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The US National Academy of Sciences is planning to help create an InterAcademy Centre, run by a multinational board, as a mechanism for setting up and running panels of top-level scientific, engineering and health experts.

Alberts: seeks global solution to problems.

Describing the plans in Washington last month, academy president Bruce Alberts said the new body would operate as an international version of the academy's National Research Council. The expert panels would advise global institutions such as the United Nations and the World Bank on issues of critical importance to them.

Alberts said he was keen for the academy to move into the international arena “to ensure that the type of science and technology advice that so wisely informs policy at home can help inform decisions abroad”. He pointed out that four years ago it had joined with the scientific academies of other nations to create the InterAcademy Panel on International Issues, an informal network now totalling 80 academies.

It had also developed a website to promote rapid communication between these academies as they prepare for a Conference of Academies, to be held in Tokyo in May 2000, which will address “the many opportunities and challenges for scientists as the world accommodates an estimated 10 billion people in the 21st century”.

Alberts pointed out that policy-making institutions will face increasingly complicated issues involving questions of scientific validity and balance. “The world badly needs an impartial mechanism, based only on science, to promote smarter decision-making on such issues as agricultural strategies for Africa, safe drinking water in Bangladesh and energy options for Asia,” he said.

“The world's academies and their counterpart organizations are the ideal institutions for providing independent, credible, timely, multinational advice on a broad range of such issues — and we are presently working to help them accept this important responsibility.”

In his speech, delivered to the academy's annual meeting, Alberts also urged the world's scientists to work together to create a communication network designed to empower scientists and scientific organizations with valuable knowledge and skills.

He suggested that the world's major scientific organizations cooperate to connect all scientists to the World-Wide Web, where necessary by providing subsidized Internet access through commercial satellite networks, and to take responsibility for generating “scientifically validated knowledge resources”, made available free on the web, in preparation for a time when universal Internet access for scientists is achieved in developing and industrialized nations.

“By taking full advantage of new information technologies, the scientific community has an unprecedented opportunity to close the vast ‘knowledge gap’ between all peoples.”

Full text: http://helix.nature.com/wcs/c15.html