Envious of others' success, the EU wants to set up a European Research Council...
EU bids to grab research
WORKERS, MAR 2005 ISSUE
IF THERE'S ONE thing that the European Commission and its backers hate more than anything, it's seeing cooperation across Europe when it has nothing to do with it. It wants to control everything, be seen as the source of funding. Nowhere is this envy of others stronger than in the field of scientific research.
The fact is that European scientists have, over the years, persuaded their governments to work together on costly but vital research in a number of areas. The moves have seen the creation of world-ranking — and world-beating — research institutes involving European (but not just EU) countries.
Examples include the European Space Agency (see feature article on Cassini-Huygens), with many non-EU countries. Then there are the high-energy physics collaboration in Grenoble, the Institut Laue—Langevin, between France and Germany, and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg. One of the finest collaborations is CERN, the European particle physics laboratory in Geneva, source of a string of stunning discoveries about the basis of matter.
Billions of euros
Now, though, the European Commission wants to get a name for itself in basic research, through its plan to establish a European Research Council with an annual budget of between 500 million and 2 billion euros — so up to £1.4 billion. That's a lot of money, equivalent to more than double the total funding of Britain's Medical Research Council, for example.
The proposal has gathered support from a motley assemblage of industrialists and scientists, most of them (rightly) frustrated with the expensive failure of the EU's Framework research programmes — though as usual some of them are hoping for plum jobs in a new set-up.
But others are wary, led by the Britain's premier organisation of scientists, the Royal Society. While others in Europe, eager to be in Brussels' good books, have timidly kept their doubts to themselves, the Royal Society has spelled out why it is a bad idea.
The society called the proposals "premature", in that, as it pointed out, no one had done a comprehensive study of just how science was funded across the 25 countries of the European Union. As it said, there was no point spending money to fix something if you did not know how it was operating in the first place.
But what may turn out to be the nail in the coffin of this EU proposal is the Royal Society's insistence — echoed by thoughtful scientists across Europe — that any European Research Council has to award grants on the basis of excellence, judged through professional peer review.
To most British scientists, that seems like nothing more than normal common-sense practice. But to the EU, and in particular to its many countries with weak scientific bases, that is anathema — because if money is to be awarded to scientists on the basis of excellence, then most of it is going to flow to scientists in the "north" of the EU, Britain in particular. And the pork-barrel politicians of the EU won't be happy with that: the whole financial basis of the EU is that countries like Britain subsidise the rest.
Meanwhile, scientists in Britain and elsewhere are saying that any funding for the new research council must be additional to national budgets. And industrialists are saying that any funding must be additional to the EU's existing Framework programmes.
The European Commission is due to present its proposals for the composition of the research body in April. With the concerns about where the money is going to come from still unresolved, it looks as though a European Research Council will not be up and running soon, at least not with enough money to have an impact (for good or ill). But that won't stop the commission from trying to press forward.
Anyone looking to be reassured that all will be well need only look at the five-person body set up by research commissioner Janez Potocnik to identify members for the new council: it is chaired by Chris Patten, ex-commissioner, ex-Cabinet minister, ex-MP, and full-time placeman and has-been.