Special Section: Science in the Third World

Let me first warmly thank UNESCO and ICSU for the invitation extended to me to take the floor at the opening ceremony of this Conference and address it on behalf of the Third World Academy of Sciences, over which I have the honour to preside. I am aware that this distinction is a tribute to the many colleagues of our generation who, in the developing countries, under the pressure of necessity, after training and often working abroad, have been summoned to an early assumption of responsibilities in science and technology development, over many years, in their own countries and sometimes in the international arena. I am sure that this tribute would be particularly fitting for my predecessor and founding father of our Academy, the late most distinguished scientist and international personality, Abdus Salam – one of the great flagbearers of science. First and foremost, he thought that basic sciences should receive special attention, for there is no applied science – i.e. technology – without science. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to recall that we are assembled here on the threshold of a new millennium to ponder on the pressing demands for launching a new social contract under the aegis of science, bearing in mind at the same time the recollection, not only of the upheavals and pangs that science has mainly entailed in this terrible century of ours, but also of the splendid enlightenment it has brought about, enlarging and deepening our understanding of the workings both of nature and of the very fabric of society. A new social contract for and with science and technology as a lever for improving the lot of the species does also, of course, remind us of an analogous contract, first enshrined here is Europe two centuries ago. According to John Burnett – as cited by Schrödinger – this quest of science for rational enquiry is deeply rooted in ancient Greece. For him ‘it is an adequate description of science to say that it is essentially thinking about the world in the Greek way’, a vision that along the last centuries has steadily shaped our world. The pursuit of happiness and the happiness of pursuit, according to Albert Hirschman, are equally fundamental human aspirations that the new contract we are now