Research is getting more transnational. It is affecting more people's lives in more ways. All the more need, then, for accessible ways of keeping in touch with what's going on. The EU's quarterly magazine RTD Info provides an increasingly important road-map. The next 25 years will undoubtedly see extraordinary technical advances.
Optimism sells policies and pessimism sells newspapers, but both have been wrong in the past.
Voters and taxpayers want scientists to tackle society's problems, not follow their own hunches. And problems are messy - they rarely sit neatly within the traditional bounds of academic disciplines. At European level more than elsewhere, policy relevance is the watchword. RTD past and future The Commission's 1999 annual report on its research and technological development activities marks the end of the Fourth Framework Programme and the start of the Fifth. But a facelift is now under way.