Taiwan Nobel Laureate Y. T. Lee Elected President Of Intl. Council For Science

Former Academica Sinica President Emeritus and Nobel laureate Yuan-Tseh Lee was elected President of the International Council for Science (ICSU) at the Council’s 30th General Assembly in Rome yesterday.

AsianScientist (Oct. 1, 2011) – Former Academica Sinica President Emeritus and Nobel laureate Yuan-Tseh Lee was elected President of the International Council for Science (ICSU) at the Council’s 30th General Assembly in Rome yesterday.

Dr. Lee’s term as President of ICSU will last for three years until 2014, effective immediately.

Founded in 1931, ICSU is a non-government organization with a global membership of national scientific bodies (121 members, representing 141 countries) and International Scientific Unions (30 members), which aims to strengthen science globally for the benefit of all humankind.

The main ICSU Secretariat is baed in Paris, and it also has three Regional Offices—Africa; Asia and the Pacific; and Latin America and the Caribbean.

In his inauguration speech, Dr. Lee thanked the previous executive board and delineated his tenure’s main challenge – how to transform our global society into a truly sustainable civilization.

“Human population keeps climbing. And, even while poverty and starvation persist, global consumption, carbon dioxide emissions and other impacts are still going up sharply,” Dr. Lee said.

Specifically, Lee mentioned the need for people to live within their means, and for developed countries to reduce their carbon footprint substantially through drastic energy conservation.

As for emerging and developing countries, Dr. Lee cautioned that they could not simply follow the path that the industrialized countries took in their development, but instead had to find new ways to proceed.

Historically, the spread of science and technology has boosted economic growth and industrial production, Dr. Lee said. However, these advancements have also led to an array of health and environmental problems, he added.

“For most of the past 1.5 million years, humanity depended and thrived almost entirely on what the Sun provided. However, in the last 250 years, we have come to depend on fossil fuels instead. It is so important that we go back to the Sun,” Dr. Lee said.

Dr. Lee also said that the development of technology should no longer be focussed on “individual consumerism” or profit, but instead be redirected to building a better world for all.

Taking note of the global expenditure of more than US$1 trillion on defense alone, Dr. Lee said that today, the greatest threats of all – climate change and human un-sustainability – are not threats between nations, but by humanity and to humanity itself.

“What if we could take just 1 percent of that 1 trillion U.S. dollars, and use it for global sustainability research? That would be 10 billion U.S. dollars per year. That is a lot of money, but that is the scale to which we must aspire,” Dr. Lee said.

Dr. Lee’s previous appointments include chairing the National Committee of ICSU in Taiwan from 1994 to 2006.

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Source: Taiwan News.
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