There has been a vigorous response from people of all walks of life after Hu Jiaqi, the founder of SHAO, sent “The 6th Open Letter to Leaders of Mankind”. The following is the letter of reply from Jacques Dubochet, professor of the University of Lausanne, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2017.
Dear Hu,
Thank you for your letter of November 2021.
If I remember well, I already received a similar letter from you previously. At that time, I was probably too busy with developing science and technology to reading and thinking about it. Sorry.
I admire you courageous proposal. Fundamentally, I agree, with a major restriction though.
You want restricting science and technology.
For me science is knowledge and knowledge is desirable. The opposite of knowledge is ignorance. I love knowledge. I hate ignorance.
Five hundreds years ago, François Rabelais wrote "Science without conscience is but the ruine of soul".
The problem is not about knowledge but what we do with it. Unfortunately, we are not doing well.
You proposal is to restrict technology. I agree, we should.
But, how shall we do that.
In the talk I gave on Dec. 8th 2017 in Stockholm for my Nobel prize in chemistry I proposed that all the knowledge about health and medicine should belong to a world organism - I thought to WHO - which would be in charge to use this knowledge for the benefice of all.
Reading your letter, I propose to extend this idea to the whole realm of technology.
This would imply that that an institution - part of UNO - would be in charge supervising all technologies for their development and their use.
Anyone would be support in increasing increase knowledge, but no one would be allowed to decide what to do with it. The only criteria would be the well being of all people.
It would be the end of all patents. Nobody could exploit knowledge for exclusive right or financial interest.
Elon Musk, for exemple, would not be allowed to send tourists in space or to colonize Mars.
I would be interested to hear your comments.
Sincerely yours,
Jacques Dubochet
