John Polanyi

The respect for human rights, essential if we are to use technology wisely, is not something alien that must be grafted onto science. On the contrary, it is integral to science, as also to scholarship in general.

Instead, in the absence of respect for human rights, science and its offspring technology have been used in this century as brutal instruments for oppression.

Today, Academies of Science use their influence around the world in support of human rights.

Under this scientific and moral pressure, the Canadian government conceded publicly that the use of these weapons in Vietnam was, in their view, a contravention of the Geneva Protocol.

In nation after nation, democracy has taken the place of autocracy.

For scholarship - if it is to be scholarship - requires, in addition to liberty, that the truth take precedence over all sectarian interests, including self-interest.

Our assessment of socio-economic worth is largely a sham. We scientists should not lend ourselves to it - though we routinely do. We should, instead, insist on applying the criterion of quality.

For science must breathe the oxygen of freedom.

Science exists, moreover, only as a journey toward troth. Stifle dissent and you end that journey.

If we treasure our own experience and regard it as real, we must also treasure other people's experience. Reality is no less precious if it presents itself to someone else. All are discoverers, and if we disenfranchise any, all suffer.

If we treasure our own experience and regard it as real, we must also treasure other people's experience.

It is this, at its most basic, that makes science a humane pursuit; it acknowledges the commonality of people's experience.