I would like to send my sincere congratulations to you all in the USA for the magnificent achievement of two of your research scientists in discovering "RNA interference -- gene silencing by double-stranded RNA" that has been properly recognised by the award of the Nobel Prize to Professor Fire from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University and Professor Mello from Harvard University and Massachusetts University.
The congratulations go to you all because it is a tradition of Liberal politics to recognise that nothing is achieved in a society that is not a product of all of that society.
I send the congratulations as an antidote to all that has happened in the last two weeks in the United States in order to remind you all that you are still a great nation capable of great achievements.
I hope that my comments will not be seen as impertinence, but I have sensed enormous despair among many contributors on Daily Kos over the last few days. It is as if people feel that your nation is defined by the failures of Congress on torture, by Foley, by Guantanamo Bay, by Abramoff, by the awful incident in a rural Amish school.
These are real and terrible products of your society but they are not the sole things that define it. By its nature, they are the inevitable subjects of recommended diaries in Daily Kos and it is right that they receive this attention.
Yet there is still so much to admire in the achievements of your people - in science, in the arts, and in the search that goes on amongst your people for the humane and civil society that is deeply intrinsic in the values of your country.
Those outside the USA who criticise your policies do so because they recognise that yours is still a country in which the debate about what constitutes a good society is still alive and still emerging. Despair only if there is a silence.
Those of us who are of a Liberal persuasion have a single powerful driving force to all that we do - we are engaged in the politics of hope. It is in days like this that our true grit and our courage are shown.
To despair is natural and not to despair of what one sees is to be blind. We are not blind - our eyes are wide open and see the full nature of the change that is needed. Yet our politics must offer hope - it is what our countries need and what our people crave and what our politics as Democrats and Liberals must offer.
So, from across the Pond, I congratulate you on this, the latest of your many Nobel Prizes. In doing so, I would like to quote a bit of the acceptance speech of another of your past winners - William Faulkner:
....the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed -- love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.