I'm really happy to be talking about science this morning, because it's one of the things that's near and dear to my heart. It, it's- I just want to talk for a couple of minutes and take any questions you might have.
You know, science is the lifeblood of our civilization. It's what has made the modern world possible. It's why the planet supports six billion people and not several hundred million. it's what has distinguished this modern age. It has tremendous benefits, and that carries with it tremendous responsibilities and risks.
We in America are the- we're the prime beneficiaries and the real carriers of science and technology and the scientific method. We come by it naturally. We came here to this continent, a continent that, according to the latest research, was ravaged by diseases that, that our forbearers brought to this country that may have killed off 90% of the original inhabitants. But we came here and it was an open continent. It only needed the imagination of men and women and their courage and their skill and their hard work to develop it. We were pragmatists by nature. We had a frontier to conquer. We took what we could find from abroad. We brought it in. Ben Franklin was our first, one of our first notable scientists, taming lightening in a bottle brought down from the sky, understanding for the first time, proving that lightening was this magical thing called electricity. And we Americans put together steamboats. We built railroads. We created magnificent bridges like those incredible pieces of architecture over the East River in Manhattan. We discovered, I said, blessings and risks and problems. We discovered petroleum seeping out of the ground, and that it was pretty good. It was almost as good as, as, as quail oil for lighting the lamps. We developed electric lighting, the telephone. The French disagree with us on this, but say we developed the airplane. And-
(laughter)
You go to France, you'll get into a big argument. There was McCormick, Sirus McCormick and the whole mechanization of agriculture, which really made possible the American miracle and built our civilization after we passed the Homestead Act. There was Henry Ford and how he took the principle of designing automobiles and then, and building them by hand, and converted it into something entirely different - the mass production process - that has swept around the globe. I think everyone's familiar with what happened in the 1930s in this country, when as a result of the rise of National Socialism in Austria and Germany, a wave of the most incredible talented men and women in the world came to America with the result that nuclear energy became, not a fantasy, but a reality. And we used it when we had to to end a terrible war in the Pacific.
And after World War II, we developed the laser. That was ours. Semiconductors, those were ours. The internet. We went from developing Penicillin in World War II to the Polio vaccine to cracking the Human Genome. We put in place things like, not only the internet, but the Global Positioning System, which is soon going to make it possible for you to track your location.
(laughter)
And everybody else to track your location all around the country.
(more laughter)
And it may have started pragmatically, it may have been haphazard, it may have been pushed by human freedom and, and, and, and a little bit of greed and competitiveness and ego, but by the 1950s this had become a national policy of science and technology.
You know, I was a young person, and I'm not the only person with gray hair in this room, but we're probably a small minority of what someone called the Internet Generation. It's not chronological, you know.
(laughter)
And, and I was in the eighth grade when Sputnik was launched, and I remember this incredible outpouring of fear and concern. And of course, the United States quickly- we had our satellite program too. We had an aiding system called Vanguard, and it was on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral. Sputnik was a little bitty thing that went around the Earth beeping. So, we had our little bitty thing that, that, but it didn't work, and when the satellite took off, it wobbled a little bit, and it fell and crashed. And I don't know if it was the thing or not, but someone took a picture of something about the size of a grapefruit laying on the ground at Cape Canaveral. And it was a real comparison that marked the United States a relative failure in the most important international competition that we could imagine - the struggle of the United States and our principles against a worldwide Communist movement that sought to overthrow us, take away what we believed in, our freedoms to choose and live.
And so the United States government got very serious about science and technology. We created the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. We created- we passed the National Defense Education Act in Congress in 1958, so teachers could go to school and learn science and mathematics and have their education supported by the federal government. Because we understood that science and mathematics, they were the lifeblood of competing against a godless Soviet empire. And those young men and women in Russia who were smart and intelligent and trying to be the new Marxist men and women, they couldn't compete with Americans. They couldn't compete with the products of the free enterprise system. And we passed the NDEA and we were determined to compete and win. We created some incredible things through the National Science Foundation and the R&D Tax Credits and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
I was one of the beneficiaries. I was in the ninth grade in the Little Rock Public School System, and they, one of our- I guess I got a note from my homeroom teacher. I'd been selected to participate the Federal Radiation Project.
(laughter)
So, there was four or five of us from Pulaski Heights and four or five from Forest Heights, and we were taken across town at 3:30 in the afternoon, after school, a couple three days a week. And we met with Mr. Barihugh, who was the tenth grade, he was the Biology teacher at Hall High School, and we were only in ninth grade, but this was to give us a jump on those Soviets' kids who were learning things. And so, what we were taught about, we were taught about - and here's how smart it was. The one thing the Soviets couldn't quite handle was genetics, Mendelian genetics, because if you understand genetics with dominant and recessive genes, then you have to question whether you can, by the environment alone, create a new form of man. And so, in the Federal Radiation Project, they talked to us and they taught us about genetics with the, the species was Drosophila melanogaster, which is the common fruit fly. And the medium was, was spoiled bananas. So, Mr. Barihugh would go to the, the Krogers, and he'd buy the oldest bananas he could find, and he'd come back and they'd mash them up in a test tube. And we would, we would look at these Drosophila melanogasters under a microscope, well actually under a big magnifying glass, and you could see the colors of their eyes and the numbers of wings. And then you'd stuff them into the, and let them feed on the banana stuff, and then you'd- He'd take them over to the University of Arkansas Medical center and give them, you know, thousands of roentgens, rads. He, he irradiated them, thank goodness not us. The radiation was on the fruit flies. And the idea was could you mutate the fruit flies - could you convert yellow eyes into, into, into red eyes? And so, we spent about six weeks on this, and I don't know if we ever produced a new modern fruit fly. I think we produced a lot of sterile fruit flies.
(laughter)
But it was a very fertile period for those of us who were engaged in the research, and it really opened our eyes to science. And it also shows that when the country gets behind something, imagine this was done all across America, and the idea was to take those of us who were, who were inclined, intellectually curious and (inaudible), and give us an accelerated opportunity to learn. It was a strategy that we applied all across America. It was competitiveness. It was designed to protect our freedom. And it produced this incredible outpouring of technology that gave us high fidelity. It gave us the chip as we know it. It gave us the internet. It gave us our, our security and freedom, and it gave us the incredible growth in the economy that we had in the 1990s. All because people in the 1950s and 60s cared enough to invest a very small proportion of what we had into an acceleration of educational effort in science and technology.
And today, I'm sorry to tell you, all that is at risk today. And the distinguished members of this panel are going into it in a lot more detain than than I will. They'll tell you about the cutbacks in basic research and science. They'll talk to you about the politicization of scientific findings, whether it's in the federal Food and Drug Administration or the office of the White House Science Advisor, whether it has to do with the Morning After pill or stem cell research or global warming. It is shocking that the political party that professed to believe in freedom and liberty is trying to impose it's political will on the province of science. It's absolutely turned its own principles in its head in the purest demonstration of political hypocrisy you can see in the American stage today. And that is the Republican Party.
(applause)
But what particularly worries me is the conflict that's out there between faith and reason, between faith and science. There's nothing new about this conflict. It's as old as Christianity and even older. It's always been there as men sought to reason their way into an understanding of the world around us, and women sought to reason their way into an understanding of the world around us, and others sought to prevent it. Whether it was the Copernican theory of the solar system or Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas in trying to merge faith and reason, it's a long-standing conflict.
You know when I was growing up in Arkansas, everyone read about the Scopes trial in Tennessee in, in 19, 1924. And, and that was considered for the 1950s as the height of, of lunacy. And now, what do I find across my beloved South in the United States? I find teachers throughout the area who cannot use the dreaded 'E' word. I'm not talking about e-mail.
(laughter)
I'm talking bout E-volution. They can't use it. It's like they're (inaudible) a science teacher from my home state in, in a, in a newspaper, and he says, "Well, I got these rocks in the classroom, and I'm teaching science. And these rocks, they're, they're, they're pretty old, you know. They palea-" It's, it's, I don't know what, "Mesozoic rocks, you know 200, 300, 400 million years old," and so forth. He says, "But I can't say that in the classroom." They say, "Well, what do you say?" He says, "I say. "these rocks, they're very old."'
(laughter)
He says, "Because if I say it, one of these students may go home and say, 'Daddy, that, that teacher he's teaching us something. He's saying stuff's older than, older than the, the Book of Genesis. He's saying it started before 4004 BC, and he's teaching us stuff that it conflicts with our faith. And he's trying to keep us from having our faith."' And across America, well-meaning teachers are running scared. They're running scared because we haven't built for them the kind of support network that lets them fully engage the young minds in their charge, fully deal with natural human curiosity and provide them access to the facts that the, our own hard work and labors have created.
I mean, imagine Isaac Newton is relaxing under the apple tree, and you know the story, right? There's an apple and it falls off the tree, and (pop). And he says, 'Gee, I wonder why that apple fell.' And from that comes, you know, the formula for gravity. I think it was like, S=½AT2, when I was taking physics-
(drowned out by laughter)
You know, gravity works at like 16 feet per second, per second, and Newton figured all this out, you know, in, in the 17th century, but he didn't have to. What he could have said is, 'I was sitting under the apple tree, and God punished me (laughter) for relaxing. And so, he made an apple fall on my head.'
(laughter)
And Roy Chapman Andrews , who was one of the real early Paleontologists - I was one of those kids, I read "All About Dinosaurs". Did you ever read that book in the Landmark series for, for youngsters. I'm, I'm dating myself. I know.
(laughter)
So, Roy Chapman Andrews goes to China in the 1930s and is picking up rocks and he's looking, and he's seeing bones sticking out. And it was when we really began to discover the full extent of the, of the Jurassic Era. And Roy Chapman Andrews could have said, 'I see a bone sticking out, but it's not really a bone. It's actually, it was put there by God to test my faith in the Book of Genesis.' He could have said that, but he didn't.
Because you see, I think this is an artificial, it's an artificial, manufactured crisis. It's designed by some in authority to maintain authority over spheres in which they are not competent. I believe there are incredible mysteries in the universe, mysteries that the mind of man doesn't understand and may never understand. And I see in no way in which the advancement of science and the pursuit of knowledge by mankind is in any way threatening to the idea of a supreme being or a greater creator.
Read Leonard Susskind's new book, called "The Cosmic-" It's called "The Cosmic Landscape And Intelligent Design" if you want to see something that's overpowering. Suskind is the inventor of cosmic string theory, and what he does is he takes cosmic- he takes the idea of the universe. He says the universe is- see, what's happening in intelligent design is people are saying, 'Ah well, you see, the, the, the wavelength of, of, of the electron and Planck's Constant and all these numbers are so odd. They don't- they're not even numbers, you know. They, they, they don't balance each other. It's sort of 1.- It's like the figure of pi, 3.14159... Why would it be such an odd number? Why, why wouldn't God make the universe, you know, symmetrical?'
(laughter)
Then they said, 'well, because, you know, it's like there's only one on 10 to the 50th chance that the universe could have worked out in a way that mankind could survive. Therefore, you know, this must have been an intelligent designer who created this universe especially for us.' What Susskind does is he turns it on its head. He says, "You know, if you look at string theory and the 9+1 dimensions" or 10+1 dimensions, and I'm not sure how he knows that time only has one dimension, but he does. (inaudible) would say I'm very arrogant for questions questioning this.
(laughter)
But what Susskind does is he turns it upside down. He says, "Look there are- there is an infinite number of universes." He calls it a multiverse, and he says that however the motive forces, and nobody understands why quarks pop in and out of existence. Nobody understands it, but apparently they do. And apparently there are many, many universes, and we're here in this one. And maybe there are others in which Planck's Constant has a different number, in which the speed of light is not 186,200 miles per second. Who knows? We don't know.
There is incredible mystery out there, and what I believe is that God did create us and put us on this earth to use what he gave us, which is our imagination, our intelligence, our hands, our minds, our ears to study, to learn, to create, and we must do that. We must do it, because it's in our nature as human beings to push beyond the frontier, to ask the impossible questions. We can't be any other way. We're no different than our ancestors a thousand generations ago who gnawed on the bone of the woolly mammoth, threw it into the fire, stumbled out of the cave, laid on their back and looked up at the stars and said, 'What are those specks of light?' And I think that we're closer and closer to finding out, and I think that's our destiny, and I think God wants it that way.
Thank you
(applause)
If you believe like I do, you got to fight back on this. You've got to seek more improvements in the quality of education. You've got to write in to your newspapers. You've got to speak out on talk radio. You've got to have the nerve to call up and argue, and I know you do.
(laughter)
And you've got to help us put this together into a new national strategy of competitiveness, because there are big problems ahead for this country if we don't create a new national strategy of investing in our young people in science and technology. We simply have to do it, and we need your support and your leadership to make it happen. We can do it. We can take this country forward again. We can create a new Golden Age of innovation and science and technology in America.
There are whole worlds of knowledge waiting to be discovered in nano-science, in human science, in physics, in material science and in all of the applications that can make life better and safer and more convenient for all of us, but only if we open our eyes, only if we acknowledge the reality of the condition we're in, only if we beat back the challenges that come from well-meaning people of faith who argue against the very kind of exploration that God gave us the power to do. We have to take back our world and advance the frontiers of knowledge. That is our destiny. That's why you're here at this panel. And now that we're talking about it, we're going to get a lot more information out. We expect you all to get out and help us do it. This is about action, not just talk.
(applause)
...some questions?
MC: We can take- we've got time for one or two questions...(instructions)
Questioner#1: Hello, sir. I am, I am Aros. I am a blogger and professionally a linguist and software engineer. I grew up with my dad working under C. Everett Koop, who was standing up against the-
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Right.
Questioner#1: -early vanguard of the cuts in science and so on. I have a question that I think you're probably uniquely qualified to answer. We've been hearing a lot about the right wing religious groups having, basically, an agenda to seed our Armed Forces with people who believe as they do, and I find this very disturbing, and I wonder what your take is on that. Thank you.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, I'm very disturbed about it too, and I thank you for the question. You know the old, the old saw is that there are no atheists in the foxhole. And when the bullets are flying and you realize that you're existing only by chance, you're going to be looking for every bit of help you can find. It's like my old Division Commander, General Hall used to say, he'd say, "All prayers are answered, but sometimes the answer is no."
(laughter)
But in the Armed Forces, we believe that- We believe in the, in, in American principles. There can't be proselytizing for a particular faith or a particular interpretation in the Armed Forces.
(applause)
And if it's going on, it's wrong. And I know it's going on. I've talked to people who's, who, who are, who are Jewish whose children have been told at the Air Force Academy that they're going to go to hell and so forth by people in authority. I mean, that, that's crossing the line. That, that's wrong, and, and I want you to help us work against that. I believe every man and woman should be free to choose to worship God or not to worship God, and if they choose to worship God, to worship God in any way they choose. And you can't mix the authority of the United States of America and our government with the religious persuasions that people choose in their heart and in their conscience, and when you do, it's wrong. In the United States Armed Forces, those of us who are officers wear US on the collar. That chain of command goes all the way down to the bottom. And if there's anybody out there telling one of our people they're going to hell, because they don't have a particular religious belief, I'm sorry, that guy's going to jail if I have anything to say about it.
(applause)
Right here.
Questioner#2: : Hello. My name is (deleted for privacy), and my Kos handle is Unstable Isotopes.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: You're going to have to speak up, because the acoustics are bad up here.
Questioner#2: : Okay. Can you hear me?
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Yeah, now.
Questioner#2: : Thank you. Thank you for addressing us, and it's very refreshing to hear political figures talking about science in this way. And the question I have, I think scientists- there's an incredible untapped resource in scientists. I mean, we all have stake in this country, and we have a stake in where it's going, and I think some of the problem is we don't know how to communicate. And I think we need people in the political world to help us.
And I hope that you guys will get engaged with scientists in a more direct manner. There's many scientific organizations like the American Chemical Society, the American Physics Society, all of the various societies. And so, what is your comment or thoughts about having an engagement with the societies to get people involved in politics, you know, even apolitical people, just how to talk to politicians. Because you need from us to sell it to the country.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: You are a scientist.
Questioner#2: : Yes I am. (laughs)
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: That, I mean, when you say 'us', you consider me a politico and yourself a scientist. I like that.
(laughter)
I'm not ashamed of it. I'm happy to, that so many of you all have given me a voice in American politics, but you know, I wanted to be a theoretical physicist at one point. I was going to be a theoretical physicist when I went to West Point. Finally, I discovered it was incompatible, that you couldn't be an Army officer and work in a high energy physics lab, believe it or not, and still lead troops in the field. And so, I had to make a choice, but I do think it's up to all Americans to reach out across whatever occupational boundaries you have. And people who have special spheres of knowledge and special insights, I think they have a special obligation to talk out, whether that's retired Generals or scientists.
And so, I hope that you'll encourage your friends in the scientific community to speak up, to get engaged in politics, to take an hour off from going over the latest 50,000 publications they've got to read that night, and just write a letter in to the newspaper. Because what's- one of the things that's made American science and technology so powerful is the culture we live on. And if scientists don't participate in that culture - and I'm talking about the political culture - if they don't participate in that culture and speak out, we'll lose that culture.
We 're counting on you all to come to us just like we got to come to you.
Thank you.
(applause)
This, I guess, will be the last question. Last question right here, sir.
Questioner#3: : Morning, General.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Morning.
Questioner#3: : I can't believe anyone in the Air Force would say anything about hell. There's only one hell. It's Ranger school.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: (laughs) And you say you're an Air Force officer, sir.
Questioner#3: : No, I am not.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Okay.
Questioner#3: : I work for a living.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Alright.
(laughter)
Be careful.
(more laughter)
Questioner#3: : But Sir, your other hat, serving on business boards, it's been my experience there's no downside, or very little immediate downside in the business community for decision makers not to know science. Typically, it's a question that may be handed off to the geeks in the back. But personally, I've had experience where people didn't believe that lasers decreased power over distance, that they honestly believed that light bulbs got brighter as you backed up. And it's one of those things where-
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: And these were failed investment bankers, right?
Questioner#3: : These were major telecommunications executives who went on to buy other telecommunications companies.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Oh.
Questioner#3: : It's just a case right now socially, it seems like knowledge of science is not only not a prerequisite, but sometimes it's a guarantee you won't get a date for the prom. Is there some way that the business culture itself, that we can address that in terms of a direct risk/reward to have them see that the upside of knowing science, of putting more science in the executive class would pay back directly as opposed to putting yet another lawyer or marketing person in charge of the company?
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, you're asking a very important question, and when I was running two and a half years ago, a guy- young man- came up to me and said, "You're talking about science and education," he said, "but" he said, "look," he said, "I'm not going to study," said, "I, I did Calculus in high school, but I'm not going to do science and education, science and engineering in graduate school or even at, as a major," he said, "because why should I." He said, "American business can go out and hire an engineer from, from Prague or from Bulgaria for $6000 or, or, or $2000 a month, top, and you'll get great talent. They're studying the same textbooks. they're going to the same engineering calculations. They're able to do exactly what I'll be able to do. So, I don't have any competitive market advantages." He said, "My, my marketing advantage is in financial engineering," he said, "and that's why I'm going into business." And so there is some calculation about that. I'll tell you something else. I think one of the things that, that makes it a little more difficult today is science is, it's less accessible in many of the products that we're using. In an automobile in the old days, I mean, you could open it up. You could, you know in my eighth grade science class we had the, we had the automobile engine sitting there, and you could sort of see how up and down power got converted to rotary power through- I mean, you couldn't quite see it. You had sort of see the crank shaft turning over the engine, how the pistons were going up and down. And you had to, you didn't quite understand the valves, but you had to see them going up and down on the cylinder heads. But if you now take apart your computer, and you look at the chip, there's not much you can do with a chip. You can't sort of pull it apart and look at the wiring, if it's there. It's very nice. It's very pretty. And, and, and there it is. So, it's harder for young people to get into it. When, when they launched Sputnik, I was one of those young people who went out immediately and started building rockets. And I started by cutting off shotgun shells, and, and using the gunpowder in a shotgun shell and trying to launch two-inch-long rockets. And then we moved up and eventually somebody had, had access to metalworking, and they actually created rockets. And they never went very far, and they never did very much, but we thought it was a contribution to American national security.
(laughter)
It's real hard for young people today to get access that way into the kind of hardware that excites their imaginations. So, we got to try harder. My friend Dean Kamen runs this robotics competition called, called Us First, and if you haven't seen that, you should do it and, and get involved in it. Because you have an engineer-type sponsor. You get all the kids that like to wear pocket protectors and carry a calculator in their pocket. And you get them in, and you buy $10,000 worth of junk, and you make a robot, and the robots have to do certain tasks, and it's a national competition, and you get rewarded for it. It's the kind of thing that Dean's trying to do to help us get back on track. We've got to put more emphasis on education. We've got to have more qualified science and mathematics teachers. We've got to start giving more money to young people who will study science and mathematics at, at college, and put in four or eight years teaching in the classroom. We've got to somehow change the reward on the education side. In terms of business, I have to tell you, my experience in the business community's a little bit different. I work with a number of investment banks, and I'm on a number of boards. I find the people who are there very, very, very smart, and they drill down to the bottom, whether it's the process for cracking petroleum or the way to make the best kind of fiber-optic cable with, with proper doping to carry a laser, and how to make a cable that will reflect light around a corner with minimal attenuation. I hear a lot of scientific and engineering talk, even at boards of directors meetings, and I see a lot of emphasis put on it. I don't think we've gone as far as we can go in things like R & D tax credits, but I do think that international business, and today almost all business is international, is intensely competitive. We will not succeed in international business as a nation with our companies unless we've got a full quotient of scientific and engineering expertise at the top. Sometimes people that get to the top get there because they're good with numbers. Business is about numbers, mostly about numbers of dollars, but it is about numbers. But you got to be smart. You got to work hard, and you got to be able to bring people together. Sometimes those people also have enormous scientific skills. Sometimes they don't. But I'm a big believer in the competitive system of American business. When you go into that arena, it's combat. It's a struggle. It's a competition. It's a sale a day to your boss, to your colleagues or to a firm, and you've got to make it happen. So, I think that the very rigors of the marketplace reward a certain degree of scientific progress unless it's protected by excessive government regulation. What we have to do is clear away the obstacles that keep inefficient firms leading and dominating marketplaces. And then pump our energy into education for youth and adults, so we can stay abreast of scientific progress and make full use of the body of human knowledge to better mankind's condition.
Thank you very much. It's been great to be with you this morning. Thank you.
(applause)