It isn't that if you were merely to increase the salaries of
schoolteachers, you would solve the problem. The problem is endemic. It
works at every level. It works in the culture of children themselves. It
works in the federal, state, and local government. It works in the media.
It works in the school boards and taxpayers with school bond issues.
There's not just one point of attack. And it's very hard to imagine a
serious change unless there's a change of behavior at many levels by many
different people. That involves rethinking, it involves changes in
values, it involves money--not out of cynicism, but out of understanding
how the real world works. It's going to be very difficult to make this
change unless, as happened with Sputnik, there's an apparent threat to
national security that requires us to learn more science.
PT: We need a Sputnik-like explosion in public awareness to make us
think, wake up.
CS: We do have the example of the late '50s and the early '60s. I
don't know if that's the only thing that can make us do it. A sudden
outbreak of wisdom maybe would be such a shock.
PT: I don't think we should count on that. Sputnik worked in part,
I think, because people then had faith that science was going to cure our
medical ills and solve the world's problems. People today don't have the
same view of science as a panacea.
CS: As someone whose life was saved in the last six months by
medical science, I certainly don't share the skepticism. The lives of
almost everybody on earth depend in the most intimate way on science and
technology--to be unenthusiastic about science and technology is not just
foolish, it's suicidal.
Without agricultural technology, for example, the earth could
support only tens of millions of people, instead of billions. That means
that almost everyone on earth, 99 percent of us, owe the very fact that
we're alive and haven't starved to death to the existence of
technology.
PT: You just referred to your own intimations of mortality. Has
that changed your outlook at all? You've recovered from something that
could have been very serious.
CS: It was very serious. It's a bone marrow disease called
myelodysplasia, which is invariably fatal if not treated. I had a bone
marrow transplant at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in
Seattle. I was lucky that my only sibling, my sister, was a perfect
match. It was lucky, but also I was the beneficiary of decades of
experience that that institution, and medical science in general, has had
in bone marrow transplants. The age at which you can get a transplant is
increasing every year. I think I'm the oldest person to get a
transplant.
PT: Science saved your life.
CS: This is not the first time I almost died. This is my third time
having to deal with intimations of mortality. And every time it's a
character-building experience. You get a much clearer perspective on
what's important and what isn't, the preciousness and beauty of life, and
the importance of family and of trying to safeguard a future worthy of
our children. I would recommend almost dying to everybody. I think it's
really a good experience.
PT: Probably once is enough for most people. In part because
science has done such a wonderful job of saving lives, we have a
population crisis, at least in some people's eyes. Does that worry
you?
CS: Oh yes, absolutely. But it's also clear how to resolve the
problem. It involves complex social issues, and there are religious and
nationalistic objections to dealing with the crisis. As with all crises,
it will, if untreated, blow up in our face. The way to treat it is very
threatening, since it is the billion poorest people who reproduce
fastest, for simple reasons of survival. If you have children and no
Social Security, there's a chance that some of your children might
survive into your old age and take care of you. It's a simple calculation
that the poorest people make, to have lots of children. So the first
thing to do is to improve the self-sufficiency of the billion poorest
people on the planet, which will lessen the charity of the major
religions, It's not just good ethics, it's good in the most practical
sense.
There also has to be a ready supply of safe, easy-to-use
contraceptives. And the third key item is the political empowerment of
women. There are societies in which the per capita income is high, but
women are so oppressed that they cannot have a say in whether or not they
have children. There are good reasons for helping the poorest people, and
good reasons for empowering women, apart from the population crisis. But
the population crisis makes it very dear that those should be prime
goals.
PT: You're not just a scientist, you are also a celebrity. Because
of that visibility you can be a salesman for certain issues if you care
to.
CS: Since childhood, the most pleasurable occupation I could
imagine was being a scientist. It had a romance to it that nothing else I
know of even approached. And I've never lost that. My goal always was to
be just a working scientist. It's true I studied some very exotic areas
of science. I was interested in exploring other planets at a time when
man had not even gotten outside the earth's atmosphere. So I actually
have spent much of the last 35 years exploring the solar system my
childhood dream.
Tags:
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genetic predispositions,
human emotions,
human intelligence,
imperfections,
inner space,
intelligent life,
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Science,
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