Gordon Conway

New Fellow Gordon Conway with Communications Secretary Leon Eisenberg

Like 40 percent of my fellow New Yorkers, I was not born in this country, but I was welcomed here and encouraged to play a full part in this society. The United States is leading the world in fostering, affirming, and, more important, celebrating diversity. It's beginning to learn that diversity is something to be treasured in its own right, while also being a significant force in advancing the world economy. A high proportion of the leaders in the new technologies are Asian Americans, African Americans, and Latino Americans.

The world is getting smaller, and with greater integration has come an increase in the pace and the scale of change, as evidenced in finance, in trade, in governance, in science and technology, and in culture. This trend toward globalization brings the promise of eliminating poverty and hunger and improving health around the world. The need is great. About 1 billion people in the world live on less than $1 a day; nearly 2 billion live on less than $2 a day. There are 800 million chronically malnourished people in the world; 180 million children are severely underweight for their age, and 400 million women of childbearing age are anemic. Between 100 and 200 million children in the world suffer from Vitamin A deficiency, and each year some 2 million die as a result. In the United States there are unacceptable levels of poverty, hunger, ill health, and poor housing.

Whether the promise of the new technologies can be realized is a major challenge for all of us, but particularly for the kinds of institutions represented in Class V of this Academy.

Since its establishment, the Rockefeller Foundation has worked to address human suffering and need. When John D. Rockefeller created the Foundation in 1913, he said that its purpose was to "advance the well-being of mankind throughout the world." Over the past two years we have sought to redefine our mission within that mandate. Today the Rockefeller Foundation is a "knowledge-based, global foundation with a commitment to enrich and sustain the lives and livelihoods of the poor and excluded through the world."

Sally Pitofsky with inductees Robert Pitofsky and Lance Liebman

There are four key points in our new mission statement. First, we are saying that we will make no grants unless they benefit the poor and excluded-and we deliberately use the word excluded. We had a long discussion about whether to use the word disadvantaged, but it was decided that this tends to place blame on the individual; it implies that if only you had another leg or a different color or a different sexual orientation, you could succeed. By using the word excluded, we are making the point that society, not the individual, is at fault. Second, we are addressing the state of people's lives and livelihood by adopting integrative approaches. People don't live by bread alone; their food, health, and cultural interests must be integrated. Third, we are a knowledge-based foundation, concerned with the application of science, technology, and research to the alleviation of poverty, hunger, and disease. Finally, we are a global foundation, with an increasing number of offices throughout the world, and also a belief that globalization can lead to a better world-that it can be steered not to make the rich richer and the poor poorer but to make everybody better off.

Within that new mission, we have a continuing, strong commitment to our Food Security and Health Equity programs. We are concentrating on crop biotechnology as well as on the development of new vaccines, pharmaceuticals, and contraceptives. In health our special focus is on the so-called orphan diseases-those that tend to be neglected by pharmaceutical companies yet devastate the poor. The three primary orphan diseases are malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS-all now major epidemics throughout the world, especially in Africa, where the effects are particularly appalling.

Our Working Communities program seeks to transform poor urban enclaves in the United States into safe and effective neighborhoods by increasing employment rates and improving schools so that all children receive a quality education. Finally, in our Creativity and Culture program, we are working to preserve and renew the cultural heritage of developing countries, as well as to support creative expression in the arts and humanities on the part of the poor and excluded. These four areas build on the institutional history of the Rockefeller Foundation, and they are united by a new cross-theme of Global Inclusion, which brings integration and synergy to these themes and helps to ensure that globalization processes are more equitable.

I want to close with an anecdote that relates to our afternoon discussion on the humanities. In recent years I have become very involved in the debate over genetic engineering, particularly regarding genetically modified foods. In that time I have increasingly realized that the debate is only partly about science-that the arguments are coded for other concerns, including ethics, history, and the nature of our society. About a year ago I gave a speech at a meeting of Monsanto's board of directors-a speech that, before its presentation, was reviewed and extensively rewritten by the director of our Global Inclusion theme, who was trained in the humanities. Some five months after delivery of the speech, I received a report from the United Kingdom House of Lords' Committee on Science and Society, which is concerned with the way scientists present their ideas to a broader audience. In commenting on my Monsanto speech, which they considered to be "good," they quoted a number of sentences-all of them written not by me but by my humanist colleague.

Earlier, in the "old days" of the Rockefeller Foundation, we were able to produce a new vaccine for yellow fever and to initiate the green revolution. We did this alone, but today we must rely on partnerships. In the post–World War II years we initially believed that government would provide all the welfare that people needed; then there was a period in which we thought that the private sector would do it all. At about the same time, the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) argued that government and the private sector were inadequate to meet the need, so NGOs would provide the solution. What all of us now know is that we need a partnership between government, the private sector, and NGOs if we are to achieve sustainable, equitable, civil societies. I believe the great challenge for foundations and for organizations like the American Academy is to bring these different groups together-to serve as a catalyst in creating partnerships that will enable us to use our knowledge and our wealth to make a better world.

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