    [Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 22 (Monday, June 5, 2000)]
    [Pages 1247-1248]
    [Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

    <R04>
    Remarks to the Scientific Community in Lisbon

    May 30, 2000

        Good afternoon, Mr. Prime Minister, Professor Quintanilha, Minister
    Gago, Dr. Vargas, ladies and gentlemen. I have just had a lot of fun
    touring this science center, but the meaning here of what is being done
    goes beyond the simple joy of learning. From the outermost reaches of
    space to the darkest depths of the ocean, from the mysteries of
    nanotechnology to the miracles of the human genome, men and women are
    gathering knowledge at a faster pace than ever before that will have the
    most profound impacts, especially on the way the young people in this
    audience live.
        Knowledge is being more widely applied and more quickly disseminated
    than ever before, thanks in no small measure to the Internet. And
    therefore, universal education and universal access to technology are
    more important than ever before.
        Today I applaud the scientific work being done in Portugal and the
    efforts of Prime Minister Guterres and Minister Gago to train the next
    generation of scientists, engineers, doctors, and astronauts, as well as
    to close the digital divide to make sure all the children of this nation
    have the tools they need to master the information age.
        I am particularly impressed how much scientific research is being
    done in partnership. In my tour of the science center and its exhibits,
    I saw impressive examples of cutting-edge research across national
    boundaries, Portuguese scientists in close cooperation with Americans,
    Europeans, Africans, tackling some of the world's most critical health
    problems.
        In Africa, Asia, and many parts of the world, diseases like AIDS,
    malaria, and tuberculosis are killing not only people but hope for
    progress. In Africa, where 70 percent of all the world's AIDS cases
    exist in sub-Saharan Africa, some countries are hiring two employees for
    every job on the assumption that one of them will die of AIDS.
        In other African countries, 30 percent of the teachers and 40
    percent of the soldiers have the virus; millions suffer from strains of
    malaria that are increasingly resistant to

    [[Page 1248]]

    any drug; and a third of the world has actually been exposed to
    tuberculosis. These diseases can ruin economies and threaten the very
    survival of societies.
        I was gratified to meet with some Portuguese scientists working on
    state-of-the-art malaria research, together with the U.S. Public Health
    Service, and to meet some of their students who were learning about it.
    Other Portuguese and American teams are learning together, studying the
    bacteria that caused TB, other new drug-resistant disease threats, and a
    recently discovered pathogen that can strike down those already
    suffering from AIDS.
        I enjoyed meeting with the high school students who were using the
    Internet to study infectious diseases and share information with other
    students all across Europe. This kind of research and learning benefits
    both our nations. It reaches across continents to benefit people who
    really need it, especially in this case, in Africa.
        Our challenge now is also to support prevention programs, to
    accelerate the creation of affordable drugs and vaccines. We have made a
    national commitment to do this in the United States. I've asked Congress
    for over $325 million to increase our international efforts against
    AIDS. I've asked for a billion-dollar tax credit and a global purchase
    fund to speed the development by our pharmaceutical companies of
    vaccines for AIDS, TB, and malaria. We have committed over $70 million
    to fight TB, over $100 million to fight malaria.
        And as the Prime Minister said, today we are announcing a new
    partnership with Portugal and Sao Tome and Principe to study that
    African country's unique malarial epidemic and to develop a strategy to
    end it.
        Tomorrow I am here also to meet with leaders of the European Union,
    and your Prime Minister is the President in this period. I hope we'll
    come out of that meeting with a common approach to the global health
    crisis that will increase scientific research, increase the availability
    of learning opportunities for our young people, and most importantly,
    keep more people alive in the 21st century.
        We have got to make sure that today's revolution in science and
    technology serves all humanity, helps us to fight hunger, to mitigate
    natural disasters, to reverse the tide of global warming, to grow our
    economies without damaging the environment. This is profoundly important
    and a very great challenge, indeed.
        I couldn't help thinking today that intelligence is equally
    distributed throughout the world, but not all the young people of the
    world have a chance to come together as the Portuguese young people I
    met today do, to study TB, to study malaria. Instead, many of them are
    fighting for their lives because they have it.
        We have a solemn responsibility to take the benefits of the
    information economy, of the explosion in biomedical discoveries, and use
    them to give every young person in the world the chance to live up to
    their God-given potential and to create a safer, better, stronger, more
    prosperous world for us all. That, in the end, is how these discoveries
    should be measured, by whether we did our part to spread them quickly to
    benefit everyone.
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 4:56 p.m. at the Pavilion of Knowledge
    Science Center. In his remarks, he referred to Prime Minister Antonio
    Guterres and Minister of Science and Technology Jose Mariano Gago of
    Portugal; Alexandre Quintanilha, professor, University of Porto, who
    introduced the President; and Rosalia Vargas, director, Pavilion of
    Knowledge Science Center. A tape was not available for verification of
    the content of these remarks.