European Research Council

A Nobel cause in jeopardy


In a European Union often associated with compromise and
averageness, something else is about arise: “A very
elitist idea,” admits Prof Jean Patrick Connerade, Lockyer professor
of physics at Imperial college.
It’s the European Research council, which will bring
national teams of basic research scientists into
direct competition for the first time – to see who is
the best of the best: “A champion’s league of European
scientists,” as someone put it.
The reward is enough money to conduct top end research
to compete with the best science in the world.
At the moment Europe’s national research councils ban researchers
from foreign universities from competing for their funds,
which are allocated instead to domestic research
teams, the best of whom – like Chelsea and the league title - can take their money
for granted.
Sir David King, the government’s chief scientific
officer, said recently: “Before, British researchers
could rest on their laurels, but an ERC grant is a
prize to fight for: it is a competitive mechanism to
get the best out of British researchers.”
The problem is – it might not happen. The two billion
euro ERC is part of a package of budget demands the commission has
asked the member states to vote for; the sum is hefty,
a doubling, to 70 bn euros over seven years, of what
already was the third largest item in the EU budget
and employed the largest number of commission staff in
Brussels.
To fit that in, two possibilities are that Jacques
Chirac concedes on the agricultural policy or, Tony
Blair and some of the other richer nation states agree
to an overall EU budget increase. Whether either of
these will happen is anyone’s guess, with Jacques
Chirac giving notice on Thursday that he would veto
any WTO demands to cut agricultural subsidies.
The past achievements of European science have given
these two behemoths anything but a good reason to
support funding it at its current level – let alone
give way on their red lines to give it a boost.
When asked the biggest thing what EU science had
achieved in the last
five years, a senior commission official admitted: a
vaccine for the wrong kind of bird flu.
The ERC is about basic science – which wins prizes.
Most of what the EU has so far funded has been
applied, which leads to economic growth
It hasn’t funded it effectively, it has been said.
Anyone who has engaged in the EU’s past science
programmes, Framework 6 (FP6), framework 5 etc, knows
the
bureaucratic hassle involved. Political correctness
demands collaborative projects across countries, with
complex accounting methods, difficult intellectual
property protection issues, poor communications, bad
synergies between the small Estonian start-ups and
large French universities, say.

The programmes have been top down, or targeted, which
meant commission administrators defined what areas of
science had to be researched.
Applications for funding have been criticised for
being unrewarding – applications are cumbersome, have a high
failure rate, and feedback is brief. Chris Leaver, the head of
the biochemistry society, said, echoing sentiments of
many researchers who complained in the European
parliament’s Marimon report of last year that looked
into European science: “If the ERC is going
to be anything like previous science programmes it
will be a disaster and no one will sign up for it.”

If that were the case, there would be little reason to
deprive one controversial programme – Jacques
Chirac’s beloved Common agricultural Policy – in order
to fund another.
But the ERC’s supporters say basic science is easier than
applied science to fund from the centre; whereas
applied science is best funded locally. Moreover,
basic science needs the broadest possible talent pool
to draw on; applied science needs to be administered
close to the location of research and development. In
fact, science in Europe should be run in exactly the
opposite way than it is done now.
The agency that selects proposals will probably be
based in Brussels, but the creativity-stifling
potential of Brussels bureaucracy will be at a
minimum, because the science will be bottom up – the
scientists will choose their own research priorities.
There will not be transnational consortia, but teams
based in one place, reducing IP and communication
problems. Independent evaluators will assure the
projects chosen are not based on the principle of
juste retour – where countries get back what they pay
into the ERC – but on scientific quality. This could
open up career opportunities for east European
researchers, currently limited by the underfundedness
of their own research councils, and whopse countries
probably would not be able to pay a lot into the ERC.
IThe ERC already has the support of the British
government – Tony Blair called it last week “Europe’s
equivalent to the US national science foundation” -
and the major European science associations, including
ithe European University association and heads of
national science councils, but it is not clear everyone is on board: Jacques
Chirac is in favour of promoting European R&D. That is
pretty universal view in Brussels.
But apart from not wanting to give way on his
agricultural budget, it is not clear whether he wants.
His article in the Financial Times on Wednesday
mentioned a 10bn euro startup instrument by the
European Investment Bank which would
attract private investment to the tune of 30bn euros –
a scheme one of whose advantages is presumably that it
doesn’t touch the EU budget, and therefore threaten
the common agricultural policy.
In Le Figaro, he wrote that the EU should pursue
grand programmes along the lines of those institutes
by France and Germany on nanotechnology and biotech;
it is unclear whether this is the ERC by another name
– with a French flavour. Or whether this is the ERC at
all. Or whether he does and this is just a feint to
turn the ERC's creation into a concession he can
extract from Blair, perhaps on the famed British
budget rebate.

Facing uncertainties about budgets and political will,
ERC supporters insist the advantages are clear:
with over 270 Nobel Prizes, the US leads the
next four nations – The UK, Germany, France and Sweden
added together, and the gap is growing. Europe has
lost 400,000 researchers to the US because scientists
there compete with the best of a talent pool drawn
from a nation of 300 million, and, if they win, get a
lot of
money to pursue their research. Winning back Nobel
prizes may not be everything, but it is a start: A
beacon to keep researchers in Europe, even if few will
be competing for ERC money. The association
Euroscience says a million extra scientists are needed
in Europe by 2010.
Then, Europe can deal with other problems, such as
getting industry and universities to work better
together - where current framework programmes have
shown a way ahead, of sorts: how not to do it: on an
international scale