I want to report on some joint work with Sergio Doolicher and E. Roberts which extended over the past 5 years. It concerns the origin of charge quatum numbers and particle statistics in relativistic, local quantum theory with short range forces and the classification of the possibilities allowed by the basic principles . A bibliography of this and earlier work on the same lines is attached (ref . (1) to (7)). In the available time I can, of course, only gives a very incomplete accomt but hope to be able to sketch the physical backgromd, the theoretical framework used and the main resulte in an understandable way suppressing all detailed arguments and proofs