News Analyses in 1998

The choice of a new director for the International Medical Research Centre in Gabon is crucial for the future of an institution which has been criticized as lacking relevance and falling far short of its potential.

High-technology industry makes up most of Israel's industrial exports. But leading companies, worried by the government's failure to invest in research and development, are threatening to take this work abroad.

Farmers and chemical manufacturers are bracing themselves for a bitter fight with environmentalists in the coming months over new pesticide regulations. Both sides claim that science is on their side.

Japan has traditionally had poor links between universities and industry. The government hopes to change this. But its efforts face a daunting challenge in the need to transform deeply engrained attitudes.

The tenth anniversary of the Caribbean Academy of Sciences has highlighted both the case for greater regional collaboration on science-related issues, and the political and economic obstacles that can stand in the way.

Has ‘mad cow disease’ — BSE — infected sheep in the United Kingdom? Scientific advisers to the UK government and the European Commission are calling for research to assess the risks to be stepped up.

John Peoples will retire next year as director of Fermilab, leaving it in solid shape. But with CERN expected to usurp its position at the forefront of high-energy physics, and doubts about government investment, his replacement must find a way of ensuring a secure future for the US lab.

There are only three scientists in Congress, but Rush Holt, former assistant director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, believes he can become the fourth. He comfortably won the primary to become the Democrat nominee in New Jersey's twelfth district.

Hungarian science has undergone considerable post-communist reform, but the country's academy of sciences feels that further change is needed to allow it to take tough decisions on spending priorities.

The east German city of Magdeburg, long known for its neuroscience research, went through a difficult period in the years after the Berlin Wall came down. But its scientific efforts received a boost last week with the opening of the Centre for Neuroscience Innovation and Technology.

After a series of annual meetings that have failed to challenge the attractiveness of those organized by its US rival, the European Neuroscience Association is changing its name — to the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies — and structure, and has made financial savings. There are already signs that these changes, to be formally announced at its meeting in Berlin later this month, will reverse the trend.

Scientists met industry to discuss the technology of the future under the previous government — and it worked. The Labour government is launching a second phase, reflecting lessons learnt and its own social concerns.

A tough time lies ahead for the US administration in its push to achieve the two-thirds Senate majority needed to ratify the treaty banning atomic weapons testing. Republican senators are digging in with a complicated set of conditions and will prove hard to shift.

Evidence heard during the first four weeks of the public inquiry into the British government's handling of the BSE affair points to a catalogue of errors enacted against a background of spending cuts and deregulation.

Hopes were high within the French research community when Claude Allègre was appointed minister of research last year. But a good start has given way to frustration with the slow speed of change.