The author is Executive Director of Leadership for Environment
and Development International Inc., and the recipient of the 1999
AAAS International Scientific Cooperation Award. Presented at the
CAIP Annual Luncheon Meeting on Sunday, January 24, 1999, AAAS Annual
Meeting, Anaheim, CA
It is a great honor to receive the AAAS Award for International Scientific
Cooperation. As I said yesterday, the title of this award already tells
you that one is not alone in accepting it. All of the words: "international,"
cooperation," and "science" imply working as a part of
a team. Thus, I accepted the award yesterday as a member of that team,
consisting of my immediate colleagues at ICSU, where I spent nearly
20 years: the staff in Paris, various Boards of Directors of distinguished
and dedicated scientists, all of whom could be in my place today; the
huge network of scientists and science policy makers who constitute
ICSU, and the numerous partner organizations with which ICSU worked,
from within and outside of the UN system. The objective of this network
has been, for nearly a hundred years, "to encourage scientific
cooperation for the benefit of humanity." It was a wonderful privilege
for me to contribute to attaining such laudable objectives.
I would like to say a few personal words about how I actually got here.
I sort of knew that I was an "international" person when,
as a very young girl, my parents decided to take us away from our native
Hungary. We settled in Vienna where I began, for a few months, to catch
up on a lost school year, then we came to the United States for what
we thought would be a brief trip, only to accept an award for my parents
"bravery in journalism." It was my mother who decided that
we should not return to the Old World which was full of painful memories.
Thus, within a few months, this international person settled in to her
third country. I cannot help but look back in gratitude to those early
years in the U.S. I hardly spoke any English, but before long I was
fully accepted in my school, rising rapidly from being a member of the
school patrol (a great honor in elementary school!) to holding the top
offices in my student government. Maybe it is true that Hungarians go
in a revolving door behind you and come out ahead, but in this case
I think the credit should go to the warm-hearted welcome the people
of the United States gave to me and my family, and to so many other
refugees and foreigners before and after us.
I continued on the international path during my relatively short period
in this country: I spent my junior year in France, and two years in
Asia in the Peace Corps. After graduate school I returned to Europe
and took my first bona fide international job at the UN -- hired by
the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) to work at UNESCO on a
brand new, post-Stockholm Conference program, devoted to environmental
education. I went to Paris full of idealism about international cooperation,
and about what needed to be done to save, what we finally realized,
was “our only one earth”. Those were difficult days at UNESCO however,
and it was hardly a place for a young Hungarian-American woman, full
of energy and new ideas about how to change the world. That wasn't really
the business that UNESCO was in at that time. It was more about politics,
power, and the Cold War, which was waning on the outside world, but
not inside UNESCO.
I recall vividly meeting Dr. Al Baez, at a UNESCO consultation I had
organized in the late 1970s. Al Baez was distinguished for much more
than his famous daughter, Joan. For us he was, in addition to his contributions
to physics, a great science educator and science communicator. It was
from Al Baez that I first heard about The International Council of Scientific
Unions (ICSU), and I first began to appreciate the role of the Non-Governmental
world in international cooperation. Al, who had been an important UNESCO
director before I got to UNESCO, was spending much of his time, in those
days, chairing and organizing an ICSU Committee on the Teaching of Science.
Listening to Al speak with so much enthusiasm about ICSU obviously became
a life-changing moment for me. By 1978 I realized that I was paralyzed
at UNESCO, and began to look around for another way to change the world.
ICSU gave me the chance to do that.
I remember so vividly being interviewed for my job at ICSU by the then-Secretary-General,
the distinguished Nobel laureate, the late Sir John Kendrew. At that
time ICSU was looking for an Assistant Executive Secretary, and I had
made the short-list, the rare woman candidate in what was then very
much a male world. So, one handicap was that I was a woman, and another
was that I had studied ecology and environmental planning, certainly
not a science in Sir John's mind in those days. Still, by miracle, I
was offered the job. I remember the awkward moment when I told ICSU's
then Executive Secretary, before accepting the offer, that I had planned
to have a second child sometime in the years ahead and that I simply
wanted ICSU to know this, and to retract the offer, if this would be
a problem. I don't know the reaction, except of course the offer was
maintained, and we laughed about this story for many years after my
second son Nicolas was born, on schedule, 18 months later. Remember
that this was Europe in 1978! I managed to carry out this plan so well
that I even attended ICSU’s General Committee meeting in Brussels the
week before Nicolas was born.
So, I began as Assistant Executive Secretary in ICSU in 1978, still
full of ideas and energy, and still full of a desire to change the world.
I will always remember walking into my first ICSU Executive Board meeting
and thinking that not only was I the only woman, but I was certainly
the only person with a sense of humor which I would have to seriously
reign in to keep my job. The only woman part of this early observation
remained true for many years, alas, but at least laughter and good spirits
had no gender or cultural borders.
The President at that time was the late Bruno Straub, the eminent Hungarian
biochemist who later became President of Hungary. Bruno did not wish
to be involved at all in my selection, in order not to be criticized
about the proliferating Hungarian "mafia" in the world of
science. In spite of this we became great colleagues and friends. The
Secretary General was Sir John, who became President of ICSU later on.
He passed away in August 1997. A Kendrew fund is just being set up at
St. John's College, Oxford, which he also presided over for many years,
which will provide fellowships to students from developing countries
in science and music. I have inherited John Kendrew's wonderful opera
record and CD collection, and lots of memories of a great internationalist.
The US Member on the Executive Board was Tom Malone. I know that Tom
has received this same award before me, and know also that Tom's tireless
efforts to promote science across the borders could never be praised
enough. Tom was replaced years later by Walter Rosenblith who was then
Foreign Secretary of the Academy. As Vice President of ICSU Walter took
on, the important projects of examining ICSU's role in a contemporary
agenda for science, and the need for ICSU to forge partnerships beyond
its own membership. I was particularly involved in both these important
reflections which took place between 1985 and 1990. It was at the 1985
Ringberg Conference on International Science and the Role of ICSU: A
Contemporary Agenda that we suggested to one of the participants, Professor
Federico Mayor, that he might try his hand at bringing about the needed
change at UNESCO. I was happy to participate in the celebration of Walter
Rosenblith’s 85th birthday a few months ago in Cambridge, and can tell
you that he is still the same active internationalist that he ever was.
Later remarkable US members of ICSU's Boards have included Rita Colwell,
and Hal Mooney who has been Secretary General since 1996. These are
all eminent scientists and committed to science international.
Before long at ICSU I realized the strength that a non-governmental
organization has over its inter-governmental counterparts. We didn't
need layers and layers of instructions or approvals to get anything
started -- all we needed was a clarity of vision, a common purpose,
and the energy to move ahead. My role as Assistant Executive Secretary,
then later on as Executive Secretary and finally Executive Director,
was simple: I was the "choreographer" charged with ensuring
that all that ICSU was capable of accomplishing actually did happen.
The secret was the ability to listen to and understand the various cultural
and disciplinary inputs to our planning efforts; the ability to bring
all this richness together into a coherent program of action taking
into consideration the political and financial realities; and then carrying
it out transparently, openly and with energy. Never for a moment did
I feel that this was impossible or not worthwhile.
So at the end of the 20th century, who are the major actors
in international science? In some ways calling science international
is hardly necessary -- by definition it is international, although I
know that in such a great country as this one, this idea does not always
come automatically to mind. Think of any discipline of science, and
imagine it without the free and open communication between scholars
from other parts of the world. This is certainly true of the natural
sciences, and hopefully increasingly so in the social sciences. So,
individual scientists are the key actors in international science. Organizations
are simply set up to help these individuals work more effectively. Let
us just remind ourselves briefly of the history of these organizations.
In the last years of the last century, a handful of remarkable scientists
decided to create an International Association of Academies, with ten
founding members, in 1899, including the National Academy of Sciences
of this country and five German academies. The objective of the Association
was to "initiate and otherwise to promote scientific undertakings
of general interest, proposed by one or more of the associated Academies,
and to facilitate scientific intercourse between different countries."
By a few years after the establishment of the IAA we can see signs of
the kind of action which justified it, in for example, the creation
of a world system of seismological and geological observation stations.
After the outbreak of the first World War, the IAA lost its energy,
and it was not until a few years after the war, at a conference in Paris
in 1918, that it was decided to create a new organization, the International
Research Council, with only five Academy Members, none from the Central
Powers nor from countries which remained neutral during the war. Thus,
the new body was far from respecting the tenets of the international,
or universal nature of science. The IRC remained in existence until
1931, and had as one of its goals, the initiation or the "formation
of international Associations or Unions deemed to be useful to the progress
of science". It is during these years that we see the beginning
of the bi-cameral nature of the organization of international science,
consisting of national and interdisciplinary academies of science, and
international disciplinary bodies or Unions of Science. The problem
with the IRC was its restricted nature as the Central Powers and the
neutral countries were excluded, and thus the wings of science were
cut from the outset.
In 1931 the IRC dissolved and quite naturally converted itself to the
International Council of Scientific Unions, ICSU. The new name was meant
to recognize the non-political nature of science as represented by the
independent scientific strength of the Unions. At the formation of ICSU
there were 40 national members and 8 Scientific Union Members. Today,
ICSU's name has changed slightly to even better reflect its reality.
Thus, since last year, ICSU is known as the International Council for
Science, although the acronym of ICSU has been kept to remind us of
its long history. Today ICSU’s membership comprises over 90 National
Scientific Members, and 25 International Scientific Union Members.
The strengths of ICSU have been, in my opinion, many. Firstly, its
clear adherence to a non-political agenda. The needs of science have
always set the program for ICSU, and those who have tried to introduce
politics have always been easily out-voted. ICSU's strength has also
increased with its strict adherence to the principles of the universality
of science. Thus, ICSU, since its establishment in 1931, having learned
the lessons of its more politicized predecessor, the IRC, has "vigorously
pursued a policy of non-discrimination, affirming the rights and freedom
of scientists throughout the world to engage in international scientific
activity without regard to such factors as citizenship, religion, creed,
political stance, ethnic origin, race, colour, language, age or sex."
ICSU has never abandoned these principles, admitting members who were
not popular on the world political scene and canceling meetings when
host countries refused to give visas to scientists for political reasons.
This has demanded the clarity of purpose I spoke about earlier. I particularly
enjoyed this part of my job as I was totally convinced that our principles
were worth fighting for.
I will always remember a meeting held at UNESCO in 1987, co-sponsored
by three cooperating bodies in the ocean sciences. One of these was
the inter-governmental World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the
other was a joint ICSU-UNESCO Committee on Climate Changes in the Ocean
and the third was ICSU's own Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research,
SCOR. I went to UNESCO for the opening of this meeting, and chose, in
my remarks, to call attention to the fact that it was unusual, but very
positive, that intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations
were joining hands in such an important topic as the study of the world's
oceans. A few hours later, as I was happily back in my own office at
ICSU, across the river from UNESCO, I was asked to return as the Conference
was threatening to break down, due to serious political pressures. Apparently
the African delegations to UNESCO had noticed that there were some South
African scientists on the list of participants, and demanded that UNESCO
stop the meeting. I then spent hours preparing my fight: by studying
UNESCO's own internal rules; discussing with my friend, the recently
elected Director General of UNESCO, Professor Federico Mayor, who was
away from Paris during those days, and, getting the French National
Research Council to give us another venue for the meeting, in case I
did not succeed. After hours of stubborn negotiations the ICSU view
prevailed and we managed to convince the UNESCO officials and the angry
delegations that the meeting was about science and not about politics,
and that the participants present were invited because they had something
to contribute to the debate at hand, which was about the world's oceans.
The three South African scientists even volunteered to sign a statement
about their own anti-apartheid views, which added strength to ICSU's
case. Thus, we were able to continue the meeting in peace at UNESCO,
setting a precedent for increased cooperation between the UN bodies
and ICSU, which was to be the theme of the next decade.
Not only the universality of science, but also the wider network of
partners that science needs to carry out its mission became my own personal
agenda during the past 10 years, when I was the chief executive officer
of ICSU. This, I think, is a needed ingredient for international science.
Our network thus grew and grew, to include a large number of partners
from the national and inter-governmental spheres and from the growing
number of organizations known as “non-governmental”, or what is now
called the organizations representing "civil society".
Although ICSU was well on its way to carry out its mission of promoting
international scientific cooperation before the United Nations system
was established, it would be impossible to describe international science
without referring to the UN bodies, and notably to UNESCO. UNESCO is
the only UN body with the word "Science" in its title, and
without it ICSU might be a very different organization today. The Preparatory
Conference convened in London in 1945 drafted a constitution for a United
Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in which it
gave instructions to consult with the International Council of Scientific
Unions on methods of collaboration to strengthen the programmes of both
bodies in the area of their common concerns. This has led to long years
of close cooperation, which has included financial support for the work
of ICSU, with no conditions, and mostly a joint commitment to shared
goals. It would be difficult to imagine the history of ICSU or UNESCO
without the other during these past 50 years.
Several other parts of the UN system deal with science, although only
UNESCO has the "S" specifically in its name. It is perhaps
the work in environment which best illustrates both the wealth of expertise
and the confusion and inevitable turf battles which have emerged. In
all this, ICSU has remained strong, again because of its clarity of
purpose, and also because it has no competing counterparts. ICSU’s framers
were extremely wise to set up a single international body devoted to
scientific cooperation. Can you imagine the confusion if there were
international organizations for the earth sciences, for the biological
sciences, the physical sciences, and so on, and a separate body of national
scientific concerns. Now that we know more about the contributions of
science to human development, the only improvement we could suggest
to the original formula would be to have included the human sciences
in the design for the early ICSU.
In describing the variety of actors involved in international environmental
programs I could confuse you with a recitation of endless acronyms of
UN and other bodies, which you would find meaningless. I will not do
that, but simply remind you that scientists have been involved in studies
of the earth system for a very long time. In the mid 1950s ICSU launched
the important International Geophysical Year, whose political and scientific
legacy is still with us. It was after the IGY that ICSU felt confident
enough to initiate programs on a larger scale than ever before. So,
starting in 1964, the decade-long International Biological Program began
and left its important contribution to the ecological sciences. Then.
in the 1970s the Global Atmospheric Research Program, the first undertaking
in full partnership with a UN body, the WMO was begun to study the transient
behavior of the atmosphere and the factors that would lead to better
understanding of the physical basis for climate. . These three important
precursors pointed the way for the multitude of cooperative programs
to study the earth system that has characterized the last 30 years of
this century.
The scientific community was already much involved in the 1972 Conference
on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm. It was just a few years
before Stockholm that ICSU set its Committee on Science and Technology
in Developing Countries (COSTED) to stimulate and facilitate the participation
of scientists from developing countries in international science, and
then the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment, SCOPE,
to advance knowledge of the influence of humans on their environment
as well as the effects of environmental changes upon people. These were
important steps preparing ICSU for the full participation on the international
scene in the 1990’s
In 1990, ICSU was invited to be the chief scientific adviser to the
UN Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro.
This invitation came in recognition for the scientific community’s active
and visible role in a number of programs launched after the Stockholm
Conference. Foremost in this was the work carried out by SCOPE, notably
its work on the biogeochemical cycles, especially the carbon cycle,
which helped turn political attention to the greenhouse effect, and
also the much -praised SCOPE study of the Environmental Consequences
of Nuclear War. Other excellent examples of international cooperative
work toward increased understanding of the earth system include the
World Climate Research (WCRP) – sponsored first by ICSU and UNESCO,
and later by the Intergovernmental Oceanic Commission (IOC), looking
at the physical climate system; the International Geosphere Biosphere
Program: A study of Global Change, (IGBP), set up by the entire ICSU
family in 1986 to look at the global interactions between the living
and non-living processes that together underpin the habitability of
our planet; the structure and function of biological diversity (DIVERSITAS)
and the study of the interactions between human society and its environment
on a planetary scale, the International Human Dimensions of Global Environmental
Change Program (IHDP) set up jointly by ICSU and the International Social
Sciences Council in 1996.
In the 1990s a number of global observing systems were also launched
as a result of a common concern by governments and scientists of the
need to keep the earth system in its totality under continuous observation.
These observing systems, GCOS (on climate), GOOS (the world’s oceans)
and GTOS (terrestrial observations) are jointly sponsored by a number
of UN bodies and the single non-governmental partner: ICSU.
With these vast number of important global programs as a part of the
development of international science, it was natural for the scientific
community to become a full partner with five UN bodies in the organization
of the Second World Climate Conference in 1990, and then to accept the
challenge to move the international scientific effort to a more noticeable
policy level by preparing the Rio Conference. This was done by involving
all of the national and Union actors involved in science to establish
links with their national delegations to the Rio Conference, and to
ensure that science as given due consideration in the Conference preparations.
We put together a very ambitious conference just a year before Rio on
An Agenda of Science for Environment and Development into the 21st Century:
ASCEND 21. This was the first time that scientists: physical, chemical,
biological, medical, and social, with engineers came together to contribute
their knowledge to the issues of grave common concern. The outcome of
the Conference provided a real input to the UN Conference in Rio. Notably
in convincing the UN to include a Chapter (35) on Science for Environment
and Development in Agenda 21, but also by resulting in a solemn "commitment
on the part of the international scientific community as a whole to
work together so that improved and expanded scientific research and
the systematic assessment of scientific results, combined with a prediction
of impacts, would enable policy options in environment and development
to be evaluated on the basis of sound scientific facts."
All of the activities I have referred to here were launched in response
to the growing realization of the extent to which the changes in our
planet threaten the earth’s carrying capacity, and the increasing recognition
by governments that scientific knowledge of the earth system is a necessary
ingredient for wise policy making. Changes in the earth system extend
across national boundaries and scientific disciplines, thus, the programs
put in place have, by necessity become international and interdisciplinary.
Systematic investigation on a global scale has only recently become
feasible. Given the high cost and the lack of adequate human resources
to carry out these investigations, the coordination and cohesion of
the international research programs and observations systems is vital.
I have given brief examples of international cooperation in the environment,
simply because this is what was the most visible during the past 20
years of my own involvement in the world of science. There are many
other examples of course. I could have given you a talk about the intensity
of cooperative action during this same period in the mathematical sciences,
or in astronomy. What characterizes all of these activities is that
they involve thousands of scientists throughout the globe driven by
the common language of science a common curiosity to understand our
planet and the common knowledge that science is a truly international
endeavor.
Finally, in the constantly growing stage on which international science
has been taking place, the need to address problems in an interdisciplinary
and global manner has reached heights not known before. ICSU's own interdisciplinary
bodies, addressing issues which none of the Members (National or Union)
can look at alone have grown in number and in diversity. The links with
the social sciences have also grown in such areas as the human dimensions
of global change, anthropology, psychology, and geography, which has
always played a key role linking the natural and the social scientists.
In an ideal world the International Council for Science would encompass
science in the way the German language describes it as "wissenchaft".
And finally international cooperation in science is reaching out to
emerging countries, where the organization of science is either young,
or countries which had not been comfortable about scientific cooperation
up until recently. No one has made more contributions to science in
the so-called "developing world as the late Professor Abdus Salam,
Nobel laureate in physics and founder of the Third World Academy of
Sciences (TWAS). At the ceremony launching TWAS in 1985, Abdus Salam
described international science better than I ever could: "Even
as we are gathered here in a Third World context, I remain conscious
of the fact that science as such has no national affiliation. The history
of science indeed, involves the history of diverse civilisations."
This, of course was a positive philosophy, but the responsibility of
science and its increasingly global interests to help scientists in
less developed countries remains and the commitment of all the organizations
I referred to today to capacity building is strong.
I myself left ICSU a year an a half ago, not because I stopped believing
in all that I have told you, but simply because I had a chance to contribute
specifically in this area of capacity building in a newer organization
to which I hope I have taken all the valuable lessons I have learned
at ICSU. My new program is also an ambitious one, but does not have
the long distinguished history that I have just described to you. The
Leadership for Environment and Development (LEAD) program is a global,
independent, education foundation, originally set up by The Rockefeller
Foundation, to provide continuing professional education for outstanding
mid-career individuals in both public and private sectors, introducing
them to issues of the environment and development and honing their skills
as future leaders who will deal with these problems around the world.
LEAD is now an independent foundation with programs in most parts of
the world, and I have the challenge of being its first chief executive
officer. One of the ways that I will continue to help international
science is to take to the World Conference on Science, organized jointly
by ICSU and UNESCO in June, a delegation of 26 young scientists from
all over the world, half men half women, who are LEAD alumni, and who
I am sure will make a great contribution to that meeting.
Sources:
Statutes of the International Council for Science
Science International: A history of the International Council of Scientific
Unions, Frank Greenaway, Cambridge University Press, 1996
ICSU: the first Sixty Years; Science International, Special issue,
September 1991
Understanding Our Planet: An overview of the major scientific activities
of ICSU and its partners that address global environmental change, ICSU,
1996
An Agenda of Science for Environment and Development into the 21st
Century, Dooge et. al., Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Ideals and Realities: Selected Essays of Adus Salam, World Scientific,
1987
