Albert Lasker
Basic Medical Research Award

Acceptance Remarks of Roger Wolcott Sperry

The great pleasure and feeling in my right brain is more than my left brain can find words to describe. To fully convey my many thanks and indebtedness: to former colleagues, to Caltech, to the National Institutes for support and others involved would, in itself, take much more than our allotted time.

When it comes to prospects for future benefits and quality-of-life impact, our own bets, and hopes, have shifted somewhat in recent years from the more direct medical, scientific, and education implications, to give more focus to certain less direct, more humanistic—what may be called human-value implications of brain research. These stem largely from recent changes in our concepts regarding the mind of man, the nature of consciousness and the fundamental relation of mind to matter and to brain mechanism—concepts that bring some changes in worldview perspectives and revise our ultimate criteria for determining value priorities and settling value conflicts.

Promising prospects emerge particularly as these apply in those so-called world crisis areas where today's major, and greatest, threats to the quality of life are found, and where differential outcomes in resolution of value conflicts have potential for tremendous global quality-of-life consequences. For example, even a slight shift in value perspectives affecting the balance in opposing views on the Abortion vs. Right-to-Life issue could mean the difference, in itself, of hundreds of millions of lives, pro or con, with enormous secondary impact also on current and future generations.

Considering the way the world is going these days and the prime role that human value factors play in determining the course of events, one cannot hope for more than that. Our basic mind-brain findings—so kindly and generously referred to in the citation—may serve somehow, perhaps, to contribute beneficially, at least in a small way, to that supreme determinant of the quality of life: man's sense and understanding of ultimate value to help benefit the well-being of all people everywhere.