It is rather interesting and very impressive to me that in this Congress you are dealing with facts which are so important to the understanding of human beings. I must admit very frankly that before coming to this (President's) house, while dealing with polymers and bio-polymers, proteins, and nucleic acid, I was not very much interested in love and hatred and happiness and pain and jealousy and anxiety and depressions and trauma. But here, this is what I am dealing with every day, so here I feel I somehow belong to your union.
I know that you are dealing with drives, with egos, with superego, with the conscious, and sub-conscious. I wish I could know so much more about it, because I found out, to my great regret that most of the people, at least that I meet—certainly the politicians—they are not rational, they have no regard for the scientific method, certainly not for the method that I thought is the most powerful method that man has devised, the modern scientific method. But they certainly represent the people. They represent their desires, and it's quite possible that people are so much more complex than even nucleic acids and the proteins that I have studied for so many years. Will a time come when we will be able to put your frame of reference together with our frame of reference, to produce perhaps one important frame of reference? Well, then perhaps those who elected me here would have some justification for having done so.
May I say that I was naturally very much impressed with the program that you have. It's nice to find out that so much can be said about the various topics that you are discussing. But let me say for the minute, not as a President, but as a natural scientist, that something has bothered me for many years, (as a matter of fact I still wonder whether something can be done about it); that is the fact that, on the one hand, natural scientists are dealing with materials and processes. We have controlled experiments, we can repeat experiments. We can study all the physical phenomena which occur when the brain functions, the change in potentials and currents and capacities. We can study many materials that appear in the brain and act on the brain. But there is an enormous gap between the materialistic approach and the materialistic data of a natural scientist and, really, the soul, the mind. Can one bridge the gap?
The older I become the more I feel how important it is to understand the soul and the mind and the drives that we are moved by as individuals, as communities, as nations. I think that during your stay, you will have an opportunity perhaps not only to discuss problems of mutual interest with our distinguished specialists, Israelis, but go around and see the people. I have done it again and again. I know the people of this country. You have here an extraordinary group of people, who have gathered from all over the world, who have, to a certain extent, a similar tradition, but who are determined and who are finally moved by the most noble ideals that a man can have. They have gone through enormous hardships. If you are looking for traumas and anxieties, go to villages where you have remnants of the Holocaust. Go into Kibbutzim, where they have lost most of their elderly sons in our wars. See what they feel. I always thought of Israel as a small country, as a pilot plant. It's a pilot plant to test modern technology—how to conquer deserts, swamps and diseases. But it is also a pilot plant to test the human soul and human mind, and the noble factors that move people. So let me thank you wholeheartedly for being with us, and wish you a lot of success. I hope you will be successful in healing individuals. May I add from my new experience, healing Nations, Communities: make them perhaps a little bit more modest and noble and idealistic. Good Luck.