Opinion in 1990

Differences within the US research community over how best to support biomedical research create the impression of factional quarrelling. That cannot be avoided, but it would help if there were a director of the NIH in post.

The ending of the Cold War seems to have revived interest in regional arms control arrangements

It is properly ironic that the conference on European political union beginning this week should follow so quickly last week's collapse of the four-year effort by 107 governments to extend GATT.

The British and Soviet governments are beset by problems of sovereignty, as it happens the obverse of each other. They (and other governments) should follow the dictum that national interests are but an amalgam of what people want.

There is no immediate prospect that researchers will be sued for what they publish, but care is called for.

The British government, embarrassed by the cost of health care, should devise a new strategy for research.

Mrs Margaret Thatcher's remarkable eleven years as British Prime Minister, which end this week, may have enhanced Britain's reputation in many fields, but not in research. A spell of unconviction politics would be welcome.

With a British general election due within 19 months, British science should say now what it wants.

This week's diplomatic gathering at Paris has formally confirmed that the Cold War is over, but the future of Europe remains in doubt.

Mineral exploration should be abandoned, but research should be better co-ordinated and data shared.

The world needs a better mechanism — probably a permanent institute — for assessing the consequences of the accumulation of greenhouse gases than IPCC has proved to be.

Two centuries of self-conscious science and technology may have given the world previously unimagined prosperity; can the same agents of change help avoid the calamity that seems to threaten?

The British government's plan to turn British universities into commercial enterprises has backfired.

The United States, the land of free enterprise, seems to be curiously illogical in its continuing belief that markets in some commodities should be less than free

The time has come for decisive action by Utah's Fusion Advisory Committee.

One of the casualties of the budget wrangle in the US Congress may be a sensible reform of US copyright law.

The European Commission is disappointed that past investment in research and development has not yet made European electronics flourish. It may be over-impatient, but it also needs a better strategy.

Where will the continuing contraction of the British research enterprise next strike?

The US National Institutes of Health should make public their apparently cheerful findings in their Gallo inquiry.

The sponsors of next week's conference at Geneva on climate change, the World Meteorological Organization and the UN Environmental Programme, should be careful not to push their luck by demanding too quick a treaty.