Bréf til Donald J. Trump

Dear Prime Minister,

I would like to bring the following suggestion to your attention and hope that you might consider it.

When Jón Baldvin Hannibalsson was Minister for Foreign Affairs, I once heard him say, in the context of difficult relations with foreign leaders, that it could be very helpful to conclude by raising a humanitarian issue on which it would be possible to find common ground.

I heard on Kastljós that you are due to have a conversation with President Donald Trump later this month. I assume that some difficult issues will be discussed. This made me wonder whether it might be possible to use the approach Jón Baldvin described and raise with the President an issue on which the United States and Iceland could find common ground on humanitarian and scientific grounds.

My suggestion is that Iceland and the United States jointly advocate, within the World Health Organization (WHO), for the establishment of a working group of experts in artificial intelligence and the life sciences. The role of the working group would be to gather the fundamental scientific knowledge that already exists internationally in the field of neuroscience and use artificial intelligence to analyse and integrate the data.

The aim would be to use artificial intelligence to identify important connections, patterns and new knowledge within the vast datasets that have already been generated. Such an initiative could contribute to a greater understanding of the nervous system and accelerate the development of more effective treatments, and potentially cures, for neurological disorders and spinal cord injuries/paralysis.

President Trump has placed strong emphasis on making the United States a leading global power in the field of artificial intelligence. It could therefore be of interest to him and to the United States to play a major role in encouraging the WHO to launch such a humanitarian and scientific initiative—one that could benefit billions of people around the world for generations to come. According to WHO figures, approximately three billion people are affected by disorders and diseases of the nervous system.

Although the United States has decided to withdraw from the WHO, I believe it could nevertheless participate in such a focused international scientific collaboration under the auspices of the WHO.

In 2022, Iceland brought the entire field of neuroscience into the WHO's decade-long initiative in support of brain health and the nervous system. In this context, the United States Embassy in Geneva supported Iceland.

Examples of disorders and conditions affecting the nervous system include spinal cord injuries/paralysis, mental disorders, Alzheimer's disease, epilepsy, Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis (MS), motor neurone disease (MND), and various types of neurodevelopmental disorders.

Dear Prime Minister,

With best regards, and I wish you every success in your conversation with the President. I hope you will see merit in bringing this matter to his attention.

Yours sincerely,

Auður Guðjónsdóttir

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