Opinion in 2001

As European integration gathers pace, the notion that scientists must be rewarded with tax-free salaries and other perks for working at a 'foreign' international laboratory has become an anachronism.

Instead of helplessly pondering a new trove of data for guidance on how to improve science education, researchers should better exploit existing mechanisms for helping out at their local schools.

The European Commission should not lose its enthusiasm for supporting research into the preservation of cultural heritage.

This week sees the launch of an independent website for the developing world.

Current debates on human cloning have been stimulated by questionable achievements. All the more reason for proponents of cloning for biomedical research to articulate the full range of potential benefits.

Analogies with a current conflict seem apt.

Reviews of books and other creations can be highly opinionated. Editors get used to the brickbats they receive in maintaining a balance between the rights of authors and reviewers, and between fact and interpretation.

Researchers and their live subjects in US universities are valuably protected by some regulatory processes but pointlessly undermined by others. It is time to streamline or scrap the latter.

Biologists must become more aware that their work could be abused to develop weapons of mass destruction. But it should not have taken the disturbing events of recent weeks to bring this debate to the fore.

A balance of basic and applied science makes sense, provided resources are deployed wisely.

A collaboration marrying epidemiology and genomics should provide a much-needed boost to analytical rigour.

Italy's principal funding agency has missed an opportunity to enhance the prestige of its institutes. In appointing its first crop of new directors, it has conspicuously avoided some candidates of the highest calibre.

Some parties to debates over the safety of genetically modified crops don't want to hear the results of objective research. But that isn't an excuse for not doing it.

Developing countries deserve as much leeway to deal with their public-health crises as the United States has allowed itself.

A broader vision of a pan-European research enterprise will remain just that until the continent's nation states become more imaginative in their approaches to collaboration.

The US space programme will miss the colour, character and energy that NASA's departing administrator brought to his job.

The current security crisis will lead to the restoration of an intimate relationship between science and the US federal government, in which money-grubbing will take a back seat.

A powerful new agency needs to attain a more appropriate balance between Japan's policy-makers and researchers.

Viewing the budget crisis enveloping Europe's leading particle-accelerator lab, politicians may conclude that high-energy physicists cannot be trusted to manage billions of dollars of public money. This perception must be reversed — and fast.

Scientists and government officials bear collective responsibility for an unfolding tragedy.