Opinion in 1991

Although the final decision in the Imanishi-Kari case is some way off, one issue in the case is already clear.

Japan, notoriously neglectful of its universities, now seems bent on rescuing them with a substantial infusion of yen for rebuilding from the education ministry.

The NIH are afraid of both Congress and the Bush Administration when it comes to sex

Worries about nuclear weapons and their manufacture, dramatized by anxiety about Iraq, can be met only by strengthening the Non-Proliferation Treaty, due to expire in 1995. There is not much time left.

Academics in the United States, where the telephone was invented, are over-secretive about their telephone numbers.

The case for a linear city to the east of London is stronger than the short-term arguments suggest.

Data from a first round of audits hint that accounting problems may afflict nearly all US universities.

The general opinion of the state of British science, provoked by last week's discussion of Nature's manifesto, is that morale matters more than money, but that much must be done to remedy the impoverishment of scientists.

Next year's International gathering on AIDS is to continue, but to what end?

A small club of well-intentioned people, best known for its past warnings of global catastrophe, has now produced a more persuasive vision of apocalypse and its avoidance.

Using a concordance and a computer, scholars have published an unauthorized edition of some of the scrolls.

Data that mothers can transmit HIV to infants through breast feeding add disturbing new insight into the mechanism of transmission.

The European Communities seem at a loss to know how to respond to new membership applications. Some (like that of Sweden) seem too much of the same, others (mostly from Eastern Europe) raise economic problems Europe is unwilling to face.

Now Baroness Warnock has joined the chorus saying that even knowledge can be ethically dangerous.

The unexpected return of Mr Mikhail Gorbachev is heartily to be welcomed, even if his spell in Moscow will be relatively brief. But the rest of us have things to do as well.

Pity poor Russia, the other quondam republics of the Soviet Union, the most talented and the most deprived part of the scientific community and also Mikhail Gorbachev (who may yet recover, but not quickly).

The British Liberal Democrats are risking too much in their plans to create a green economy

Publications more than 25 years old are likely to be forgotten, which is a shameful waste.

A Hemlock Society book on suicide is leading the best-seller list in the 'how to' category, revealing widespread public concern about having control at the end of one's life.

Are the mysterious circles of flattened corn in British cornfields simply a media ploy?