SCIENCE AT THE SHINE DOME canberra 5 - 7 may 2004
Symposium: A celebration of Australian science
Friday, 7 May 2004
Welcoming address
Professor John White
Today you will hear something of the science of the future. Some of the things you will hear about may well raise questions in your mind about public good or public concern. Where, for example, would the very latest type of informatics, information gathering, take us? In the United States there is at present a discussion going on, and it has been said that there is no consensus within the scientific community, about the safety of purposely engineered nanomaterials. It is quite interesting that that should be so. We will hear at least one talk today concerned with nanomaterials. And the intention is that there should be a coordinated research program on health, safety and environmental issues under the auspices of the United States government.
I am not wishing to scare anybody here, but I am wishing just to give you an illustration that there are many consequences for science, and one of the things which we do and expect to do as responsible scientists is to respond to those issues at the same time as we are experiencing the great joy of doing scientific discovery.
I would like to give only one last word of advice and encouragement to the young people who will be speaking today. That is to let them know that, for example, in the National Science Foundation in America, which I visited two years ago, I met people who were dishing out the money for science. And I found that there was installed in that body a point of view that if people had achieved things and went on and asked to do even more adventurous things, ones with a risk involved in them – maybe the experiments would not succeed but, as Jim Pitts, one of the deputy directors of the National Science Foundation, said, 'We would like our researchers to walk away from that and we would think, "Well, there was just no oil in that hole."' Attempting risky things, attempting difficult things, is what our charter is about, and I think it is essential that our funding bodies have such an attitude.
