Sir

Your leading article of 1 January (Nature 391, 1; 1998) voices warranted concern over the fate of fundamental research endeavours of the European Union, which you trace back to the Rome Treaty of 1957. But you erroneously credit the treaty with the creation of the European Commission, which was created only in 1968.

The 1957 treaty created two institutions. One, considered the most important at the time because of the Suez oil crisis, was the European Atomic Energy Community (or Euratom), with its Euratom Commission. The other was the European Economic Community (also known as the Common Market), with its Economic Commission. In 1968, the two communities merged, together with the pre-existing Coal and Steel Community, to form the European Community, headed by the single European Commission.

So, from 1957 to 1968, there was a separate Euratom Community, with its own commission, to which the Rome Treaty had assigned the creation of a European nuclear industry. Despite the industrial goal, or rather because of its obvious requirements, fundamental science was not absent from Euratom directives. Research and education are written into the treaty, which even includes the creation of a European University. In fact, a large part of the research enterprise at that time was connected to nuclear establishments, in the United States, in other developed countries and in developing countries.

Euratom research and development was carried out in two ways. On the one hand, a Euratom Common Research Centre was set up, including the research establishment at Ispra, Italy, where the Orgel prototype reactor was designed and built, the Bureau of Nuclear Standards at Mol, Belgium, the European Trans-Uranium Institute in Karlsruhe, Germany, and the research reactor at Petten, The Netherlands.

On the other hand, Euratom created associations with national institutions (public or private) in the realm of nuclear reactor prototypes, fusion (culminating in the Joint European Torus, JET, project), isotopic geology, radiobiology and so on. There was also a major US-Euratom agreement with an important research and development component. The teams were multinational, and the knowhow and results were made available to all member states. The Common Research Centre is still active, as are some major associations (JET, for example).

So, when the European Commission was created, in 1968, it is not so much that, as you say, “science was unfortunately not on their agenda”. Rather, science was dropped from the primary agenda, after 11 years of turmoil and opposition to an inspired and in many ways successful European research and development programme (see, for example, Sciences et Avenir, pp 214-217, March 1969).