Opinion in 1993

An article on page 748 of this issue raises the question whether remaining stocks of smallpox virus should be physically destroyed. That option, chiefly symbolic, should not be followed — just yet.

The US Congress, largely because of bipartisan support, has voted to ratify the North American Free Trade Agreement and thereby enhanced the status of US President Bill Clinton in the international arena.

Industrialized countries still in recession would be helped by their own version of NAFTA for Europe.

There is calculated perversity in the British government's latest policy on school examinations.

The US Surgeon-General has revived a long-simmering debate about existing legal restraints on drug abuse.

This week's GATT agreement (if signed) leaves doubts about the protection of intellectual property unresolved. With UNESCO absent from the scene, the world's academies should take up the issue

A British newspaper, The Sunday Times, has so consistently misrepresented the role of HIV in the causation of AIDS that Nature plans to monitor its future treatment of this issue, if only to save readers the trouble of buying it.

Last week's folksy gathering off Seattle should not be mistaken for the country fair it has been represented as. Clinton's immediate goals (and success) notwithstanding, it marks the beginning of an historic process.

The Council for Science and Technology is not likely to meet the needs of the British science community.

Reinventing science advisory apparatus in the White House should be good for science.

The Non-Proliferation Treaty may collapse at the review conference in 1995 unless several urgent problems are dealt with before then. Either way, attention should shift from the avoidance of weapons to the avoidance of war.

Britain is getting good value for money from its overseas biodiversity programme.

The origin of the blood and blood-products contaminated with HIV sold on the European market is more probably a mark of incompetence than of cupidity, but is none the less culpable on that account.

The responsibilities of the US Office of Research Integrity should be returned to the research community.

The Maastricht Treaty has sown confusion in the names of European institutions.

The appearance of another new journal linked with Nature offers great opportunities.

Governments are habitually seeking to regulate the distribution of electromagnetic signals within and even outside their territory, but usually for reasons more concerned with wish-fulfilment than technological logic.

The decision of the US Congress to kill the Superconducting Super Collider does not and should not spell the death of particle physics, but rather the beginning of a strictly international programme.

After another bomb, long-term institution building should be the goal in Northern Ireland.