Posted Sunday, January 11, 2004; 15.48GMT
Brain drain isn't a purely academic problem. Billions of euros and tens of thousands of jobs are at stake, because science drives economic growth in the IT, biotech and pharmaceutical sectors. Europe can't afford to fall further behind. "Growth in the future will come from industries that are science-based," says analyst Andrew Wyckoff, of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Europe "needs scientists to irrigate them."
That message is getting through to Europe's politicians, including policymakers at both the national and E.U. levels. Amid the chronic complaints about bureaucracy and lack of resources, there are signs of progress. In some institutions, public and private, Europeans are stealing a page from the American playbook,
If you're in the system, you do what you have to do to survive. the culture is the main problem
— SANDRA SAVAGLIO, research scientist, Johns Hopkins University
offering researchers better funding, better facilities, better support for entrepreneurship and competition, and an overall better environment for world-class science. No single European country has the brain power or the financial clout to challenge America's scientific preeminence, so the E.U. is trying to develop a European Research Area a "common market" for science building networks, pooling strengths and raising standards regionwide.
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As German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder noted last week when he presented his government's priorities for 2004, "Only if we manage to keep our innovation at the top will we be able to reach a level of prosperity that will allow us to keep our welfare system in today's changing conditions." To make that vision a reality across the region, Europe will have to add 700,000 new researchers by 2010 and lure back the Continent's scientific expats. Here are the problems and potential solutions.
Follow the Money
In the spring of 2002, after three productive years of research at the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly in the U.S. state of Indiana, Matthias Tschöp went home. Leaving the country he calls "a paradise" for scientists was hard, says Tschöp, who studies hunger-related hormones. "I thought about staying, but I'm German. That's where I belong and where I should contribute."
He landed at the German Institute of Human Nutrition (DIfE) in Potsdam, and the shock set in. As at many German institutions, his colleagues were top-notch, but there was little money, and bureaucracy had a stranglehold on what resources were available. Though he quickly helped to win an €11.7 million E.U. grant for obesity research in collaboration with more than two dozen other institutions, it wasn't enough to overcome his disillusionment. "You had to file a four-page application to get a used computer, only to be rejected because of a mistake in paragraph 342," he says. "I could not deal with all that." He kept a visiting professorship at the DIfE and a role in the obesity project, but headed back to America, where he's now an associate professor in the University of Cincinnati's psychiatry department. He still laughs when he thinks of the $750,000 he got for his new lab, staff and travel at Cincinnati. In Germany, he says, "I couldn't even get a start-up grant."
European research Commissioner Philippe Busquin points to an E.U. funding program called the Sixth Framework, which is backing Tschöp's obesity work, as proof that the money is there for good research. But he concedes that the priorities of politicians are another matter. "It's easier during an election year to build an extra kilometer of highway than it is to build a new lab," he says. "Americans have made better long-term strategic choices."
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