  Effective field theory is considered to provide a highly useful framework for
connecting nuclear physics with the symmetries and dynamics of the underlying
theory of strong interactions, QCD. Of many issues that are of great current
interest in this domain, I concentrate here on two: (1) A new class of ab
initio calculations of obsevables in two-nucleon systems; (2) Attempts to
extend chiral perturbation calculations to higher-order terms.
