Technology has often been an engine of industrial and social transformation. Indeed Africa's own industrial minerals have propelled technological revolutions in other parts of the world. It is time that Africa developed high levels of expertise commensurate with her material resources, so that both may best serve the African people and their destiny. The conscience of science Ghana's Founder President, Kwame Nkrumah, used to say 'Socialism without science is void'. And yet however free the economic market place may be allowed to be, the human race cannot afford to have laissez faire science.
Science has to have limits of conscience, especially in the new era of globalisation.
In the twentieth century, science has saved millions of lives through the control of diseases and the improvement of people's living conditions. But also in the twentieth century science has destroyed millions of other lives through war, industrial pollution, ecological degradation and 'smart weapons'. In the twenty-first century the human race needs to get the equation more clearly on the side of saving and improving lives. Africa should seek to play a dynamic role not only in scientific research, but also in the search for the ethics of science and, in the era of globalisation, also the ethics of expanding biotechnology.