It's been 27 years since I last saw my friend Eric Meslin, who is currently Chairman and CEO of the Council of Canadian Academies. And we met again in Paris.
At a time when the United States had decided to withdraw from UNESCO's programmes, he had been appointed as an 'observer' to UNESCO's International Bioethics Committee (IBC), which I chaired.
Thanks to his expertise and open-mindedness, his role was crucial in enabling the Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights, which this Committee drew up, to be adopted by consensus first at UNESCO and then at the UN in 1998.
This text, which is still relevant today, is resolutely humanist in its aim to reconcile science and human rights, following the famous expression "Science without conscience is but the ruin of the soul". Eric and I reminisced about that period at the end of the 90s and the tremendous contribution made by the IBC's rapporteur, Harold Edgar (professor of law at Columbia Law School) and my successor at the head of the Committee, Ryuishi Ida (professor of international law and former university president in Japan). It was a fantastic time when the most contrasting cultures could correspond in their diversity and mutually enrich each other despite the often marked differences!
