Commencement Address to Georgia Institute of Technology

Thank you, President Clough. I have been looking forward to speaking today ever since you invited me several months ago. Georgia Tech has a great reputation for producing outstanding graduates, especially in engineering fields, and this has become an important priority for our nation, and indeed for the world.

I experienced a commencement of my own last fall when I came to Washington to serve as President Bush's Science Advisor. The President had nominated me and I was working on Long Island waiting for Senate confirmation when the terrorists struck. I decided that under the circumstances I could not wait any longer, and on September 15 my wife and I borrowed a van, loaded it with some essentials, and drove to Washington.

As we passed the still smoking ruins of the World Trade Center, which we could see across the Hudson River from the New Jersey Turnpike, we wondered how these terrible events would change the world, and what we could do to prevent anything like them from happening again.

Today, seven months later, I am grateful to be in a position where I can help in our nation's war against terrorism. My office is providing the technical support to Governor Ridge's Office of Homeland Security, and I have been working to mobilize the nation's science and engineering communities in this effort.

I was surprised when President Bush asked me to take on this job, because government service at this level had never occurred to me. All my life I had just wanted to be a physicist and an engineer, doing research, teaching, and working on challenging technical projects.

But I kept finding myself in situations where the problems I was working on, when viewed broadly, did not have purely technical solutions. And I found that even when the solutions were technical, they had to be implemented by people, and very often the people did not work smoothly together to get the best result.

And so over the years my technical interests became more and more closely entwined with organizations of people that are necessary to get the technical work done. I did not realize it at the time, but I was acquiring the education I needed to perform the job President Bush asked me to fulfill.

Neither the President nor I realized last summer just how important that job would become after September 11, but I welcomed the challenge and felt that my experiences as a scientist, a teacher, and administrator, and a broker between institutions and concerned publics, had given me the tools I needed for the job.

And so I commenced. Last Fall, I entered a new world, as you are entering a new world today. For all of us -- you and me -- it is a world newly conscious of the immense power technology has placed in the hands of individuals. The anthrax incident last October was likely the work of a single person who had the knowledge and the opportunity to bring our government briefly to a standstill. We are aware of many other vulnerabilities in the infrastructure of our daily lives where a single angry man or woman, with the right knowledge, in the right place, can disrupt or even terminate the lives of thousands of others.

As with other negative side effects of our high-tech way of life, technology created them, and only technology can mitigate them. We cannot turn back the clock and return to a simpler world where terrorists could not use our technology against us. We depend on that technology to maintain a better way of life. Our growing populations need the food, the health care, and the economic opportunities that modern technology has multiplied. The only way to insulate ourselves from terrorism is to use our knowledge to analyze its causes and our vulnerabilities, and our options to protect against, respond to, and repair the damage it may cause.

What I find quite remarkable about the task before us is how ready the technology is, and how appropriate to the task, that we need for the war against terrorism. Powerful computing, fast communications, sensitive detectors for the materials of terrorism, are all there or nearly there waiting to be deployed. Some new research is required, particularly on the pathogens that might be used by bio-terrorists, but the R&D work will be mostly "D" -- development. The basic knowledge we have needs to be turned into practical devices; reliability needs to be improved, costs lowered.

Most of all, however, we need ideas about how to deploy all this defensive technology in a complex and open society that values individual freedom. The simple solution is to turn our nation into a police state where everyone is watched and foreigners are not invited. But we are a freedom-loving nation of immigrants. Our values will not tolerate the simple solutions of continual surveillance and control. And our way of life relies -- as it always has -- on the skills and talents our foreign friends and new Americans bring to our shores.

We will have to win this war against terrorism the hard way, by spreading the responsibility for freedom widely among ourselves. We cannot rely upon a homeland security army, or centrally controlled systems of transportation, communication, or commerce to protect our infrastructure from terrorism. Each of us has a role to play in protecting our way of life. This is an old lesson that our nation learned more than two hundred years ago, but now we must translate it into the modern age.

What we need now are minute-men of the mind, a populace skilled not in marksmanship or hand to hand combat, but in the skills of science and the tactics of technology. The needs of freedom are changing with the times, and the times demand the kind of education Georgia Tech delivers.

I am not suggesting that you need to work directly on anti-terrorism as a career, although many of you may. I am suggesting that the strength of our nation lies in the cleverness of its people, and in their ability to use the modern tools and be ready when the need arises to serve the nation.

The education I received as a scientist and an engineer prepared me for a life of learning and service, and yours will as well. Your education will never be complete, but now it is time to get out, and begin to give back to our great society. We expect great things. Godspeed.