Plenary Session VI: Peace and Human Development: ICUS: The Role, Responsibility and Relevance of the Sciences
Hon. Biman Chand Prasad, a member of Fiji’s parliament and the director of the Fiji Institute of Applied Studies, served as the moderator of this session, which featured the opening of the 23rd International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences (ICUS), one of the initiatives started by Rev. Dr. Sun Myung Moon and Dr. Hak Ja Han Moon. The first ICUS was held in 1972 in New York City, and the last ICUS before this, the 22nd, was held in 2000 in Seoul during celebrations for Rev. Dr. Moon’s 80th birthday.
Professor J. Martin Ramirez of the Psychobiology Department and Institute for Biofunctional Studies, Universidad Complutense Madrid, Spain, spoke on “The Limits of Science and the Benefit of Unified Values.” Dr. Ramirez gave a testimony to his own passion for an open, interdisciplinary and global approach to research and teaching. It is due to his personal experiences living abroad and being exposed to different cultures that he has a sense of global citizenship, he said. He explained his understanding of the unity of the sciences. The pursuit of knowledge has become overly specialized, he said, and there is a need to bring unity between disciplines. “Since scientific inquiry is about a single common universe, conclusions from different disciplines cannot contradict one another,” he said.
Professor Luc Montagnier, the founder and director of the Fondation Luc Montagnier, France, won the 2008 Nobel Prize in medicine for his discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Professor Montagnier spoke about DNA and its development over billions of years. “Life is not random,” he said, but “has a sense, a meaning, toward more organization, more sophistication, and more recently the appearance of consciousness and collective knowledge—science.” Through science, humanity has gained the capacity to interact through language and writing and passing on knowledge from one generation to the next, he said. Science has allowed for the control of epidemics and disease. Disease can be controlled “by an open-minded medicine with four pillars: prevention, prediction, personalization, and participation,” he said. In this way, “science unification can meet the social and environmental challenges of our century.”
Serving as commentator for the session, Dr. Glen Rein, a senior researcher at Innovative Biotechnical Studies, United States, offered a summary of the presentations. Dr. Ramirez reminded us that we need to work collaboratively. He said that Dr. Ramirez made the remarkable discovery that DNA produces an electromagnetic signal or radio waves. This is impacting the entire conceptual framework of chemistry. Bacteria and viruses communicate electronically and not chemically. Just as a glass can be shattered with high-frequency sound, then possibly disease can be treated with radio waves. Already Dr. Montagnier is doing research on how to apply this research to autism. He also spoke about alternative technologies as energy sources.