OLD BOYS' CLUB: Pagano, whose N.Y.U. team is mostly European, laments that the science scene in his native Italy "is not based on merit"
"Money is the real point," agrees CERN director Luciano Maiani. "Europe has been weaker because we have not invested enough." Only Finland and Sweden have reached the E.U. goal of spending 3% of GDP on research. For the whole union to hit the target by 2010, R-and-D investment must grow by 8% a year nearly twice the 4.5% annual increase recorded since 1997. It's not happening. In Italy, public-research spending has fallen over the past decade. Poor opportunities and pay as paltry as €6 an hour provoked scientists to rally in Rome in November, waving their passports to symbolize their readiness to take their talent abroad. France's 2004 budget hikes funding for research by about 0.9%, less than half of what's needed to cover inflation and not enough to change the fact that "I pay more for my cleaning lady than a researcher gets," says Pascal Degiovanni, a theoretical-physics researcher at the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique in France.
And what if a scientist tries to cover the shortfall by procuring funds on his own? In some places, that apparently deserves punishment. Michael Krausz, a professor at Hamburg University's Clinic for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, accepted research funds from an unnamed drugmaker; German prosecutors are investigating whether he did so in exchange for promotion of its products. Clinic director Dieter Naber, who notes that a 2001 university inquiry cleared Krausz of wrongdoing, wonders how institutes like his are supposed to pay their bills. Industry is an essential source of funding though in 2000, E.U. firms spent €79 billion less on R and D than U.S. companies but Germany lacks a clear legal framework for the donor-recipient relationship. "Nearly every contact to industry is being criminalized," Naber says. "Because local governments are bankrupt, we are being asked to procure third-party funding, including funds from industry. But often, when we do so, prosecutors are called in."
Even countries without such legal hurdles struggle to match the deep-pocketed U.S. For example, wealthy charities such as the Wellcome Trust and a relatively flexible funding system boost research in Britain, which has many world-class scientific centers, such as Edinburgh's Roslin Institute, the University of Nottingham and King's College London. But "there's simply no comparison to the U.S.," says Colin Blakemore, who heads Britain's Medical Research Council (MRC). The $27 billion annual budget of its U.S. counterpart, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is about 40 times that of the MRC. "Even corrected for population, it's 12 times higher," Blakemore says. "The total annual MRC budget last year was equal to a fifth of the increase in the NIH budget."
The European Commission has boosted funding levels. Its Directorate General for Research is in the midst of the five-year Sixth Framework, which runs until 2006 and is worth €17.5 billion a 17% jump from 1997-2001. But critics contend that E.U. funds are often doled out by bureaucrats who prioritize social and geographic factors over science. The E.U. claims to have reformed its procedures, but the running joke among funding applicants is still that a Portuguese on the team will lock in money bonus points if there's a female scientist on board. Such tales typify the Brussels bureaucracy, laments computational scientist Peter Sloot of the University of Amsterdam: "There is a strong administrative and management culture, rather than a scientific culture, in the higher regions of the E.U."
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