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HIVAN Director receives Science-for-Society Gold Medal
Prof Hoosen Coovadia. HIVAN. October 2004.
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Professor Hoosen (Jerry) Coovadia, HIVAN's Co-Director (BioMedical Science) received a Science-for-Society Gold Medal from the Academy of Science of South Africa on 29 October 2004, at a ceremony held at the University of Cape Town.
Professor Coovadia's acceptance speech follows:
Distinguished Colleagues,
I will not forget for the rest of my days, the considerable recognition you are bestowing on me through this award. I will always remember this time, the solemnity of the occasion, this loveliest of places, and the generosity and eminence of this assembled group of the Academy. I have arrived here, in front of you, after a very long journey of self realization. Today is the apogee of this journey, allowing me to stand among you and receive this award as a fellow in science.It has been a journey of whose pathways and destination I have been barely conscious;sometimes I seemed to move forwards and and at other times, backwards. I returned often to revisit an idea on life and its meaning, and to an experience in medicine, as often as I abandoned a firmly held conviction, and then departed along a different direction.
I now understand that this was no ordinary journey. It was unlike the experience of the many millions in historically stable societies. But like most of my countrymen and women,especially those who constitute the diaspora of Europe and Asia, it was, in its purest form, a search for an identity. Along the way I was shaped by multiple identities- religion, culture, ethnicity, and an all embracing nationhood. Ever since school one identity entered into my being and lay silently undetected below the level of my consciousness.
It was only when I was intiated into medical research that I became aware of inchoate persona within me, a realization which has subsequently become my most enduring identity-that of an scientist. Which is the reason I am in your debt for creating this rare moment in my life and career.
The roads in my search for identity led me through the darker unknowns of nature and the human condition. But intermittently there were flashes of illumination which changed the course of my journey. One question always puzzled me-how was it that so many of my comrades in the fight against apartheid, courageous to a fault, failed to transcend and fully utilize the richness of their immediate experiences during the 1970s and 1980s, for the benefit of their own development and for that of the country after independence.It seemed to me an issue of individual purpose, determination and free will.
In this regard, I have been hugely impressed by Erwin Schrodinger`s book on?‘What is Life??’.The last section, where he deals with determinism and free will, however leaves more unsaid than revealed. I interprete determinism widely to reflect the impact of not only the biological but also the social constraints on living beings. I wish now to say a few words on how free will, supported and reinforced by my understanding of the methods of scientific inquiry, overcame the crushing pressures of my environment.
In the anti-apartheid struggle during the 1980s there was a constant conflict between the choices dictated by fury and political passion, and the choices arising from reasoned arguments. It was understandable and easy to succumb to the deep bitterness and anger within us against the brutal system of racial oppression and respond instinctively and viscerally, but I always saw my role as attempting to find the most logical option to the choices and methods of political struggle. Similarly, both reason and an intense sense of justice, have formed the bedrock of my belief in the provision of health services. I cannot ever find a justification, in theory or practice, for the commercialisation of health care. I have always had an unshakeable belief in the unqualified right of all people to health care, and am repelled by the thought that treatment of illness, either urgent or chronic, should be held ransome to the exchange of money at the point of service.
For the same reasons I have never overcome my romance with socialism, albeit tempered by the tumultuous political events in Africa, India, China, Europe and the Soviet Union during the past 20-30 years. The lodestar on my voyage of self-discovery has been the excoriating exposure to the interventions of powerful groups within the South African government into the field of HIV/AIDS.
It is a landmark event in the historical record of conflicts which arise when the state defines its terrain outside legitimate boundaries and erodes the freedoms of science. Free will was sorely tested as it became more comfortable to become compliant and capitulate. It turned out, for me at least, to be a search for an equilibrium between loyalty to democracy, to the country and to my own freely chosen government, and a lifelong commitment to an engagement with the search for the truth, for rationality, and for the reality of human society and the natural world. I would have become a traitor to myself if I had acquiesced in the egregious assault on the scientific evidence establishing the biological and social foundations of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
So it turned out that my free will determined that I become a prisoner of my own beliefs.Scientific values have been critical in strengthening my ability to deal with the catastrophic global and individual consequences of HIV/AIDS. In clinical medicine, the expiring light in the eyes of a dying child have spurred me to ask fundamental questions on suffering and prevention and treatment, and have driven me to discovery; reason in my life has never prevented me from expressing compassion nor did it reduce the cathartic and healing power of grief over a wasted life.
We have all arrived at less turbulent shores. There is much, though never enough, that is now being done by the state for HIV/AIDS. There is much that is good in the country. There are wonderful new institutions of human rights,of governance, of learning and of freedom. The Academy is one such institution, it is the custodian of the scientific traditions, values and ethos in our society. It can ensure that we, as a country, benefit from the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of civilizations through all time. The task we have is to be vigilant that obscurantism and bigotry never triumph over understanding, impulse never erodes reason, and that intellectual disorder never destroys rationality.
We are charged by our professions, our discipline, and our beliefs to seek at all times the fine equilibrium between the interests of the people and the country on the one hand, and our dedication to protecting, nurturing, and promoting the culture of science. |
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