PAGE 4 PRODUCTION GORDON HAMILTON the herald PUBLISHED BY NORTHWEST PUBLICATIONS LIMITED Published five days a week at 3112 Kalum Strect; Terrace, B.C. A member of the Canadian Daily Newspaper Publisher's Association and Varied circulation. Authorized as second class mail Registration number 1201, Postage paid in cash, return postage guaranteed. MARY OLSEN NEWS P.O. BOX 399, 3212 KALUMSTREET TERRACE, B.C. TUESDAY, DECEMBER 14, 1971 OUR_OPINION KEN FISHER ADVERTISING On the care and nurture of sitting ducks? Prime Minister Trudeau seems to have been in a particularly com- municative mood at his recent Town Meeting in London, Ont. Describing, very much off the cuff, his govern- ment’s tax package as “pretty revolutionary’’ he said: “Look, we're going to take one million people off the tax rolls and we're going to lower taxes for another five million Canadians. And, to do this, you have to juggle a lot of figures because we don’t want the middle class PM showed that he at least u- nderstands the danger of reaching the point of diminishing returns in these tax policies. government was not doing still more in social welfare programs, he said: Explaining why his “That's all we feel we can do at this ship.” people to notice it too much, because they are the ones who are going to have to pay for it.” The Prime Minister was doubtless having some light-hearted fun, but there was more truth than poetry in his admission. Middle-income taxpayers. are by now all too well aware that they are being treated as willing horses, loaded with more and more of the burden of carrying Canada financially. Later on in the London meeting, the . time without slowing down the economy and creating disincentives to invest among the middle classes, which would create much more unemployment and much more hard- Prime Minister Trudeau used the conditional tense, suggesting that such €ven unpleasant possibilities lay in the future, rather than the present. However, the recent minibudget, with belated ax reductions, suggests that e recognizes diminishing economic returns from taxation had already been reached. “From the Financial Post federal that government the point of ‘Sctence-Youand me’- Suzuki BY DR. DAVID SUZUKI ..Dr. Suzuki,is a professor. of Zoology at UBC and the winner of several prestigious awards for his work In the field of genetics. He recently spoke to one of the largest student assemblies gathered this vear. The condensed text of his hour long talk is reproduced here for your interest. Within our lifetimes society has made a quantum leap into the age of science and technology. There is no place on this planet (hat one can go and escape the debris of man’s inventions, A scant 15 years ago, science and technology promised a world of.plenty, of leisure and no poverty in which machines would do our every bidding. Yet today, these dreams have changed to a nightmare of urban sprawl, environmental decay and ever more frightening weapons of- control and destruction. Many of us scream for some Kind of stability in this accelerating proliferation of new things, yet our insatiable appetites for novelty and litillation only feed the rate of change. Who is to blame, what has gone wrong? I would like to porpoese the thesis that the root of the problem lies not with science, not with politicians or power-mad fiends, but with us. In the past decade, we have witnessed an accelerating turnover in social fads, each heavy with its vision of the apocaly pse‘and laden with all of the violent rhetoric of we-they politics. So we have lived through: ban-the-bemb, civil rights, anti-Vietnam, university reform, . population and pollution and liberation groups. Yet today, nuclear weapons continue as a_ billion-dollar industry, «apartheid - dnd segregation remain as rigid as ever, the [Indo-China war continues on, universities have waffled their way through the. crisis and now the ecology movement has diverted its crities..‘In no case are we any nearer @ solution to any one of the problem,s yet newer, more relevant issues dull the. older ones. |; into.- unimportance. person involved, as our energ and morale is battered in the fight for change; we shift from. cause to cause in the hope that a new issue may be the key to trdnsforming society: I hope that the current. eco-craze will. last “longer ‘because it* comes clode; to grappling: with fundamental “issues ‘of man on this ‘planet, " But’ 7° fear. the ‘fanatical fervor and dogma of ithe edo-freake, whose: . apparent: commitment to their vision of the selution for the world often resembles the = ruthless shortsightédness of “the. industrialists they so vehemently decry. I cannot see how we can treasure the lives of other organisms so long as we show such contempt for human life. ‘How can we speak of the intrinsic worth of redwood trees or maintaining wilderness areas while human lives and minds are destroyed by apartheid, segregation and napalm? It is irresponsible to say that Vietnam, French separatism, police brutality and the oppression of women are not germane to the environmental problem. In fact, unless we also deal with these problems, the ecological crisis will never be solved 1 would like to pose two questions and deal with them in order. 1. Will we survive the next 15 to 20 years in the sense of, maintaining society as we know it? 2. If we do, will the world be a better place? Most of us have been invoived primarily with short-term problems and here I feel that the fundamental cause of many of our crises resides in the _autonpmous nature of elite groups, In a complex technological society skills of a very specialized nature come to be practised by highly trained people. So. we have neurosurgeons, criminal lawyers, brake specialists, etc. As each group of specialists grows in size and importance, they come to acquire or ‘are granted special powers of self- regulation that renders them virtually immune from the suggestions and criticisms of the general public. With the autonomy, there is an inexorable change «. in .commitment from the privilege of serving the community to a concern with growth and maintenance of power whieh too often conflict with the needs of ‘the public. Lome I include as specialists group, any Barage mechanics ‘businessmen, © policemen, . . lawyers, doctors and teachers. Those of us in ‘the University, _ Fm sure are ‘conscious of the, way ‘the: Adminlatration ‘and: -. Physical Plant, with all of their As the enormity of each issue ~- beconies' apparent to each - Tules and regulations, become. impediments to the activities of Y . the very people they origina ' started toserve.. I don’t nay deny’ the importance . and necessity of specialists,’ It is their relative immunity from and insengitivity to inspection and’ criticism: by: the people ; affected by them. that creafes *, difficulties.» 2: 0 oe. ; 2 would lke to” spend some time “with: the-* group’ ‘of ‘specialists with whom J .am ‘moat: familiar-" scientista. ““one’s mind or. magic bulleta’” and . BaMe. tod]s . “biological weapons, *~ “7° "Gy be eantinued):° 7 Scientists hold a very special position in present society, since their work, when translated by technology, affects every aspect of civilization. Yet, by the nature of its languages, complex machinery and requirements for prior knowledge, science has remained cloaked from the prying eyes of non-scientists. Scientists, of course, are people with many reasons for being in science - curiosity, social status, fame, the Price, ete. But they are uniformly committed to the need for freedom in their work, a freedom which often abrogates any responsibility to the rest of society for the application of that knowledge. There is no question that we need science to destroy many of our myths and superstitions. Copernicus showed us that the earth was not the centre of the universe, Pasteur demonstrated that living things only came from other living things and Darwin explained- how man evolved. Each man evoked profound upheavals in his society that helped to rid us of ignorance and create a less egocentric view of man. . Let me give you an example of advances in one small area of science - genetics - as an illustration of the potential for beneficial and destructive application to society. The most exciting area of science in the past ten years has been molecular genetics, where the actual biological language has been decoded. With’ an understanding of how a gene is made and what it spells,.it is’ now possible to make genes in test tubes and to consider injecting them into cells by typing such genes onto viruses, In fact, the first completely synthetic gene was completed at the end of May, 1970. This. holds the promise of cures :for many forms of inherited mental disease, diabetes, albinism and so on. It also provides an - ultimate weapon for total biological control since the injection ofa small number of genes could completely cripple \ ee For’ those who hold that this _ Science is. fiction of the far _ future, I sadly point, out that, already. geneticists’. haye ~ Injected viruses into children.in An vattempt to ‘cure’ a hereditary disease. - Dr,. Sol Splegelman, of Columbia University’s medical school, has described the.Isolation of Pleces of viruses which can suck /Up certain’ molecules -in cells, He calls them “self-repreducing while they may destroy cancer targets, the may be. -potent ete ny. THE HERALD, TERRACE - KITIMAT, B.C. Lemrphochp. “Ee Retfe STA PENNY ARCADE YOUR The Editor Terrace Herlad Dear Editor: Your publication of December 9 carried what can only be described as a prejudiced opinionated {etter which could find the writer guilty of racial discrimination in a court of law. I took exception to the tone of this “third generation-interested Terrace reader,” The “anti- Jolliffe’ content of the letter was of no concern to me, that was merely a craft move, politically crucial and vote winning most probably. What concerned me was the antagonism for the immigrants from the British Isles. [I am from England, some people would say of my accent. * that it was unusual, I am part of * the “new breed of immigrant,” I’m not in the civil service or in Union organization, I came to Canada in 1968 to go into education. Since I arrived I have worked hard like most immigrants I know, and most immigrants will tell you it’s not easy, progress just outweighs the set-backs, The British gentlemen farmers your “third generation Britisher interested reader” speaks about, were a minority fifty years ago and now they hardly rate. The “gentlemen farmers'’ were misfits in Victorian ‘‘well-to-do— families. They were eccentrics and the adventurers, we hear this distorted image of them today in their legend; I think there might have been a few ‘gentlemen farmers’ emigrate, who were intelligent had foresight, were capable and were even successful. People with intelligence are almost always outward looking, it has been outward looking people who have left the islands in the North Sea called Great Britain. For every gentleman farmer who did not know what a donkey looked like, there have been thousands of ordinary - people turn up in Canada from Britain looking for something better than they had back home and moreover prepared to work hard to achieve it, It does not take get top inward looking when we start breeding. Nationalismis a hateful thing like racialism, 1 would say that these two traits were equally destructive, In - Canada we are ashamed of our history of racialism, the redman in Canada was almost wipe out a hundred years ago; now in seperatism Indians are . increasing in. number and on average enjoy the benefits of a grade six education. Do not allow us to add the narcissistic vanity: df Nationalism to the white man's errors in Canada. Indian saying that would mateh the anecdote of last Thursday's correspondent is “Whiteman . build a fire and run. away from “A limey aaying. in Yorkshire _ where I was born is: “Where there's muck” there's brass’ which ‘means that, if one is prepared to put up with « hardships like industrial ugiy cities and hard diry work. there _ ls financial. reward’ at the end. . The average limey. turna up in -Canadi with lots of enthusiasm and ‘courage but most. of all , optimism just like immigrants to North: Ameri¢a"have always. done romantics’. call’ it “the loneer spirit.” ‘The people who eave the old country no matter three generations to breed incentive. to work, neither does it help to’ OPINION_— which country, (I would also include refugees,) have several things in common. Obviously, initially the average immigrant has to ‘getup and go” usually he brings with him know-how as well; but most of all he has the broad mindedness and awareness cf more than one country, continent, century and way of life. Another saying we had in Yorkshire was “‘Shirtsleeves to Shirtsleeves in three generations” - which being interpreted means: - the old man worked like a horse, the son did okay on his father’s money but the grandson spent it all and ended up on the welfare. (Beware! third generation writer), Canadians should not be tethered by nineteenth century brainstorms like Nationalism. Nationalism can only fail, We haveseen nationalism forced on people, the processes of elimination and‘ purification cause too much friction usually the “Fuehrer” of Nationalism and ail his henchmen get . bunkered good and proper. If Nationalism is allowed to- germinate slowiy it fails again; the outcome would — be mediocrity, . an sludge. Presently in Canada ‘foreign- professors at. our Universities are being encouraged to leavé, we are content to be nationalised and in your paper you have printed — the unfriendly attitude of our neighbours.