It announced that the National Library of Medicine's indexing of the complete biomedical literature would be made electronically available for free around the world through a Web site called PubMed. The director of the PubMed effort, David Lipman, is presently investigating what can be done to produce a similar site for agricultural and environmental literature. The communications revolution also is driving a great transformation in education. Already, the Web is being used as a direct teaching tool, providing virtual classrooms of interacting students and faculty. This tool allows a course taught at one site to be taken by students anywhere in the world.
Science academies can be a strong force for wise policymaking.
In preparing for the future, we need to remember that we are only a tiny part of the world's people. In 1998, seven out of every eight children born will be growing up in a developing nation. As the Carnegie Commission emphasized, we need more effective mechanisms for providing scientific advice internationally, particularly in view of the overwhelming needs of this huge population. The report developed by this group of 60 academies was presented a year later at the 1994 UN Conference at Cairo. A common Web site for the entire group will soon be online, and the IAP is working toward a major conference in Tokyo in May of 2000 that will focus on the challenges for science and technology in making the transition to a more sustainable world.