Graduation!
Comments by Alistair Miller to the 2010 Graduation of the Deep River Science Academy
Good morning.
It occurred to me that this summer marks the 50-year anniversary of my research career: my first real research job was as a undergraduate summer student in a research centre in Edinburgh in 1960. Since then, the World population has gone up by factor of almost 2.5 from under 3 billion to 7 billion next year. Energy consumption and World GDP have tripled. Neither statistic is not quite what they seem since the added population was mostly at the impoverished end and so individual consumption everywhere was rising quite strongly.
In 1960, the British were still building steam locomotives; I used a slide rule and much graph paper and a totally mechanical typewriter. In the wider scientific world, plate tectonics was just emerging; it was three years since the launch of the first (Russian) satellite; and quantum physics theory was just a really strange, abstract theory.
Since then, I have lived within an extraordinary half-century of knowledge explosion. Indeed, population growth was driven by an explosion in knowledge particularly in health sciences and agricultural revolutions. In those 50 years, computers went from nowhere to dominating our understanding of almost every field of knowledge; not to mention the web and the internet; nuclear power was harnessed and now supplies nearly 20% of all electricity; smallpox was eradicated; polio almost so – perhaps would have been if advice from Chalk River to stabilize the vaccine using heavy water had been heeded; so many health conditions have been addressed successfully that the cost of implementing them threatens to undo us; even the workings of the brain itself are beginning to be unraveled. Oh, and quantum effects remain as strange as ever except now we have unequivocal evidence that they are real.
All of this and much more was driven by science and all sustained by technology
But the challenges today are enormous: oceans are under severe stress; food production is on a treadmill – facing water shortages, salinification, the need for more food from less land; atmospheric CO2 has gone from 314 ppm to 347 in 1987 (when the Science Academy was launched) to 390 earlier this year. Global warming and ocean acidification are not a nice legacies to leave you. Our generation has been drawing down your future.
Despite – indeed because of – the low importance effectively attached to R&D by our governments and the general population, those of us involved with the DRSA believe that R&D is precious and that attracting people like you DRSA graduates to careers in R&D, in technology, health sciences and teaching is crucial to global society’s survival.
So spread your enthusiasm among your peers: talk about it, Twitter it, post it on Facebook: because we place our hope for the future of global society and the wellbeing of the planet in the great aptitude of you personally and of all the fellow researchers that will join you.
With great confidence, I wish you lives and careers that are as stimulated by R&D as mine has been.
Dr Alistair Miller is a co-founder of the DRSA and currently Vice-Chair of the DRSA’s Board of Directors. Retired from AECL, he remains a Researcher Emeritus at AECL’s Chalk River Laboratories where his work focuses on global energy issues as well as his technical specialty of heavy water production processes.
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August 31, 2010 12:36 pm | 
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