Professor Lawrence H. Summers
President of Harvard University
Address to Peking University on May 14, 2002 [Vice] President Min, President Xu, thank you for all of those kind words, thank you for the hospitality that you have shown me, thank you for the hospitality that you have shown the visiting delegation from Harvard University.
I believe we have gathered, these few days in Beijing, the largest delegation of faculty from Harvard University that has ever come to China. That is, I believe, a reflection of the importance of China to the world of the Twenty-First Century. It is a reflection of our common endeavor: the pursuit of knowledge, and the teaching of students. I am very excited to be here at one of China's great universities, [at] one of the world's great universities, and I am especially glad to have the chance to talk to so many of your students about the world that they are going to inherit.
You know, if you think about what we do in universities, if you think about the phenomenon of globalization, I believe that our special role today and the phenomenon of globalization are manifestations of a yet deeper transformation that is going on throughout the world. And that is this: knowledge is becoming more central to every aspect of human activity than it ever has before. Think about some examples. I am
convinced that when the history of this period is written, two centuries from now, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War will be the second story that is written in those history books. The first story that will be written about the last fifth of the Twentieth Century will be the rise of societies where over a billion people- closer to two billion people- live, to modernity; will be the doubling of standards of living that take place within a decade, and then take place within a decade again, for, literally, billions of people. That is an event that, in the history of the second millennium, I believe, has potential to rank with the Renaissance and with the Industrial Revolution.
And what is at it center? China is at its center, with the dramatic transformation that China has seen over the last two centuries. And knowledge, the spread and dissemination of knowledge, is at its center as well, because no country in Europe, no country in North America, has ever grown nearly as rapidly in a decade as China has grown in the last decade, and in the decade before [that].
That is a reflection of the enormous opportunities that modern technology provides for convergence. It is a reflection of knowledge. Think about something else: we are alive in the one period in human history when science has the potential to understand disease processes. When science has the potential, during the period in which the people in this room will be alive, to understand, at the level of individual molecules,
what it is that goes wrong and causes human beings to suffer and to die, and to find that understanding in ways that can be made operational, to bring about remedies. We have the potential to see more progress against disease in the period in which we are alive than in any other period in human history.
And what is that about? That is about the growth of knowledge as well. And we know some things about the growth of knowledge, and about the process of research, and the process of knowledge finding applications that are not obvious at all. We know some things about the role of serendipity; we know some things about the role of organizations.
Let me make one general observation about knowledge, and that is, that you can never tell where the most useful knowledge is going to come from. You cannot predict where it is going to come from; you cannot direct programs to find the most useful forms of knowledge.
Let me give you two very, very different kinds of examples. Perhaps the most abstract subject we teach in the university, in certain respects, is mathematics. Perhaps the least applied area of mathematics is number theory, the study of numbers. Every one of you who has sent an e-mail has benefited from discoveries in number theory [made] within the last twenty-five years, because research on prime numbers form the basis for encryption algorithms, which form the basis of every aspect of electronic communication and electronic exchange today. That, from the most。