HUNGRY: Tschöp's scientific appetite grew after he moved to the U.S., which he describes as "more innovative, more open, more creative".
Posted Sunday, January 11, 2004; 15.48GMT
The good news is that such gripes are finally getting through in some European capitals. After a year in which researchers slammed it for putting key funding on hold, the Irish government has put a new emphasis on science, especially the kind that can benefit the rest of the economy. The 2004 government budget includes new tax relief for companies that invest in R and D. It also boosts funding for the state-backed Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) by 62%, in a move meant to speed construction of a solid scientific-knowledge base and make Ireland more attractive to firms in high-value sectors like biotechnology. SFI will plow €400 million into research over the next three years, including millions for fields such as mathematics and earth science, which are often neglected in favor of more obviously commercial sectors. "We want to make Ireland a place that's not only friendly to scientists, but science-friendly," says William Harris, SFI's director general. The focus and the funds are paying off. Last month, SFI lured home respected Irish-born
You had to file a four-page application to get a used computer, only to be rejected because of a mistake in paragraph 342. I could not deal with all that
— MATTHIAS TSCHOP, associate professor of psychiatry, University of Cincinnati
geneticist John Atkins. He'll use his €3.2 million package to launch a lab in Cork, forming a transatlantic partnership with his ongoing work at the University of Utah. "I'm delighted to see the increase in funds for science," Atkins says. "It's an enormous improvement from how things used to be in Ireland."
Culture Clash
Whenever astronomer Sandra Savaglio thinks about returning to Italy, her memory of October 2002 reminds her why she's still in the U.S. Researchers often retain ties with their home institutions in Europe, so when Savaglio moved to Johns Hopkins University in 2001 she kept her collaboration with colleagues at the Rome Observatory. Her work focuses on gamma-ray bursts, massive energy explosions believed to occur when a giant star dies. In the fall of 2002, "I was working very hard, and things were looking very interesting," Savaglio says. So interesting, in fact, that the data caught the eye of her principal investigator in Rome. "He said, 'This is interesting, but let's be clear: if you get something, and we publish, I'll get the first name,'" Savaglio recalls. "We didn't even know what the final results would be, and he was already thinking of who would be first author."
Authorship can make a researcher's career, and Savaglio cites such hierarchical attitudes — in research credit as well as in everyday office politics — as a key factor in her decision to stay in the U.S. for now. Still, she harbors no ill will toward her colleague in Rome: "That's just the system. If you're in the system, you do what you have to do to survive. Someone probably did the same thing to him. The culture is the main problem. It has always been like this."
No amount of funding can buy a culture of competitiveness. And if researchers don't see opportunities for reward, they'll take their talent to the States, where innovation and hard work are rewarded with generous grants, full credit and a financial stake in your work. "The U.S. has an entrepreneurial culture," says Finnish molecular biologist Erkki Ruoslahti, who moved to the U.S. in the 1970s and helped build San Diego's Burnham Institute into a top medical-research facility. "People tend to be more enterprising — because they have to be. Otherwise, they're out of business."
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