Message
at the World Cultural Council’s 25th Award Ceremony

by Edmond H. Fischer
President World Cultural Council

(Princeton University, November 11, 2008)
Thank you, President Tilghman, for your kind words and your warm welcome. It is a great honor for the World Cultural Council, and a great personal honor for me, to have Princeton University host this Award Ceremony, so I would like to express our gratitude for your hospitality. I am keenly aware of Princeton´s historical dimension, of its huge contribution to culture, science and the humanities, of the extraordinary distinction of so many of its faculty, past and present, so it is an unmitigated pleasure for me to be here today and I thank you once again for receiving us.

The World Cultural Council was founded under the initiative of José Rafael Estrada in 1981, with the help of 124 top scientists and personalities from Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia and the Americas. Twenty years before that, in the sixties, Maestro Estrada had set up several Human Development Institutes in different Latin American countries. These institutes are part of a larger organization called the Global Foundation, which also encompasses the World Cultural Council, the World Peace Organization, the Health and Culture Fund, and the Albert Einstein University in Mexico City. They were created with a single purpose in mind, namely to advance the freedom of culture, knowledge and expression, regardless of race, creed or ideology. Their common mission is to promote a worldwide awareness and acceptance of tolerance, peace and fraternity.

Charlie Tanford from Duke University, a good friend of mine, became the first President of the World Cultural Council. José Rafael Estrada became its Vice President in 1984 and then President in 1992, a position he held until last year. For the last 25 years, José Rafael has spent all of his time and energy and, I believe, most of his financial resources in support of that institution and its goals. So we owe him an immense debt of gratitude, respect and admiration.

The World Cultural Council was created specifically to recognize individuals that have made outstanding achievements in science, education and the arts. It honors them every year with the Albert Einstein Award of Science, and every other year with either the José Vasconcelos Award of Education or the Leonardo da Vinci Award of Art. Today we are celebrating the remarkable achievements of two such exceptional individuals:

First, Ada Yonath, from the Weizmann Institute of Sciences in Rehovot, Israel, who will receive the Einstein prize in Science for her beautiful crystallographic studies of ribosomes. She was the first to crystallize those enormously complex organelles and described in exquisite detail their culture, their function in processing the nascent polypeptide chain during protein synthesis, and how they interact with antibiotics. Incidentally, Ada is the second woman to receive the Einstein prize, following Margaret Burbidge who was awarded the same accolade twenty years ago, back in 1988.

And William Bowen, for fifteen years President of Princeton, with the José Vasconcelos prize in Education. I will not embarrass myself by trying to tell you, here, about all his remarkable achievements as an educator, a superb leader and a tireless advocate of higher education. Suffice it to mention a few of these, such as his opening up of coeducation, his promotion of diversity, his insistence on the biological sciences as major components of curricula, the impulse given to information technology as a pivotal tool of learning and the wealth of lectures and publications he has made within the field of education.

To finish, then, let me congratulate our two awardees and tell them how absolutely delighted I am of their selection, and to have this opportunity to express to them my deepest admiration for all they have accomplished.