John Charles Polanyi
John Charles Polanyi
John Charles Polanyi, PC CC FRSC OOnt FRSis a Hungarian-Canadian chemist who won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, for his research in chemical kinetics. Polanyi was educated at the University of Manchester, and did postdoctoral research at the National Research Council in Canada and Princeton University in New Jersey. Polanyi's first academic appointment was at the University of Toronto, and he remains there as of 2014. In addition to the Nobel Prize, Polanyi has received numerous other awards, including...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth23 January 1929
CountryCanada
The most exciting thing in the twentieth century is science.
Others think it the responsibility of scientists to coerce the rest of society, because they have the power that derives from special knowledge.
The moral force that we brought to this debate derived from our membership in an international community ruled by law - albeit unwritten law.
The time has come to underscore the fact that our and others' rights are contingent on our willingness to assert and defend them.
For science must breathe the oxygen of freedom.
Instead, in the absence of respect for human rights, science and its offspring technology have been used in this century as brutal instruments for oppression.
Today, Academies of Science use their influence around the world in support of human rights.
Idealism is the highest form of reason.
Nothing is more irredeemably irrelevant than bad science.
When, as we must often do, we fear science, we really fear ourselves. Human dignity is better served by embracing knowledge.
The respect for human rights, essential if we are to use technology wisely, is not something alien that must be grafted onto science. On the contrary, it is integral to science, as also to scholarship in general.
It takes a trained and discerning researcher to keep the goal in sight, and to detect evidence of the creeping progress toward it.
Individual scientists like myself - and many more conspicuous - pointed to the dangers of radioactive fallout over Canada if we were to launch nuclear weapons to intercept incoming bombers.