The following is an excerpt from President William Jefferson
Clinton’s commencement address at Morgan State University May 18, 1997.
President Clinton was awarded an honorary doctorate of laws.
The past half-century has seen mankind split the atom, splice genes
create the microchip, explore the heavens. We enter the next century
propelled by new and stunning developments.
Thirty-six years ago President Kennedy looked to the heavens and
proclaimed that the flag of peace and democracy, not war and tyranny,
must be the first to be planted on the moon. He gave us a goal of
reaching the moon, and we achieved it–ahead of time.
Let us today set a new national goal for science in the age of
biology. Today, let us commit ourselves to developing an AIDS vaccine
within the next decade.
Science often moves faster than our ability to understand its
implications, leaving a maze of moral and ethical questions in its
wake. The Internet can be a new town square or a new Tower of Babel.
The same computer that can put the Library of Congress at our
fingertips can also he used by purveyors of hate to spread blueprints
for bombs. The same knowledge that is developing new life-saving drugs
can be used to create poisons of mass destruction.
Science has no soul of its own. It is up to us to determine whether
it will he used as a force for good or evil. We must do nothing to
stifle our basic quest for knowledge. After all, it has propelled us
from field to factory to cyberspace. But how we use the fruits of
science and how we apply it to human endeavors is not properly the
domain of science alone or of scientists alone. The answers to these
questions require the application of ethical and moral principles that
have guided our great democracy toward a more perfect union for more
than 200 years now. As such, they are the province of every American
citizen.
We must decide together how to apply these principles to the dazzling new discoveries of science. Here are four guideposts.
