GOVERNOR-GENERAL: New Challenges Face World’s Scientists

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31586, 25 January 1968, Page 12

GOVERNOR-GENERAL: New Challenges Face World’s Scientists

As doctors are now faced with the ethical and moral problems involved in tissue and organ transplants, so science would shortly enter more deeply into the metaphysical field, the Governor-General (Sir Arthur Porritt) said when he opened the fortieth congress of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science, in Christchurch last night.

“You scientists at least know what you are trying to do; your search for truth—if you know what that is —is based on facts. But I think, and hope you will admit, that it is often guided by intuition,” Sir Arthur Porritt told the delegates.

Some of the great discoveries of recent years had come as side issues from a programme of planned research, penicillin being the classical example, he said. Science had given great benefits to mankind, but sadly, some of its

most magnificent discoveries had been put to evil use. “It is sad, too, that this has meant to many people the fear that modern scientific discoveries offer a threat to life, rather than hope for a better and a fuller life,” the Governor-General said. “Even any previous definition of the word ‘life’ has now come under suspicion. Science, like surgery, has passed the bounds of philosophy. “Doctors, thanks to modern scientific progress, are now faced with ethical and moral problems involved in tissue and organ transplants, and in heart-lung operations and cardiac by-pass machines,” the Governor-General went on. “One can almost certainly

predict that science will shortly enter more deeply into the metaphysical field. Will it simply take the empiricism out of the obscurities of psychology, or will it raise up great new problems of the nature of matter and the value of life?”

Science had become of prime importance in the community, both educationally and culturally, and from the viewpoint of political and national prestige. Health, wealth and security depended on it more and more. This meant power, and it should be remembered that power corrupted. The Governor-General said he had often wondered just how scientific modern medicine was. Was there not a fundamental difference between scientific medicine and medical science, he asked. “Few would question the fact that science has provided increasingly the means by which the ends of medicine have been achieved. But I feel that the ends remain essentially an art, and still very much an empirical art,” he said.

“Perhaps for this very reason, medicine offers one of the best media for a fruitful and ever more vitally important reconciliation between those, sadly, still warring factions—the scientists and the humanists. “All the advances in the modern approach to education have still to find a happy medium between technology, and the arts.

“And yet these two disciplines surely, when added up, mean wisdom and understanding. Is it beyond the wit of man today to evolve a suitable emulsion of the two—to formulate a compromise by which science becomes a method of education allowing a further and fuller appreciation of the art of living? The Governor-General ended his speech by saying: “We may unwittingly, unknowingly, but not, I hope, unworthily, be sitting in on the emergence of a new concept of civilisation. Some of the seed sown at this conference may, if duly fertilised with a worthwhile and honest appreciation of moral and ethical values open up horizons for mankind so clouded today by present events.”