Daniel Fine's Message

GREETINGS

Salutations and warm embraces, regrettably in absentia, as you gather to celebrate the founding of Physicians for Social Responsibility - to remember the past, to consider the present, and to renew PSR efforts for the future.

On the central issue of eliminating the nuclear scourge from the world, to which we have been dedicated from the earliest days, the work of our members and allies in our communities have been quintessential in educating local publics, mobilizing critical masses of citizens and projecting their concerns to create and contribute to the political will of decision makers to act for change -- closing nuclear facilities, reducing arsenals, establishing a moratorium on nuclear test explosions for almost 20 years, and promoting the goal of nuclear abolition.

For initiation of these physician-based efforts and the core ideas of PSR, we owe great thanks to the creative, visionary and enduring contribution of PSR founders, Bernard Lown, Dick Geiger, Vic Sidel and Sidney Alexander, your hosts tonight, and others, and to the many leaders who have acted indefatigably to the present day. Additionally, we are deeply grateful that in 1980 at the apogee of Cold War nuclear dangers, the founding of the International Physicians fo the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) by a US and a Soviet physician, Bernard Lown and Euvgeni Chazov, added the indispensable element of potential global solidarity of doctors to the commitment to save life on earth. That international dimension has become increasingly important today for action on the values and concerns of PSR.

Today, and looking to the future, the perception and reality of US and global interconnections, limited resources and finite boundaries of sustainability, necessitate that we undertake PSR work and imperatives with global as well as national perspectives. The ineluctable concatenation of issues of nuclear proliferation and dangers, expanded military spending, unending wars, imperial ambitions, environmental degradation, despoliation of domestic society and growing gap between rich and poor, and North and South mean that we must think as citizens and doctors of the world, as well as of our country.

As we hope and act for a future worthy of human life, we congratulate you for all that has been done with, and since the founding of PSR.

Daniel Fine, MD
PSR-Pittsburgh
4-3-2011