WSF 2017 at the AAAS Annual Meeting

Princess Sumaya bint El Hassan, President of the Royal Scientific Society of Jordan and Chair of World Science Forum 2017, hosted a special Cocktail Reception in Boston on the occasion of the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The high level informal gathering was a celebration of the themes of the upcoming World Science Forum in Jordan and an opportunity to present the Arab legacy of innovation and adaptation across the centuries, particularly through Jordan’s archaeological heritage.

Princess Sumaya gave a short talk on ‘Continuity, Innovation and Change: 10,000 years of innovation at a crossroads of cultures and ideas’. She emphasized the shared global inheritance of creative innovation and the essential cross-fertilization of ideas that has helped to fashion today’s world. She added that a vital aim of WSF 2017 was to empower a sense of the global ownership of science and of a shared entitlement to the potential of science to improve lives:

“Jordan has been at the centre of timeless human conversations on innovation and the application of knowledge for so many thousands of years. We lie at the heart of a region where so many communities and civilisations have had to innovate to survive, and for thousands of generations, creative adaptation and cultural exchange have gone hand in hand.”

The Princess added that the acute challenges facing Jordan today would be all the world’s tomorrow, particularly with regard to issues such as water, migration and social responsibility for justice and fairness in the allocation of dwindling resources. She said that science and well-crafted science policy were crucial to tackling challenges that face all parts of our planet.