various changes were made – some of which were dictated by the need for economy. Thus, the Council was forced to discontinue its grants to young scientists and to curtail its financial assistance to member organizations. More significantly, it was felt that the holding of symposia on purely scientific medical subjects was an unnecessary duplication of the large number of scientific meetings already being held.
However, the enormous progress in biology and medicine during the following twenty years, combined with the new world order that came into being as a result of the large number of newly-independent countries led to new problems with important social and cultural implications. It was thus that the main activity of CIOMS became the convening of broadly-based, multi-disciplinary, and internationally-representative conferences concerned not only with the direct impact on society of progress in biomedical science, but also with its implications in such fields as bioethics, health policy, medical education and health services research. These working modalities changed again and gradually led to convening specialized international Working Groups with the aim of publishing solid well balanced reports.