Opinion in 1995

The European Space Agency has a good reputation and an even better prospectus, but it needs to be rid of the anachronistic doctrine of juste retour.

The putative Surgeon-General of the United States should command his president's support.

The US dispute with China over intellectual property rights threatens lasting and avoidable trouble.

The US national laboratories are a large part of the richest country's resources in research, and are being wasted by mismanagement by the Department of Energy — according to a DoE task force now reporting.

A bruising civil suit between two academics at the University of Hong Kong will do the university no good.

The money crisis in Mexico is a great setback for civility in the Western Hemisphere and for hopes of greater US non-colonial influence in Latin America. The US Congress must first act on the loan guarantees asked of it.

US astronomy faces impossible choices unless there is a little more to spend.

"Taxol" is a trademark now, but Bristol-Myers Squibb should return it to the research community.

The most destructive Japanese earthquake since that in Tokyo in 1923 will have implications far outside Japan as attention there turns to the search for safety in a seismically hazardous place.

The row in Japan over research accountability has more to do with control of the civil service than with research.

The British are whipping themselves into an orgy of excitement about the export of farm animals to the rest of Europe without proper consideration of the underlying issues.

The naming of new human species should be the business of those skilled at the job.

Russia's heavy-handed approach to separatist tendencies in Chechenia is old-fashioned, to say the least, especially because both federalism and separatism are likely to be prominent features of the constitutional landscape ahead.

Do not pity those compelled to do without their latest microprocessor.

A British magazine appears to believe (with Lysenko) that genes can triumph over natural selection.

This journal plans an exercise in science popularization with a leading French newspaper.

The world's governments are remarkably at one in believing that they must win value from the research they sponsor, but they too often overlook the difficulties in their way.