To promote safe and responsible nanotechnology research and pave the way for its safe and responsible application and use, the Commission is planning to adopt a voluntary Code of Conduct for Responsible NN Research.

Therefore, together with the Commissioner responsible for education and the Commissioner responsible for research, we are going to draw up a roadmap to improve the involvement of women both in science training and in research.

Activities will promote "responsible research" in Europe, in which the requirements for investigative freedom are better reconciled with social and environmental responsibilities in the development and application of science and technology, as well as the public dialogue, monitoring, and early warning, of ethical and social issues, and risks arising from new technological developments, for the benefit of national and international policy makers and other interested groups.

For us radicals, today’s choice should be clear: ‘no’ to the Fiori report as it stands; ‘yes’ to most of the amendments tabled, to achieve freedom of scientific research; ‘yes’ to all kinds of therapeutic research that can give life and not death to the life that really exists, not that which is only present in textbooks and now lies in laboratory freezers, waiting to be destroyed; and so ‘yes’ to research on stem cells, which are, in practical terms, more malleable; ‘yes’ to research on supernumerary embryos that have no chance of life; ‘yes’ to therapeutic cloning, which – as stated authoritatively by the Nobel Prize-winner, Profe ...[+++]ssor Dulbecco, only yesterday and the former Italian health minister Mr Veronesi today – has nothing whatever to do with human cloning; in short, ‘yes’ to an adult, secular Europe that is responsible in the matter of research.

In this context, attention is also drawn to the Code of Conduct for responsible nanosciences and nanotechnologies research.[3] This Code is complementary to legislation and provides Member States, employers, research funders, researchers and more generally all individuals and civil society organisations involved or interested in nanosciences and nanotechnologies research with guidelines favouring a responsible and open approach to NN research in the Community.

Jointly managed by the Commission services responsible for the environment, for regional policy and for fisheries (and with contributions from the service responsible for research and the Joint Research Centre), this programme aims to derive lessons from 35 pilot projects representing the diversity of conditions along Europe's coastline.