Letter from the President of IUPESM
Dear Fellow IUPESM Member
On 29 September 1999, IUPESM was admitted as a full member of the International Council for Science (ICSU). At the ICSU General Assembly in Cairo, the vote for admission resulted in unanimous approval.
My preceding letter likened these presidential letters to a soap opera or serial. In the previous episode, the ICSU Standing Committee on Membership, Structure and statutes (SCMSS) was about to consider our new application for full membership at its meeting in April 1999, during which your President and President Elect presented our submission.
The SCMSS, with the advice and support of the Executive Committee, approved our application for consideration by the General Assembly. It was then necessary for ICSU to receive letters of support from at least 12 union members (a minimum of three from National Union Members, such as National Academies, and at least three from International Scientific Unions), to proceed to the ultimate ballot of all full members in Cairo.
IUPESM contacted every union by mail and many on a personal basis to underline the case for our admission. Significantly more than the required number of letters of support were received by ICSU.
The unanimous vote in Cairo is not only a tribute to the symbiotic benefits of our full membership for ICSU and IUPESM but also the persuasion of Council Members, particularly our Secretary General. My efforts as leader of the expedition to achieve this long-sought summit would have been in vain without their excellent support and I wish to record again my personal thanks to them as well as on your behalf.
So this episode of real-life drama has had a very happy and successful conclusion. But where does the story go from here?
Now the real work begins in ensuring that IUPESM is an effective and influential partner within ICSU. Even before the ballot in Cairo, I had received letters welcoming collaboration with IUPESM from the Presidents of the ICSU Committee on Science and Technology in Developing Countries, its Programme on Capacity Building in Science and its International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications.
We are now in a position, within the immense stature of the International Council for Science, to make major contributions to the exploitation of the Physical and Engineering Sciences in Medicine for the benefit of patients and people with disabilities worldwide and especially in developing countries. To do so is a major challenge in which we must succeed.
Congratulations! You are now a member of an organisation, IUPESM, which is a full member of ICSU. Your Council and I committed ourselves to seeking this status at the Nice World Congress as well as implementing key programmes that on the whole are showing good progress. We now have new mountains to climb from our present summit and the millennium congress in Chicago will provide an excellent opportunity to confirm our goals and chart our paths into the next century. We will need your wholehearted help and support to achieve greater and meaningful heights.
Together, we will write the script of future episodes of this real-life drama for the new millennium.
Keith Boddy, CBE, DSc, FRSE
President, IUPESM