On 4 March, Antonio Ruberti, the Commissioner with special responsibility for research and education, met François Gros and Carlo Rubbia, two of his scientific advisers. François Gros, Ilya Prigogine, another of Mr Ruberti's scientific advisers, and Carlo Rubbia will help direct Community research policy. François Gros will be more specifically concerned with the problems and prospects of life sciences and technologies, while Ilya Prigogine will concentrate on strengthening relations between Community research activities and the scientific community, and Carlo Rubbia will focus on matters concerning the internationalization of research and the globalization of major projects. At the end of this first working meeting, Mr Ruberti emphasized that, "in order to assess scientific and technological options, and in order to make choices in conducting and implementing Community research policy, the Commission has to be able to rely on expertise from the scientific world itself. In this respect, the Commission can only welcome and pride itself on close cooperation with three of its most eminent representatives." A university professor and Director of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, François Gros has conducted a vast amount of molecular biology research. He is also very concerned with the social and ethical impact of advances in knowledge and technologies in the life sciences. He has held official functions with the French Government and at the Commission. Director of the E. Solvay International Chemistry and Physics International Institutes of the Free University of Brussels, Ilya Prigogine received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1977 for his work on dissipative structures. A chemist and physicist by training, he is a specialist in statistical physics and the study of dynamic systems, and more specifically complex and non-linear phenomena. He has also been involved in Commission initiatives concerning the mobility of research workers. A university professor and Director-General of the CERN in 1984 Carlo Rubbia received along with the Dutch physicist S. Vandermeer, in 1984 Carlo Rubbia received the Nobel Prize for physics for discovering elementary sub-atomic particles. A physicist by training, he chaired a panel of experts who carried out a study of supercomputer requirements in Europe for the Commission. * * *
