23 November 2019 | New Scientist | 5“THE organization shall have no concern
with work for military requirements
and the results of its experimental and
theoretical work shall be published or
otherwise made generally available.” The
second sentence of the second article of
the “Convention for the Establishment
of a European Organization for Nuclear
Research”, signed by 12 countries on
29 September 1954, was a statement of
visionary idealism in a world less than a
decade on from the nuclear destruction
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Such admirable principles led to the
vast particle physics laboratory near
Geneva, Switzerland, that is now better
known as CERN. The model championed
by its founders, of peaceable scientific
collaboration across borders with results
freely available to all, has more than
proved its worth. It can be measurednot just in the contribution of CERN
researchers to our understanding of
the building blocks of reality, which
culminated in the discovery of the Higgs
boson in 2012, but also the technological
spin-offs. Most notable of these was the
World Wide Web, developed in the labby Tim Berners-Lee and released to the
world in 1993. Others include medical,
computing and imaging technologies
that have benefited humanity as a whole.
CERN’s boss Fabiola Gianotti is right to
be proud of the spirit of common human
purpose her organisation embodies (see
page 42). Its work relies on combiningexpertise from across theoretical and
experimental science, technology
and engineering to solve cutting-edge
challenges. As Gianotti points out, that
often involves cooperation between
scientists from countries whose leaders
refuse to sit down and talk to each other.
Is it dewy-eyed idealism to suggest
that this is a model we might apply
elsewhere? Just imagine an international
research institution dedicated to climate
change bringing together, physically and
in virtual spaces, the best minds from
climate science, energy technology,
economics, social science and beyond.
More than ever, we need global scientific
leadership in finding solutions to this
existential challenge. CERN’s motto is
“accelerating science”: there is no area
of science we need to put a rocket under
more right now than climate change. ❚For all humankind
CERN’s example shows the unifying power of open scientific collaboration
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