It is a great honour to have been invited to present this year's Erasmus Lecture to the distinguished plenary audience of the Academia Europaea. To deliver a lecture connected with Erasmus, this eminent European humanist, imposes an obligation from which greater minds than myself would shrink in diffidence. On the other hand, exactly such a challenge may encourage one to address a topic grand enough to be really worthy of this illustrious scholar, who probably, more than anyone else in his time, was able to bridge the manifold chasms which are—since earliest times—both the strength and the predicament of not only the intellectual history of Europe:

Language has been assumed to be housed in two small areas in the language-dominant hemisphere. However, because words can refer to actions and objects usually perceived through all modalities, it seemed possible that additional cortical areas may contribute to word processing. Recent investigations of brain activity during word processing indicate that areas outside the language regions do indeed participate in the processing of words. Individual words appear to be organized in the cortex as distributed cell assemblies that comprise neurons in both hemispheres, in the language areas and outside. The areas outside may reflect semantic word properties.

We are currently in the midst of a revolution in our understanding of human disease. The greater understanding that has been achieved of many inherited diseases is giving insights into many more common conditions not previously regarded as ‘inherited’. An individual can be identified from a DNA fingerprint obtained from the analysis of a very small DNA sample in a hair root, mouth wash or a blood spot. By the turn of the century, we will know the sequences of most, if not all, human genes. We will have the ‘recipe’ of human life. We may not be able to develop treatments for some years, but we will have the tools for identifying those predisposed to disease. Although the use of genetic tests raises many social, ethical, legal and economic issues, this potential is already with us and we cannot ignore it. Society should already openly be debating the implications of genetic knowledge so that the enormous benefits to human health can be gained without too many suffering from misuse of the technology.

The assumption is that a nation is a people, a group of people, or a historic concentration of people, giving a political system acceptable to the whole, that is to say, grosso modo, democratic. It is shown that this process is analogous, although greatly contrasted in detail, between Africa and Europe. The differences lie in three contrasting times of evolution which accentuate the risk of crises from contradictory sources: the building of a state, the life of ethnic groups and national ideologies. These three aspects are analysed and placed in the context of historical evolution within different areas and recent writings on this subject.

Today it is fashionable to see things in a ‘global context’ and to refer local events to all kinds of ‘globalization processes’. Some even argue that we all live in the ‘global village’. This paper argues that we do not and that the concept of globalization is often used in inappropriate ways. The so called ‘globalization process’ is strongly geographically limited and large parts of the world are not (yet) affected by it. Hence, the world is not (yet) becoming economically or culturally homogenized and that which is often labelled ‘global’ is, in fact, a sign of various internationalization and/or regionalization processes.

The World Wide Web (WWW) has been expanding exponentially since it was launched. It provides a unifying way to navigate and present information around the world in seconds using the Internet computer network. Many types of organization have been caught up in the revolution and are struggling to cope with the effects and keep pace with the development of the technology. One such community is that of museums. This paper presents the way museums are currently using the Web internationally, and how their use could develop in the future. Included is a description of the Virtual Library museums pages (VLmp), a leading directory of online museums, recently adopted by the International Council of Museums. Some of the ‘virtual’ visitor statistics are also presented and discussed.

The editors and publishers regret that in Volume 4, issue 4 of European Review there was an error in the article ‘The human genome project and its impact in medicine” by Hamish S. Scott and E. Antonarakis. The caption to Figure 2 is printed correctly below. We apologize for this unfortunate mistake.