone by 2006?

[Dr. Cerf confirmed the Internet would equal the size of the telephone 
system by 2006 and, thereafter, exceed both telephone and television.]

    The President. I want to get to the genes, but I think we should 
answer that question, too. The whole question of whether we're going to 
develop a digital divide in our country, I think, is a very, very 
serious one. Our administration, especially the Vice President, when we 
rewrote the Telecommunications

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Act, we fought very hard not only to get people to participate in NetDay 
to hookup every classroom and library to the Internet by the year 2000--
I think we'll get there by the end of the year; functionally, we'll be 
just about there--but also, to get the Federal Communications Commission 
to adopt an E-rate which would subsidize the cost to poor schools and 
poorer hospitals and poor areas and isolated rural areas, so that 
everyone could have access in the schools.
    Now, but the divide won't be bridged until the parents of those 
children have that in their home. So I think we ought to have as a goal 
at least to make access to computer technology and to the Internet as 
universal as telephone access is. And I think until we achieve that, 
there will be a digital divide, so we ought to try to hasten that day 
and promote whatever policies we can afford or we can achieve to hasten 
that day, because until we do, there will be a digital divide.
    Dr. Cerf. I agree with that. In fact, it's a goal. A personal goal 
of mine is to see, literally, Internet everywhere.
    The President. Now, what about the gene? That goes to patenting and 
all that, doesn't it?

[The discussion and question-and-answer portion of the evening 
continued. The First Lady then introduced the outgoing Director of the 
National Institutes of Health, Dr. Harold E. Varmus.]

    Dr. Varmus. I assume by ``outgoing'' you mean I'm leaving, as 
opposed to my social behavior. [Laughter]
    The President. You mean, as if an outgoing head of NIH were an 
oxymoron? [Laughter]

[Dr. Varmus made brief remarks about the role of genetics in cancer 
research at NIH.]

    The President. Before we go on, I just want to say--we sort of 
glided over this--this man has done a magnificent job at the NIH for a 
long time, and I am very grateful. We thank you for it, for your service 
to your country.

[The question-and-answer portion of the evening continued.]

    Ms. Lovell. I think you just summed up the whole evening. And I'm 
going to give the President the last minute.
    The President. Well, you know, that great humorist Ogden Nash once 
said, ``Progress may be all right, but it's really gone on too long.'' 
[Laughter] And I was thinking that if he were here tonight, he would 
have to revise his opinion.
    This has been an astonishing evening for me and for Hillary and I 
hope for all the American people and the people throughout the world who 
have been a part of this.
    I want to thank you both. I want to just leave you with one thought: 
There are public responsibilities involved here, particularly for basic 
research. We have been very successful, and never more successful than 
under the leadership of Dr. Varmus, in getting strong bipartisan, 
nonpartisan support for investments in health. And I think that it's 
obvious that we can all see that as in our self-interest and as in the 
public interest. We want to live forever, and we're getting there.
    But I think it's quite important also not to forget our 
responsibilities for basic research in other areas as well. And one of 
the things that we will come to know as the intersection of your two 
disciplines, informatics and genomics, come together, then we will have 
to study even more closely how all this that we know about the human 
body and its development interacts with changes in the environment.
    So other areas of research will be also important, into things like 
global warming and climate change and the sustainability of the 
environment. And what I hope we can do is to build a broader consensus, 
as we look into the new millennium, for the whole research enterprise in 
those areas where it will never be productive in the beginning, or 
profitable for people like you, to do the beginning. And then we can 
find these things, and then the American entrepreneurial genius will 
take off.
    And so I leave here with a renewed commitment to trying to help 
people like you get started. We may not understand it, those of us in 
politics, but we have an obligation to help you find it.

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    And when the first mouse graduates from Princeton, I will invite you 
both to deliver the commencement address. [Laughter]
    Thank you, and good evening.

Note: The White House Millennium Evening began at 7:35 p.m. in the East 
Room at the White House. In his remarks, he referred to basketball Hall 
of Famer Wilt Chamberlain; and retired jockey Willie Shoemaker. The 
discussion was entitled, ``Informatics Meets Genomics.'' The transcript 
made available by the Office of the Press Secretary also included the 
remarks of the First Lady, Dr. Cerf, Dr. Lander, Secretary Shalala, Ms. 
Lovell, Dr. Varmus, and the participants in the question-and-answer 
portion of the evening. The discussion was cybercast on the Internet.