New EU Science projects

The EU's science ministers have decided to push for a network of virtual European Technology Institute to please the Germans - a decision that may run aground in the European parliament., where an alternative idea is circulating. Either way, it’s not clear whether the EU’s dire science reputation will be improved.
Compared to its global rivals, the EU's science output leaves a lot to be desired – many universities are too focused on teaching, too parochial to attract private research funds or to persuade private science and technology firms to set up near the universities and commercialise their output. National borders have long meant a duplication of expertise - an expertise which, due to lack of competition and funding, remains at a low level, and this is the root of Europe's failure to produce innovation compared to the US, according to those in Brussels who worry about such things.
There are only 2 European universities in the global top 20 dominated by the US, according to a survey published by the university of Shanghai.
Last year a direct European rival to one of America's premier science institutions, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was mooted; the idea was to gather all the best European scientists under one roof, allow them to compete and stimulate each other, and fund them lavishly from the Brussels budget, hoping to apply to the result MIT's well known ability to turn science into commerce. The putative name was the European Institute of Technology.
Predictable nationalistic squabbles arose as to where such a prestigious institution would be situated, and it was ultimately ditched as being too expensive and taking too long to reach MIT's standards.
So the German government, which this spring holds the EU presidency, has come up with an alternative. Keen to do something for Europe's science deficit, Berlin last week brokered an agreement between the EU-27's science ministers for the creation of a virtual European institute of technology, consisting of a number of networks, " knowledge and information communities", KICs, linking already existing faculties with their counterparts across the EU.
A virtual ETI is not new: the commission has circulated these proposals before, but on a far more ambitious scale. The German's softly-softly, gradualist plan involves a modest €300m plan involving collaboration across two popular subject areas, energy and climate change, far short of the commission's ambitious proposals of a €2.4bn, but the scheme could expand if these first two areas of collaboration are successful, German science minister Annette Schavan told reporters. With tentative approval given at Wurzburg last week, Germany hopes to have the council's orientation ready by June and the regulation in place by December, for the first virtual networks to be in place by 2009.
However, the European parliament has commissioned a report that rubbishes the whole idea. The United Nations university in Maastricht, which carried out the survey on behalf of the EP, wrote that while a virtual network would fail to give added value to already established universities; the brand badge offered by the EIT would fail to attract graduates, the small scale of the KICs would fail to impact on the culture of either university or bring them together, so failing to be a vehicle for reform for research, funding or governance; it would divert money from already existing university spending and most importantly, studies showed that innovation benefited best from a staff and students working together in a single location under a stimulating research culture.
The report writes: "Experience and bibliometrical studies suggest that a stimulating physical environment of critical mass with high quality students and staff is the best predictor for high quality research, a fact that is reflected in the hiring practices of academic departments and research institutes."
So what to do then? The EP report proposes an intermediate solution, neither a single EIT nor a series of virtual networks. Rather - a series of physically located institutions, baby EITs or you like. Not based on capability across the board MIT but on smaller high quality US institutions such as the Salk laboratory for Vaccines in California, or the Spring Harbor genomics and cancer research institute in Long Island, the report envisages 20 institutes specialising in different areas. Each would have up to 300 staff and an annual budget of up to €70m. Their locations would be geographically balanced across the continent, relying in existing expertise. Each will be called European Technology Institute for Field X. Their themes will be derived from major problems identified by industry as drivers. At the moment, each EIT would probably be based out of current university complexes, thus removing a sense of threat they pose and challenging universities to "become leaders in the global knowledge economy in the area that particular EIT represents." Though they might get their own buildings and identity eventually
If the parliament adopts the recommendations of the impact assessment, will they be able to project this idea of the EITs over the German presidency’s virtual networks? The council is mightier than the parliament, though the latter's research and industry committee has been showing some clout in recent years under the chairmanship of the politically astute former Polish prime minister Jerzy Buzek, now an MEP and champion of scientific Gaullism that stands Europe tall against America in the science world. Science and technology are codecision issues, which means that parliament has an equal say in such legislation. It’s too early to say yet, for the legislative to-and-froing already set in train between lobbyists, civil servants, MEPs and national governments work in opaque ways. But it is clear that the parliament can put a stop to the Virtual networks.
The story wouldn’t end there.
The failure of Europe to succeed in the world today is also the failure of its science base, but nothing the EU has ever done in science – a vast area of competence, the second item in the EU budget after agriculture – has ever really given value for money. The just ended Framework 6 programme – one of many projects running concurrently – was heavily criticised by heads of the national science councils for the bureaucracy it imposed on scientists demanding grants.
In fact the basic science gap with the US seems to be accelerating even as the EU science budget grows, and ever more imaginative plans such as the EIT are put forward. Will this latest imaginative plan really break the spell?
The report enthuses that Dresden and Grenoble are already centres for nanotechnology; Stockholm’s Karolinska institute is a potential world leader in medicine; make these into European institutes of technology, start attracting the best talent across Europe, inject some EU science money, and let the Nobel prizes start rolling on. The UN report reckons this, at least is both more politically viable and more effective than abstract networks connecting already established universities, with a diffuse sense of esprit de corps, no firm sense of ownership, and little chance of impacting on the already existing institutions academic culture. But will it be good enough?
If it does win over science ministers, and then has a modicum of success at improving, EU science, it will be a turn up for the books.