Science and Human Rights (1998)

Summary: The symposium on which this publication is based took place on April 27, 1987, at the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in Washington, DC during its annual meeting. It was organized by the Academy’s Committee on Human Rights and featured, as guest speakers, three scientists and former prisoners of conscience whose cases were undertaken by the committee: Juan Luis Gonzalez, a Chilean surgeon and president of the Colegio Medico de Chile; Ismail Mohamed, a South African algebraist and associate professor mathematics at the University of Witwatersrand; and Yuri Orlov, a high-energy physicist originally from the Soviet Union, now a senior scientist at Cornell University in New York. The speakers and discussants— 14 members of the National Academies—spoke about a number of issues regarding science and human rights, including: torture, psychiatric abuse, and the ethics of medicine; human rights, human needs, and scientific freedom; and human rights and human survival. More than 700 people attended the symposium, many of whom were NAS members.