The conference kicked off Thursday evening with a plenary lecture by David Baltimore, the Nobel-prizewinning biologist, former president of Rockefeller and Caltech universities, and current president of AAAS. You know, a real underachiever kind of guy.

While wearing his AAAS president hat, Baltimore’s main job has been to choose the theme for this year’s meeting. This year, it’s “science and technology from a global perspective.” And the opening lecture was a quintessentially Baltimore offering: cerebral, far-reaching, but also thought-provoking.

Drawing on his recent travels in Africa, India and elsewhere, Baltimore tackled the science and technology perspectives on the Tom Friedman notion of the world being flat. While the US has fallen into a state of highly nationalistic rhetoric since 2001, he argued, the rest of the world has begun moving far beyond it. India is channeling its education expertise in its Indian Institutes of Technology, and beginning to outsource its own outsourcing…simply because it can. Europe has regrouped and begun powering ahead as an economic engine, while the US “has allowed itself to become mesmerized by the terrorist threat”. He saved his choicest words for President Bush, slamming him as “criminal” for allowing the NIH budget to drop over the past five years in terms of real buying power. “The president must believe himself immortal or in the hands of God to decimate this,” the most powerful engine for driving science and medical advances in the world, Baltimore said.

It must have made things a bit awkward for the next speaker: Paul Kagame, president of Rwanda. Kagame spoke warmly of meeting with Baltimore and getting his advice on such topics as how to foster institutions of excellence when resources are limited. But Kagame also has to fly back to Rwanda tomorrow, to get ready for a meeting with … President Bush.