In many fields research is impossible without access to supercomputers, analytical facilities, radiation sources for new materials, clean rooms and advanced metrology for nanotechnologies, specially equipped labs for biological and medical research, databases for genomics and social sciences, observatories and sensors for the Earth sciences and the environment, high-speed broadband networks for transferring data, etc.

These countries already participate in priorities such as life sciences, energy, transport, environment, IST, food safety or societal issues in a knowledge based society, as well as in the specific measures for international cooperation focused on the needs and potential of these countries at a regional level.

- adequate knowledge of the sciences on which general nursing is based, including sufficient understanding of the structure, physiological functions and behaviour of healthy and sick persons, and of the relationship between the state of health and the physical and social environment of the human being;

NATO drip-fed us with a series of information bulletins. In support of this, I would refer you to the comment made by the United Nations Environment Programme assessment group, at the end of 1999, that it did not have sufficient data to assess the state of depleted uranium contamination on the territory of Kosovo.

This is an essential foundation for sustaining our own systems of social protection and is based on four fundamental pillars. The first involves preparing the European Union for the knowledge-based economy through mechanisms which will facilitate action for the information society, for science and technology and for training and education. The second pillar consists of achieving the economic reforms that are essential to competitiveness and innovation, through expanding the process of economic reforms necessary to create a fully integrated internal market and through new policies for innovation and business. Thirdly, we must strengthen t ...[+++]he pillar of social cohesion, based on employment, on reform to make our social protection models sustainable and on combating social exclusion. Finally, the fourth pillar consists of coordinating macroeconomic policies in order to guarantee both the stability that we have already achieved which has provided a basis for the euro, with low inflation, low public deficits and also a macroeconomic environment which is more favourable to growth, employment, innovation and entrepreneurship.

Instead, the latter should be based upon an assessment of what it is we know, of what science has to tell us and of how we should view the product concerned in the light of the risks we judge there to exist for the environment or for the health of human beings or animals.