THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of
the Press Secretary
(Lisbon, Portugal)
| For
Immediate Release |
May 30,
2000 |
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
TO SCIENCE COMMUNITY
Pavilion of Knowledge Science Center
Lisbon, Portugal
4:56 P.M. (L))
THE PRESIDENT: Good afternoon. Mr.
Prime Minister, Professor Quintanilha, Minister Gago, Dr. Vargas, ladies and
gentlemen. I have just had a lot of fun touring this Science Center, but the
meaning here of what is being done goes beyond the simple joy of learning. From
the outermost reaches of space to the darkest depths of the ocean, from the
mysteries of nanotechnology to the miracles of the human genome, men and women
are gathering knowledge at a faster pace than ever before that will have the
most profound impacts, especially on the way the young people in this audience
live.
Knowledge is being more widely applied and more quickly
disseminated than ever before, thanks in no small measure to the Internet. And
therefore, universal education and universal access to technology are more
important than ever before.
Today I applaud the scientific work being
done in Portugal, and the efforts of Prime Minister Guterres and Minister Gago
to train the next generation of scientists, engineers, doctors and astronauts,
as well as to close the digital divide, to make sure all the children of this
nation have the tools they need to master the Information Age.
I am
particularly impressed how much scientific research is being done in
partnership. In my tour of the Science Center and its exhibits, I saw
impressive examples of cutting-edge research across national boundaries --
Portuguese scientists in close cooperation with Americans, Europeans, Africans,
tackling some of the world's most critical health problems.
In Africa,
Asia, and many parts of the world, diseases like AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis
are killing not only people, but hope for progress. In Africa, where 70 percent
of all the world's AIDS cases exist in sub-Saharan Africa, some countries are
hiring two employees for every job on the assumption that one of them will die
of AIDS.
In other African countries, 30 percent of the teachers, and 40
percent of the soldiers have the virus. Millions suffer from strains of malaria
that are increasingly resistant to any drug. And a third of the world has
actually been exposed to tuberculosis. These diseases can ruin economies and
threaten the very survival of societies.
I was gratified to meet with
some Portuguese scientists working on state-of-the-art malaria research,
together with the U.S. Public Health Service, and to meet some of their
students who were learning about it. Other Portuguese and American teams are
learning together, studying the bacteria that caused TB, other new
drug-resistant disease threats, and a recently discovered pathogen that can
strike down those already suffering from AIDS.
I enjoyed meeting with
the high school students who were using the Internet to study infectious
diseases, and share information with other students all across Europe. This
kind of research and learning benefits both our nations. It reaches across
continents to benefit people who really need it, especially in this case, in
Africa.
Our challenge now is also to support prevention programs, to
accelerate the creation of affordable drugs and vaccines. We have made a
national commitment to do this in the United States. I've asked Congress for
over $325 million to increase our international efforts against AIDS. I've
asked for a billion-dollar tax credit and a global purchase fund to speed the
development by our pharmaceutical companies of vaccines for AIDS, TB and
malaria. We have committed over $70 million to fight TB, over $100 million to
fight malaria.
And as the Prime Minister said, today we are announcing
a new partnership with Portugal and Sao Tome and Principe to study that African
country's unique malarial epidemic, and to develop a strategy to end it.
Tomorrow I am here also to meet with leaders of the European Union, and
your Prime Minister is the President in this period. I hope we'll come out of
that meeting with a common approach to the global health crisis that will
increase scientific research, increase the availability of learning
opportunities for our young people, and most importantly, keep more people
alive in the 21st century.
We have got to make sure that today's
revolution in science and technology serves all humanity, helps us to fight
hunger, to mitigate natural disasters, to reverse the tide of global warming,
to grow our economies without damaging the environment. This is profoundly
important and a very great challenge, indeed.
I couldn't help thinking
today that intelligence is equally distributed throughout the world, but not
all the young people of the world have a chance to come together as the
Portuguese young people I met today do, to study TB, to study malaria. Instead,
many of them are fighting for their lives because they have it.
We have
a solemn responsibility to take the benefits of the information economy, of the
explosion in biomedical discoveries, and use them to give every young person in
the world the chance to live up to their God-given potential, and to create a
safer, better, stronger, more prosperous world for us all. That, in the end, is
how these discoveries should be measured, by whether we did our part to spread
them quickly to benefit everyone.
Thank you very much. (Applause.)
END 5:05 P.M. (L) |
