ete

I first met Sarge Shriver in 1961 in connection with xhe President Kennedy's
Panel on Mental Retardation, and with the Jos. P. Kennedy, Jr., Foundation's activities
in the wamxe field. Eunice Kennedy Shriver brought an enormous human compassion and
zeal for solving these problems, sometimes demanding a time scale that was more closely
related to their urgency than to our practical means of coping with them. Sargent
Shriver had all of these, and also the zmts insight to know the very broad base of
scientific effort that needed to be built before we could hope to answer the human

needs in this field.

a Saturday
I recall am afiternoon in Shriver's office at the Peace Corps, where he asked me

a casual question about the genetic code-- what was all the excitemeht about. As I
began to tell the story, he grasped its importance immediately, and set aside his other

appointments for three hours to get a full account of it, and to ask penetrating questions

what
about wakk it really meant, both for our philosophical concept of human nature, and for

its potential implications for nitty-gritty problems that the politician might have to

face. Not long thereafter, he was an effective proponent with the Foundation's trustees
to support a rather unusual application from Stanford to support a basic laboratory ih
a

molecular medicine -- at a time when others must have been pressing very hard to concen-
trate its resources on shorter-term payoffs in dealing with retarded chaildren. He under-
stodd the need for a balanced program to meet the Foundation's goals, and we were supported
quite generously.

In later years, I have had many discussions and correspondence with Sarge about ethical
problems that come up as side-effects of medical advance. We come from different back-
grounds and do not always agree. I have always been imPBBS3ED that his central motive
was the thoroughsugh airing of such éssues, that his main zeal was to encourage people
to face up to the ethical dimensions of their decisions, not to enforce a particular
doctrine of how to deal with them. He has always taken remarkable pains to ensure the
most pluralistic examinations of key problems of modern life. It has been a privid ege

to see the breadth that he has exhibited in his own deliberations about them.