After COVID, Swiss group plots future for science, diplomacy

GENEVA (AP) — With COVID-19, space exploration and climate change high on many minds, a “do tank” in Geneva bankrolled by Switzerland's government is gearing up to develop long-term projects like a global court for scientific disputes and a Manhattan Project-style effort to rid excess carbon from the atmosphere.

Backers of the Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator want to bridge the Swiss city’s image as a hub for conflict resolution with visionary scientific ambitions on big-picture issues, including the future of humanity.

First created in late 2019, GESDA presented its first activity report Tuesday and announced plans for a summit in October bringing together hundreds of United Nations officials, Nobel laureates, academics, diplomats, advocacy group representatives and members of the public. .

The initiative's backers include the heads of top Swiss universities and of the world’s largest atom smasher, located at European nuclear research organization CERN. They say the coronavirus pandemic has given science a platform unseen for several decades and want to leverage the attention from a public health crisis that has taken nearly 3 million lives and quashed economies to encourage thinking about the interplay among science, politics and society.

Peter Brabeck, a former chairman and CEO of Nestle who was tapped by the Swiss government to lead GESDA, used COVID-19 as an example of how advance planning could help head off future health crises, noting that the mRNA vaccine technology being used now to fight the pandemic has been around a decade.

“We could have perhaps been more prepared for the pandemic than we were today,” Brabeck said from GEDSA headquarters at Geneva’s Campus Biotech. “Only a scientific breakthrough is not enough. It has to be embedded in a diplomatic framework so that it can be...