Message to young Chinese in the 21 st centuryFundamental Science has provided us with an i

Message to young Chinese in the 21 st century

Fundamental Science has provided us with an increasingly detailed and accurate understanding of Nature and the world around us. Progress in Science is based on the premises that:

Everything, including existing knowledge, is open to critical, unprejudiced inquiry. Science is often built on the destruction of existing paradigms and is a continuously evolving process.

Our minds, reason, and our powers of observation are the tools we use to advance knowledge. There are no mysteries that will resist scientific investigation.

Science is the property of mankind and not of any one nation or people and is our most precious human asset.

Scientists have been extremely successful in the last century in all fields, physics, chemistry, biology, and genetics.Their discoveries have had a dramatic impact on medicine and our life pattern. We are gaining the power but not necessarily always the wisdom to control our lives, our environment, our fate on this earth and galaxy.

In my own field, immunology, a division of biomedical science, it has been my privilege to witness in the last 40 years spectacular advances. The cells of the immune system have been identified, the specific molecules they produce, (antibodies, cell receptors, transplantation antigens, lymphokines ) have been purified and sequenced and the genes that code for them have been cloned.

Such basic knowledge is being translated into increasing benefits to health through applied technology and should soon contribute to vaccine development against AIDS and cancer. Enormous advances have similarly been made in other areas of biomedical science, with the discovery of the structure of nucleic acids, the genetic code, the control of growth and differentiation at the cellular level, which should soon permit the development of new generations of therapeutic drugs against cancer.

Of my own work in the laboratory over the last 45 years, I would like to share with you two of the most exciting aspects which are very well worth the years of efforts and the difficulties encountered. These are:

The exhilarating feeling that one experiences when Nature, for the first time, reveals its closely guarded secrets, and one begins to finally understand some of the complexities that have eluded us for many years.

The warm and intimate intellectual relationships that are established between teacher and student in the laboratory in the course of conducting research together, which constitute the. training process. I have had the pleasure and personal gratification of training in my laboratory more than 80 younger scientists, many of whom have made very successful careers, and made important contributions themselves. Several of my students have been of Chinese descent.

What about the future？ I am convinced that the future will be even more exciting than the past. As I told my grandson, I very much envy him and I would like to be his age and have the opportunity to become again a scientist, starting in another field, and to have a chance to push further the frontiers of knowledge. I urge many of you, who read these line, to do the same. Science is a very exciting experience as well as a worthwhile life goal, because only those undertakings that challenge us to develop our minds and energies to attempt the unattainable are worthy of us.

If I had been given the chance to live another life as a scientist in the 21st century I would study the brain and investigate the mechanism of consciousness, reasoning, logic and memory, and I would try to understand how this marvelous machine, that evolution has developed, is capable of analyzing itself and of understanding the world and reality. This is the ultimate challenge, which I dare you to devote your life to, and to solve for the glory and benef

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