I'D like to introduce my talk by reading you two newspaper headlines: "Shoppers demand ban on genetically engineered food" and "New Zealand will be clean, green and nuclear free for ever, says MP".
These headlines highlight a question that concerns me. Why is it that people in many parts of the developed world, including New Zealand, appear to be afraid of science?
I find this deeply concerning because I believe that science will lead us to the answers to many problems we face now, and to the answers to many problems we may face in the future. I'm going to discus three areas of science that I believe illustrate this problem.
Before I get under way, I'm going to ask you a question: Put your hands up if you think that genetically engineered food is a good thing.
That's pretty much what you would expect - many people are apprehensive about genetically engineered food.
On the face of it, this does not seem to be an unreasonable fear. There have recently been a number of serious food scares - namely foot-and-mouth, bird flu and, most significantly, mad cow disease.
Thus, concern about what we eat is understandable. But none of these diseases are the result of genetic engineering. In fact, when you eat an organism's genes, engineered or otherwise, your digestive system breaks them down. This is why no matter how much lettuce you eat, you don't turn green.
Far from causing problems, genetic engineering has potential to improve our food. It may allow us to breed animals that are resistant to disease, grow plants without using toxic pesticides, and improve the quality and quantity of our food.
For my second example of an inappropriate fear of science, I'd like to turn to the internet. Recently, here in Otago, I went to listen to a Nobel Prize winner and he talked at some length about his fear that the internet was making people lazy because it is just too easy to find information.
I agree. The internet is a truly stunning tool. It means I am forced to use a terrible cliché, that the world is quite literally at your finger tips. Any man and his dog, provided it is a semi-literate dog, can use it.
But this misses the point. The value of the internet is that it allows you to quickly gather information and then leaves you time to understand it. He was afraid that the internet was giving us a generation of children who were lazy, but it is actually giving us a generation that is better informed in a broader range of areas than ever before.
The last aspect of science is one that perhaps more people are afraid of than any other. I'm talking about nuclear power. When I say nuclear power, what's the first thing that comes into your head? I suspect many of you will have thought nuclear bomb, but of course they're not the same thing.
Nuclear power can be dangerous - we all remember Chernobyl. But we choose to forget how many men have died mining for coal or drilling for oil. There is another more recent problem with many traditional forms of power - you guessed it, climate change.
We are living in a world that is becoming smothered in CO2 and it is unlikely we can continue like this for much longer. While the waste from nuclear power is a serious problem, it does not contribute to global warming. Nuclear power should be explored further.
There are problems with it but they should be researched and eventually fixed. Nuclear power may lead us out of our current problems with pollution. People need to overcome their fear of anything with the word nuclear in it. It doesn't only apply to bombs.
I've now given you three examples of science that people appear to be afraid of. But is there an underlying reason for this fear? Yes, I believe there is. Science means change. But our lives are good, so we don't need change, do we?
Quite frankly, yes we do. The world is far from perfect. According to recent statistics, 30,000 people will die of starvation today and another 30,000 will die of starvation tomorrow. If that happened in New Zealand, there would be no-one left in about four months.
The three areas of science that I mentioned before all help this problem. Genetic engineering could go some way, if not all the way, to reducing the number of people starving.
Nuclear power could give them clean, green, CO2-free energy and the internet could bring them quickly into the future.
Science will improve our world. We should not be afraid of it. But we should be very afraid of the lack of science. I began this talk by reading you some headlines. I would like to end my talk by reading you a headline I would dearly like to see in a paper: "Green power breakthrough by Third World scientist".
Now ladies and gentlemen, wouldn't that be a nice read.
